When visiting the gym, increasing muscle mass is one of the most popular and frequently heard goals among athletes. Some manage to achieve this goal relatively quickly, while for others it may take 2 or 3 times longer. Why is that? More on that in this article, along with a few tips to reach this goal more effectively and maintain the results.
How much muscle mass each of us can gain depends on age, gender, and good old genetics. For example, the male body produces more of the hormone testosterone, which allows men to grow larger and stronger muscles than women.
How do muscles grow? Skeletal muscles are the main units in the body responsible for body movement. All 650 skeletal muscles contract and shorten upon receiving signals from motor neurons. And the larger and stronger the signals, the stronger a person can become and gain more muscle mass.
What promotes the muscle growth process? First and foremost, it is strength (weight) training. Strength training must be regular, with a load (resistance) that is suitable and appropriate for an individual's abilities. In the training process, you should introduce and pay more attention to basic resistance exercises, such as deadlifts, squats, bench presses, and pull-ups (using your own weight, additional weights, or resistance bands). Attention must be paid to ensuring that technical execution is correct and that you succeed in progressively increasing the training load. This ensures that the muscle experiences so-called "stress," and under these stress conditions, it can grow or hypertrophy. Hypertrophy means the enlargement of tissues or organs due to an increase in cell size.
Increasing muscle mass is a more time-consuming process than reducing body fat percentage, so you should focus more on increasing muscle mass and maintaining body weight than on weight loss. In rare cases, both options are possible—that is, simultaneously increasing muscle mass and reducing body fat percentage—but by trying to achieve both of these goals at the same time, you may not reach either of them fully.
One of the most essential factors in increasing muscle mass is the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and other necessary nutrients consumed. To have more strength in training, be able to exert skeletal muscles with greater output, and achieve greater muscle mass and hypertrophy, a lot of energy is needed. We can obtain this energy from carbohydrates, which are the primary source of energy from a dietary perspective. The amount of energy consumed is the most important factor in the context of nutrition to gain achievements in training and optimize progress in strength and appearance parameters. Therefore, one must consume products containing carbohydrates – for example, brown rice, buckwheat, millet, and whole-grain pasta.
The second most important group of nutrients is protein. Protein is the main building material for the body that promotes muscle mass gain during strength training, as well as helping to maintain and repair it during rest periods. According to nutritional guidelines, the minimum required amount of protein per day is 0.8 g per kg of body weight. Meanwhile, for strength and endurance athletes, this range is between 1.2 – 1.7 g of protein per kg of body weight per day.
Rest and recovery: Why do muscles need rest? The recovery process for the body and muscles does not occur only after training when we cool down or do stretches, but also 24 and even 72 hours after training. If we do not provide our body with enough rest and nutrition, the opposite happens and the organism starts to work in a catabolic mode, which means that the number of active cells and energy reserves decreases, leading to muscle mass loss.
By maintaining training regularity, progressively and steadily increasing training load, and providing the body with enough nutrition and sleep for recovery processes, it is possible to increase muscle mass and, most importantly, maintain it by sticking to the regimen. Achieving goals in terms of physical indicators, strength, or appearance is a time-consuming process.
Consistency and patience in nutrition and training are the main keys.
Sources: medicine.lv; researchgate.net /The Science of Muscle Growth Making Muscle; journals.lww.com
