▪️We often hear people state that you only need a single exercise to develop a given muscle group. With the basic comprehension of anatomy and biomechanics, this could make sense. However, nothing within the range of anatomy or biomechanics is that simple.
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▪️As it shows in the chart, in order to maximize tricep development, both compound and isolation exercises are required. Since all three heads of the triceps have unique mechanical advantages at specific shoulder/elbow angles, a variety of exercises is necessary to optimize development.
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▪️ Essentially every muscle group will follow this structure, so it’s important to use a variety of exercises when you’re attempting to build and grow muscle.
▪️If you fit into the “skinnyfat” category, chances are you don’t have much experience with resistance training.
▪️In addition to the body fat being generally high, with little muscle mass, more than likely you don’t eat much protein but still eat in caloric surplus while predominantly consuming more carbohydrates and fats.
▪️People identify as being skinny fat because they have a very small amount of muscle mass (Skinny) while also having a high body fat percentage (fat).
▪️So what could be the solution to this? As you’ve probably already guessed.. protein and resistance training is where the magic happens!
▪️For the most part, skinny fat people are beginners to resistance training, which means that you can get away with a body recomposition approach, aka fat loss + muscle building simultaneously.
1.Resistance Training: Focus on progressive overload by getting stronger and lifting heavier weight, doing more reps within your sets, and progressing.
2.Eat enough protein and lift heavy weights. Protein is the macronutrient that is responsible for building muscle mass. Eating enough protein is just as important as step one. Keep in mind that your muscles will only grow if you give it the right amount of stimulus.
▪️Rule of thumb is between .75 and 1 gram of protein per pound.
If you want to speed up the fat loss process, you can slightly decrease your calories. Choose a deficit that you can sustain for a long period of time (between 15-20% off of your TDEE). Keep in mind that you must look at your body composition to monitor results and not the scale. Just because you are not losing weight doesn’t mean that you are not making progress. Remember muscle weighs more than fat so if you’re building muscle and burning fat, the scale would not indicate any change.
Always be patient, it won’t happen overnight. Keep your mind set on the long term and try to make this your main priority. Remain focused and learn to love the process.
▪️Here are a few workouts that I recommend you use for your routine to build a big and strong back.⠀ ⠀ ▪️Below are some exercises and what muscles they predominantly target, and you’ll see that some work multiple muscle groups (in fact, most work more muscles than I’ve even mentioned in the diagram).⠀ ⠀ -Lateral Raises – Side Delts⠀ -Dumbbell Row – Lats (and biceps & upper back)⠀ -Chin-Ups – Lats (and biceps & upper back)⠀ -Deadlift – Hamstrings (and lower back, lats, upper back, glutes & more)⠀ -Barbell Row – Lats (and upper back, biceps & more)⠀ -Face-Pulls: Rear Delts (mid trapezius, rhomboids, etc)⠀ -Barbell Shrug – Trapezius (and rhomboids)⠀ ⠀ ▪️You can choose what workouts and muscle groups you want to focus on, you don’t have squeeze all of them in every week.⠀ ⠀ ▪️You could even deadlift on your leg days, then choose a vertical compound pulling exercise ( such as the a chin-up) and one horizontal compound pulling exercise (like a row) and you’ll engage most of your back.⠀
▪️I’d also recommend that you try doing face-pulls as they’re great for strengthening muscles that are usually overlooked.⠀
▪️BCAA’s (Branched Chain Amino Acids) are compounds that form chains (polypeptides) in order to create proteins in the body. As we all know, protein is essential for muscle growth and repair.
▪️However, supplementing with BCAA’s are useless once you examine what’s in the supplement vs what you’re already consuming. After you eat a meal that has protein in it, your body will shift into an anabolic state where it rebuilds the muscle broken down after a workout, given the meal contained all 9 essential amino acids.
▪️So putting more BCAA’s into your body won’t really do anything. Besides, only taking in 3 of the 9 amino acids is not optimal either.
▪️Save your money on something that works like getting your aminos from real food or a meal program.
▪️Anybody that goes to the gym regularly, knows about the very tight feeling in your muscles during and after a good pump. The key factor to this tight feeling is an increase in muscle blood flow.
▪️The blood flow in your muscle ensures the delivery of oxygen, nutrients,and muscle growth. Blood flow is also responsible for the removal of waste products, such as CO2. Accordingly, a food degree of blood flow is essential for normal muscle tissue functioning.
▪️The question of the day is; how important is the increase in blood flow for the muscles to grow?
▪️Protein synthesis is the process of cells making protein which leads to building muscle.
▪️Scientists did an experiment where they gave participants a pharmaceutical agent. After taking this pharmaceutical, their blood flow increased which led to an increased protein synthesis.
▪️However, when they added a pharmaceutical agent that prevents the increase in blood flow, it also prevented the increase in muscle protein synthesis.
▪️This concludes that increasing blood flow increases protein synthesis. But preventing blood flow can prevent muscle protein synthesis.
