The Most Powerful Muscle-Building Tool Available
The bodybuilding debates will never end. The endless
arguments over how an effective muscle-building
program should be structured will most likely
continue until the end of time. Just scour the
Internet message boards, flip through any muscle
magazine or talk to the sales rep at your local
supplement store. No matter who you talk to or
what you read, it seems that everyone is an expert
these days.
If everyone is an expert, confident in their
own ideas and beliefs, how can the average beginner
possibly know who to listen to? He or she is instantly
confronted with endless questions that seem to
have no clear-cut answer.How many days should
I train per week? How many sets should I perform
for each muscle group? What type of rep range
should I be using? What are the most effective
exercises for stimulating muscle growth? How long
should my workouts last?
These questions go on and on until he or she
is eventually led to believe that building muscle
is an infinitely complex process involving rocket-science
precision and an intimate understanding of human
physiology. I mean, that's what takes to build
muscle, right? Wrong! Believe me, there are answers
to these important questions, and if you are willing
to put in the time and effort you will most definitely
find them.
But that's not what this article is
about.You see, amidst all of the confusion and
endless debating, the majority of lifters end
up losing sight of the big picture. Beyond all
of the specific workout principles, such as rep
range and exercise selection, remains one crucial
principle, a principle that lies at the very heart
of the muscle growth process.
If this principle is not given full attention,
or even worse, completely ignored, building muscle
becomes next to impossible.The bottom line is
that muscles grow as they adapt to stress. When
you go to the gym and lift weights, you create
"micro-tears" within the muscle tissue. Your body
perceives this as a potential threat to its survival
and reacts accordingly by increasing the size
and strength of the muscle fibers in order to
protect against a possible future "attack".
Therefore,
in order to continually increase the size and
strength of the muscles, you must focus on progressing
each week by either lifting slightly more weight
or performing an extra rep or two. In doing this,
your body will continue to adapt and grow to the
ever-increasing stress.Building muscle is all
about building strength!So what is the most powerful
muscle-building tool available? Quite simply,
it is a pen and a piece of paper!Every time you
go to the gym you must write down exactly what
you accomplished and then strive to improve upon
it the following week.
If you aren't always getting
better, then you're either staying the same or
getting worse. Every week you should have an exact
plan of attack ready to be executed. You absolutely
cannot afford to start throwing weights around
aimlessly without a clear-cut goal in mind.The
specifics of building muscle are important to
understand and implement, but regardless of what
style of training you're currently using the ultimate
deciding factor between success and failure is
progression.
You can sit around all day obsessing
over specific principles, but the bottom line
is that if you aren't getting stronger every week,
you absolutely will not be getting any bigger.
Examine your training approach closely. If you
haven't been paying laser-like attention to the
amount of weight you've been using, the number
of reps you've been performing, and then striving
with every ounce of your energy to improve upon
those numbers each week, you are completely ignoring
the very foundation of the muscle growth process.
If you want to see the best gains in muscle mass
and strength that you possibly can, a pen and
a piece of paper is the most important tool you
could possibly have in your arsenal.
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