The WHY and HOW of Building Muscle
17.09.2023
The Importance of Building and Maintaining Muscle Mass
Muscles are extremely important - and no, it’s not all about looks! Studies have revealed the strong association muscle mass has with positive health outcomes. It can reduce your risk of developing chronic diseases, increase your bone density, improve your metabolic health, and even increase your lifespan. After the age of 40, individuals can lose 1% of muscle mass per year if they leave out resistance exercises from their lifestyle. So building and maintaining muscle mass is especially critical as we age, for both men and women!
The Process Behind Building Muscle Mass
So we’ve hopefully convinced you that building muscle is a good idea! Let’s talk about how it happens.
Building muscle (sometimes referred to as ‘muscle hypertrophy’) depends on both completing resistance exercises, AND allowing for recovery. Muscles need enough of a stimulus to grow, ie. lifting progressively heavier weights. After a workout, muscles are damaged, and they repair to come back stronger. However, this only happens if we allow a period of recovery, so this part of the equation is equally as important! This concept is called the ‘Supercompensation Theory’.
So how much is enough of a stimulus to grow your muscles? A lot of research has been done in this area, and revealed that doing exercises close to failure, but leaving 2-3 reps in the tank, is the best way to grow muscles. You can see this demonstrated by the green line in the stimulus-recovery-adaptation curve below. We don’t actually have to work to complete muscular failure, as illustrated by the red line (ie. you get to the end of your set and you can’t physically do one more rep). This creates a LOT of soreness and fatigue, and might be counterproductive to your next workout (or your next trip up the stairs after a leg day!).
At the other end of the spectrum (yellow line), leaving too many reps in the tank and taking it easy, might lead to small increase in performance, however the muscles aren’t provided with enough of a stimulus to grow.
What does this mean for you?
It will take some trial and error to find your ideal training stimulus. You won’t want to jump in to lifting the heaviest weight you can straight away! It’s a good idea to stick with a program of the same or similar strength exercises for at least 4 weeks, so you can gradually increase your weight and find that ‘sweet spot’ where you’re working close to fatigue.
Building muscle is all about consistency, so keeping up a regular strength program at least twice a week is key to success.
If you’re somebody that doesn’t enjoy strength training or find you get bored with doing the same thing, mix up your training with some group fitness classes. Our WOD and Bell Blast classes are great for building strength and keeping things interesting and fun!
If you like more individual guidance and technique training, book in with one of our Personal Trainers, we would love to help you get strong, feel great, live longer and healthier!
