Get the Muscle to Hustle!
The fundamentals to building muscle are, weight training, recovery, nutrition,and some knowledge is good too!
Weight Training
Weight training or resistance training is the most basic element in muscle development and strength enhancement. Emerging research is also revealing weight training's positive effect on health and well being, disease reduction, self esteem, confidence and longevity.
Training to build muscle size and strength and training to "stay in shape" are very different yet almost identical. As conflicting as this may sound, the basic premise of weight training is to overload the muscle. This overload invokes an adaptation response within the muscle. This adaptation to the overload results in increased muscle strength, density (tone) and size. No matter what your goal in muscular development is, the overload is what allows you to obtain this goal.
For tips on exercises, take a look at our Exercise Execution
Guide!
Recovery
This is just as important as training itself!
When you work hard in the gym to train your muscles, you have to give them time to recover.
To give you a scenario:
If you imagine that your muscles are like a house and heavy weight training is like an earthquake.
Ok.... an earthquake hits and it damages the house, so much so, that the builders have to come in to repair it but they are going to make it stronger in the process. Whilst they are repairing it, another earthquake hits and damages the house even more, now they have much more work to do to repair it.
So, if you do a heavy weight training session your body is then going to work hard to repair your muscles and make them stronger for the next time. So if you try and train the same muscles before they've had a chance to recover, you are making it too hard for your body and doing more harm than good. Allow them to recover and they will grow!
This is why there are such things as split routines.
Split routines allow you to train different body parts throughout the week. A typical example is to do weight training on your Chest,Back shoulders on a monday, Legs on a wednesday and arms on a friday. This allows each body part to recover, as long as you are also feeding yourself properly, as nutrition also plays a large part in recovery.
Nutrition
Nutrition is crucial!
If you're not feeding the body correctly, it has nothing to give it power and energy.
Power and energy will enable you to lift good weights for a good amount of time.
Power and energy will also enable your body to recover and grow after a serious workout.
The best muscle building food is protein, this will aid in recovery and feed your muscles.
The amount of protein needed to build muscle per day is approx 1.5 - 2 grams of protein per pound of your body weight.
For example:
You weigh 200Ibs, that means that the amount of protein you need to consume to build muscle is between 300 - 400 grams of protein per day. Thats alot of eating!
Also the best way to spread your eating over the day, is to have 6 small meals, 1 meal every 2 - 3 hours, this way your body is being constantly fed.
It can be a nuisance to prepare the meals everyday thats where supplementation comes in, in the form of protein powders, or protein shakes. This way you can eat 3 - 4 meals a day and have the shakes in between...might save on the jaw ache a little bit!
That way you can be assured of getting all the protein that your body needs to pack on that muscle!