Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Use Progressive Overload to Build Muscle Mass Quick

Are you looking to gain a significant amount of muscle mass in a short period of time? Well in order to do so, there are certain principles that athletes all over the world use to bulk up. Here we will talk about the idea of progressive overload. Basically, progressive overload involves adding a difficulty to your workouts every so often. This help you build muscle mass quick because it forces your muscles to constantly rebuild itself to compensate for more stress. Below are three methods in which you can use progressive overload.

1. Add weight
When you add weight to every exercise, you add resistance on your muscles. Try to increase the size of your weights by five pounds or five percent of your previous workout. Note that for progressive overload to work, you will need to exercise at your threshold. This means that you should make every workout more intense than the last. Otherwise, your muscles will not be utilized to their fullest extent and will not gain muscle mass.

2. Add reps
This method involves you adding more reps per set every workout. You will be forcing your muscles to work harder every time that you exercise, which is what you need to build muscle mass quick. However, here are some flaws with this principle. It is hard to sustain the added amount of intensity after some time and doing many reps can actually hurt your ability to gain muscle. The perfect amount of sets ranges from six to twelve, depending on the weight that you are using. This is proven to be the best number to stimulate muscle growth.

3. Add sets
Some trainers try to increase the intensity of their workouts by adding volume. They eventually run into the same problem as those that add too many reps. You cannot infinitely add that kind of stress onto your body. While increasing the number of sets slightly after a while will be beneficial, adding an extra set every time that you workout will be impossible to do.

As you can see, the best method to build muscle fast is to add weight. That is not to say, however, that the other two methods should be counted out. They can all be used in harmony with one another so that you can slightly increase the resistance on your muscles every workout. With a program that entails these principles, muscle gain should come very easily to you.

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