10 Simple Tips for Explosive Muscle Growth

[BendtheBar]

10 Simple Tips for Explosive Muscle Growth

By Sean Lentz

10 Simple Tips for Explosive Muscle Growth

1. Eat big

Eating like a fairy won’t build muscle. Quit worrying about your four-pack and up the calories. No matter how much or how hard you’re lifting, if you’re not eating enough, you won’t grow.

2. Lift big

Add weight to the bar! Doing endless reps with light weights and chasing “the pump” won’t get you anywhere except exactly where you were last year. Your training should focus on the 1-7 rep range (80-100 percent of your 1-rep max). Some work in the 8-12 rep zone is okay, but anything over 12 reps is useless.

3. Lift fast

If you’re not trying to accelerate the bar through the entire concentric phase of the lift, you might as well not lift at all. Exploding on the concentric (concentric equals lifting, eccentric equals lowering) portion ensures you’re recruiting the biggest and strongest muscle fibers with the most potential for growth.

4. Focus on compound movements

Big movements such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses, chin-ups, rows, and military presses should be the foundation of your training. Doing endless isolation exercises like curls and tricep pushdowns won’t cut it.

5. Lift through a full range of motion

This means no quarter squats, half-benches, or two-inch chin-ups. Check your ego and work the movements through their full range of motion. You’re only cheating yourself of potential strength and growth.

6. Don’t train to failure

Train for success, not failure. Failing on a rep (starting the lift but not finishing due to fatigue or too heavy a weight) puts considerable stress on the central nervous system. This will make recovering from your workouts more difficult and can lead to over training.

7. Train each muscle group at least twice a week

If you’re not stimulating your muscles often enough, you’re not giving them a reason to adapt and grow. Try following the popular upper-lower split, with two days per week devoted to lower body and two days per week to upper body.

8. Progressive overload

Always try to make progress from one workout to the next, in one form or another. Increasing the stress you place on the body tells it that it needs to adapt and put on mass. You can progress in many different ways, such as adding more weight to the bar, doing more reps with the same weight, doing more sets, or lifting the same weight faster than your previous session.

9. Get in enough volume

Not only is the weight, frequency, and speed at which you lift important to maximize hypertrophy, you also need sufficient volume (overall reps). For maximum growth, 20-40 reps per muscle group is ideal.

10. Do a high-speed movement before your main lifts

Things like clap push-ups before bench presses and vertical jumps before squats is a great way to amp up the nervous system. This will activate your fast twitch muscle fibers, priming them to fire when you start your mains lifts. Do 3-4 sets of 3-5 reps.

[Off Road]

Goos stuff. That should be a stickie at every weightlifting forum.

[wesrman]

I like how hes suggesting an upper/lower split. IMO they're under rated.