How to Increase the Rate of Your Muscle Gains
The silly idea that ‘more is better’ when you are trying to build muscle fast goes directly against the basics of exercise science. When is comes to increasing your rate of muscle gains, more exercise is almost never what is needed. Once you have “stimulated” muscle gains by hitting the gym hard, any additional amount of exercise, will in fact, prevent any muscle gains from happening.
You see, muscles are made up of ‘muscle fibers’. Muscles themselves work by contracting and reducing their length. In order for muscles to contract, they must move. For a muscle to produce movement, and therefore the power to move a given weight, it must do so by lengthening and contracting. In other words, a muscle performs exercise by contracting, and by doing this it generates force and power. While a muscle uses some of it’s fibers to perform a given exercise, it almost never uses all of them at the same time.
For a muscle to contract every one of its available fibers at the same time, it must be in a totally contracted position. To increase your muscle mass in the shortest time possible, the maximum number of muscle fibers possible must be “stimulated” The easiest way to achieve this is through multiple repetitions of a particular exercise. More often than not it is impossible to contract all of the muscle fibers in a specific part of the body, using only one repetition, without risking injury. Multiple repetitions however, allow it to be done safely.
As a general rule, it’s almost impossible to perform an exercise in a way that contracts all of the muscle fibers of the body parts involved. However, if the exercise is performed with intensity, many more muscle fibers will be stimulated, than there would have been otherwise.
