5 Tips to Build Muscle
Learn the exact tools coach Matt uses with his clients to maximize muscle growth during the fall & Winter
TIP 1 Nutrition
When the primary goal is building muscle, you need to eat more for your body to grow. Think of your body as a machine; the food is the fuel for that machine to function correctly. The most common question is, how many calories should I be intaking? How many calories you need to eat for body recomposition will depend primarily on your primary goal, current body composition, and training experience. So with that in mind, figure out where you're currently with your fitness goal. If building more muscle is the goal, eat more than you burn, meaning being in a calorie surplus. Use those higher calories to your advantage and fuel your training days with significantly higher carbohydrates. Higher calorie equals more energy, strength, and muscle growth when applied correctly.
TIP 2 Recovery | Sleep
Recovery and resting are the most overlooked key tips for muscle growth. Your body grows while at rest. It does not grow while training. When training, you are doing the opposite, you're tearing down your muscle fibers, and for those muscle fibers to repair and get bigger, you need to eat to fuel your body and rest to grow. Here's what lack of sleep can do to your gains; you get higher cortisol, which means higher stress levels, lower myostatin, a protein that prevents muscle growth, and lower testosterone. All of these together can reduce your progress significantly. So, make sure you get an adequate amount of sleep. Anywhere from 7-9 is ideal. If that seems too hard to get to, start small, and realize that any improvement in your nightly sleep duration is an improvement. Six hours is better than five hours, and seven hours is better than six.
TIP 3 Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is the gradual increase in the amount of stress placed on the body from exercise, it is the driving force of muscle growth. In other words, if no more significant stress is applied to the muscle over time, the muscle has no reason to grow to overcome that stress. Progressive overload means doing more over time. It doesn't necessarily mean more weight. There are many different ways to apply progressive overload:
1) Increase load, adding more weight to your lifts.
2) Increase repetitions with the same load, if you’re normally doing 8 reps, increase to 10, and so on.
3) Increase sets, if you’re normally doing 3 sets, increase to 4.
4) Improve form, the higher quality your movement becomes the more appropriately you will target a muscle.
5) Increase tempo (such as by slowing the eccentric/negative), slowing movements down will increase the amount of stress on the muscle.
TIP 4 Volume and Frequency
Training volume refers to the amount of work you are doing. These broad starting guidelines are appropriate for most people: Volume: 10–20 sets per muscle group/movement pattern per week. For training frequency, 2x per week, per muscle group or movement pattern. These variables are good for determining that you are progressing and keeping it organized with data on the weight you used, reps, sets, etc.
TIP 5 Training Hard
Putting in a high level of effort towards your training is essential. However, it does not mean that every set should be taken to failure since consistently taking sets to complete fatigue can lead to overtraining and reduce overall volume, potentially reducing
muscle growth. Generally, I recommend leaving one to three reps in the tank on most compound exercises. Isolation exercises can be taken more to failure without the same risk of fatigue accumulation as isolation exercises since isolation exercises target a specific muscle group. However, I still recommend reserving failure for the last set of any given exercise.
