How To Gain Muscle: 3 Pillars Of Muscle Building

Are you tired of spending hours in the gym without seeing the results you deserve? If so, you’re not alone. Building muscle can be a challenging process, but with the right tips, tricks, and strategies, you can achieve the results you’ve been striving for. 

In this article, we will explore proven methods to help you gain muscle effectively and efficiently. From optimising your workout routine to fine-tuning your nutrition, we’ll cover everything you need to know to maximise your muscle-building potential. 

Firstly, why build muscle?

• Aesthetic benefits: Building muscle helps you appear more toned and athletic. Consistent and regular weight training will not only build that beautiful hard-earned muscle but also burn body fat as well giving you that lean-looking physique. 
• Improved posture: Lifting weights helps with balance, posture and symmetry on the body to make you look longer and leaner when standing. This can drastically improve your overall appearance and presence.
• Supports joints: As we age, our joints can wear away. Strengthening the muscles around the joints gives added support. During weight training, our muscles and tendons apply pressure to our bones, which stimulates the bones to produce more bone tissue as a result bones become stronger and denser reducing the risk of osteopenia, osteoporosis and fractures. 
• Burns more calories at rest: Muscle is metabolically active meaning the act of maintaining muscle and keeping it on the body is hard work. This process enables us to burn more calories at rest, so we turn into fat-burning machines with improved metabolism.
• Lower risk of injury: A stronger body is more resilient to stress and strain either from athletic training or everyday life.

How To Gain Muscle: 3 Essentials

Building muscle requires a few essential ingredients. These include: progressive overload when lifting weights, proper nutrition and adequate protein intake and solid rest and recovery.

Let’s dive into each aspect.

Progressive overload 

To stimulate muscle growth, you need to progressively overload the muscles. This means either increasing the weight you’re lifting, doing more repetitions, or more sets. 

As a beginner, you will be able to easily overload the muscles, since any kind of weight lifting (including body weight) will be an increase on what you were doing previously. However, as your body becomes more accustomed to lifting, you’ll need to consider how to target the muscles strategically in order to progressively overload. 

Compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and rows are good to have in your routine as they engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously. Likewise, you might consider splitting your routine so that you can hit specific muscle groups on different days (e.g., chest and triceps, back and biceps, legs and shoulders) to allow for adequate recovery.

The idea of progressive overload is to incrementally increase the load as you grow gradually bigger. In order to do this effectively you will need to plan and record your workouts in order to keep challenging your muscles and stimulate growth. 

Nutrition

Working with a personal trainer will be very helpful here, as nutrition should be tailored to your individual goals. In order to gain muscle you need to be in a calorie surplus. 

However, if you’re carrying excess fat and want to appear more ‘toned’, you may choose to enter into a calorie deficit in order to lose fat and reveal muscle, before entering into a calorie surplus where the goal is to build muscle.

To support muscle growth, a caloric surplus of around 10-20% is recommended. Protein intake should also be increased in order to support muscle repair and growth. Around 1.2 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is a good daily guide.

Rest and recovery

Recovery is an important part of building muscle. Once you have added a stimulus when training, it’s important to allow the muscle to repair and grow.

Recovery doesn’t need to be fancy or expensive. Often the recovery that you can implement yourself is the best kind. 

This includes getting adequate sleep, adding rest days into your routine, taking time to stretch and getting adequate hydration and nutrition. 

Aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night to support muscle recovery, incorporate rest days into your routine to allow muscles to rest and stay well-hydrated to support muscle function and overall health.

Learn how to build muscle sustainably

At DARE, we teach you how to build muscle sustainably.

Working with a coach who focuses on perfect form and execution will help you get the most out of your weight training and achieve progressive overload. Coupled with a consistent nutrition plan that aligns with your goals, you will be able to gain muscle and improve your physique.

Ready to move closer towards your goals? Book a tour of our Bentleigh personal training studio today.