The Secret To Building Muscle Is Cycling Your Workouts…
When it comes to your workouts the main thing you need to focus on is making gradual progress overtime. A bigger muscle is a stronger muscle (and vice versa). So by making your main training focus on gaining muscular strength, you’ll also gain muscular size!
Now there are all kinds of workout routines that you can follow; from total body workouts, to dozens of different body part split routines, and countless set and rep patterns that you could implement within those workout routines.
And you know what, they ALL work to a certain extent. You could talk to 10 successful bodybuilders and ask them to explain their workout routine to you, and chances are you would get 10 totally different answers.
When it comes to building muscle remember this:
That is probably the most important thing to remember for making consistent progress with your workouts. You can follow most any type of workout routine and you will make good progress for the first few weeks (provided that you are getting adequate nutrition, rest, etc.). But generally after a few weeks of following a set workout program your progress will slow down and eventually you will no longer make progress with that routine.
Our bodies are very smart and naturally accommodate to stress. Your body will add as little muscle as necessary to get the job done. This is why construction workers get only big enough to handle the exact amount of “lifting” they do during a days work and no bigger, even though they are doing physical work all day long.
Adding muscle is a very unnatural thing to your body. You must constantly throw curve balls at your muscles to get them to grow. Now from my own personal experience of having coached hundreds of people one-on-one in the gym (and indirectly coaching tens of thousands of people online), I have found that most people make their best muscle and strength gains within the first 3 weeks of starting a new workout program.
Whenever you do a new workout routine, or a new exercise, it is a total shocker to your body. That’s why you very often feel awkward and uncoordinated when doing new exercises and you usually experience delayed onset muscle soreness that lasts for a few days afterwards.
However, each time you do that new routine it gets easier and easier. You start to feel more comfortable as your body gets accustomed to the exercises. You feel stronger and eventually you will no longer get sore from doing that workout anymore. In other words your body adapts and your muscles grow.
But the problem is that once you adapt to a workout routine, your muscle growth slows down and you reach a training plateau. This is where 99% of all gym members are stuck. Most of the regulars that you see in the gym day after day look no different now then they did this time last year. And chances are they’ll probably look exactly the same this time next year (if they are still working out).
Now while you should constantly strive to increase the weights you lift with progressive overload. This is actually the hardest and slowest way to go about making progress. Now don’t get me wrong, progressive overload is VERY important and does provide new muscle stimulation. But the “easiest” and “fastest” way to stimulate growth is with new training stimulus in the form of new workouts and new exercises.
Whenever you do a new exercise, you’ll make strength gains really fast with that exercise. To give you an example of this, just think back to the first time you did deadlifts. (Note: I hope you are doing deadlifts, and if you aren’t, then now would be a good time to start 🙂
When you did your first deadlift you may have worked up to 135 pounds on the barbell. Chances are you struggled and felt awkward doing them. After all, it does take some practice to get the technique and coordination down pat. Most likely you felt sore throughout your back, hips, and hamstrings for a few days afterwards. As a lot of novice lifters will say: “I worked muscles I never knew I had”.
The next time you did deadlifts chances are the weights felt much lighter and you probably worked up to lifting about 10 or 20 pounds more then the first time you did them. And they probably felt less awkward to perform the second time around as well.
The third time you did deadlifts you probably added another 10 or 20 pounds to the bar and performed them with even better form again. This kind of rapid progress and strength gains usually keeps up for a few weeks before it starts to taper off.
Granted some of the fast strength gains will come from improved lifting technique, but a lot of it also comes from the unique muscle stimulation provided by the new exercise routine. So if you want to make the fastest muscle gains possible you must go through the process of regularly selecting new exercises and workouts and then let your body adapt and grow.
Now here in the Total Fitness Bodybuilding Inner Circle I’m going to provide you with an ongoing source of new and unique workout programs that you can follow. Each one will provide different forms of training variety and unique muscle stimulation.