▪️Researchers are currently looking for new ways to increase capillarization and blood flow, such as different types of exercise, heating and cooling, blood flow restriction, and massage therapy techniques.
▪️No training leads to no stimulus, and as a result, we can experience muscle loss. ▪️Is it hard to regain lost muscle ? ▪️Studies show that, “Muscle Memory” is real, and as many of us have likely experienced, it’s far easier to rebuild lost muscle, than it is to gain it for the first time. ▪️Nonetheless, our muscle fibers appear to have an “epigenetic memory” which defines the changes that the cell’s DNA undergoes, including information regarding its previous size. ▪️Although we experience muscle loss pretty fast after a period of detraining, we don’t actually lose the number of myonuclei. This makes it much easier to rebuild lost muscle once we’re back to working out. ▪️Furthermore, motor unit recruitment seems to decrease slowly in comparison to muscle size. ▪️This signifies that once we’re back to working out, we’ll be able to still recruit a decent amount of muscle fibers, and still use high amounts of force, in contrast to when we previously started training, which will allow muscle regrowth to arise at a much faster rate.
▪️If you wan’t to grow bigger and stronger shoulders, the Overhead Press is a great compound exercise to take you there! ⠀ ▪️It’s one of the best exercises for progressively overload your deltoids to improve size and strength in your shoulders. ⠀ ▪️You can do the exercise with either dumbbells or barbell, seated or standing. ⠀ ▪️When you perform it standing, you’re recruiting your Pectoralis (chest), Deltoids (shoulders), Triceps (arms), and Trapezius (upper back). But to stay balanced and upright, your Lower Back, Obliques, Serratus Anterior, Transverse Abdominal and Spinal Stabilizers are engaged. ⠀ ▪️Also, keep your Glutes and Abs engaged to press the weight up with stability. ⠀ ▪️Make sure you have enough shoulder mobility to perform this exercise correctly, otherwise you might compensate by overarching and hurt your back and shoulders. ⠀ ▪️A good solution is to add Wall Angels to your routine and foam roll your lats before Overhead Pressing.
▪️Have you ever done a weightlifting session after a long period of cardio? It’s more exhausting than anything that you can think of. When I step up to the weight rack after 90 minutes of basketball, my energy and strength stores are depleted. Every time I play ball before lifting, I have the worst workout sessions.
▪️On the flip side, if I play ball after my workout sessions, I feel fresh and energized. I’ve learned that lifting before cardio is much better for fat loss and workout energy efficiency. It takes tons of energy to move heavy weights; don’t zap it all by running on the treadmill beforehand.
▪️To attain “shreddedness,” your body has to use your stored fat as fuel for exercise. In order to accomplish this, you have to burn off your glycogen stores first. When you workout, you typically use glycogen as fuel. By doing weight-training first, you can burn most of your glycogen stores. Knocking out your cardio after you demolish the weights will burn more fat!
▪️After a training session, your body continues to burn additional calories up to 48 hours. This is callef excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. EPOC occurs because your body needs energy to rebuild your muscles after you’ve taxed them. It occurs at an extreme rate after intense weight-training than after low-intensity, steady-state cardiovascular training; that’s why it’s important to put as much energy into your workout sessions. If you do steady-state cardio before you workout, you won’t have the endurance to work as hard as you can. A less productive lifting session can impact EPOC. Less calorie burn for you.
▪️A University of Tokyo Study published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that doing cardio after lifting burned more fat during the first 15 minutes of the cardio session than doing cardio before working out . Don’t just take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Spend one day hitting weights before your cardio and another running before you hit the weights.
▪️You’ll be able to tell which strategy works the best.
▪️Patience is overvalued; especially within the weight room and particularly when it involves those focused on a specific outcome:
▪️Sure it takes time to build muscles, but if you’re trying to build muscle and aren’t seeing obvious size increases from month to month, it’s a sign that your approach is off.
▪️And a workout may be a terrible thing to waste. Plus, if you’re seeing progress, there’s no reason you can’t see more.
▪️How do you rev up your results? Here are 5 ways.
1. Increase Your Training Volume
▪️Training volume—your number of reps multiplied by your number of sets—is a primary determiner of hypertrophy (aka the way to grow muscle). And to extend volume, you’ll really need to lower the weight than you would expect.
2. Focus On The Eccentric Phase
▪️When weight training, you’ve got a concentric (hard) and eccentric (easy) phase. For example , as you lower into a squat, you’re performing an eccentric movement. Once you return to standing, that’s concentric. And, according to research published within the ecu Journal of Applied Physiology, eccentric work is much better at activating muscle growth.
3. Decrease Rest Intervals
▪️When lifting for hypertrophy, rest periods of 30 to 90 seconds encourage a fast release in muscle-building hormones (including testosterone and human growth hormone) while also ensuring that you truly fatigue your muscles.
4. To Grow Your Muscle, Eat More Protein
▪️Weight training breaks down your muscles. Protein rebuilds them. The more intense your workouts, the more important it is to consume protein to solidify recovery.
5. Focus On Being In A Calorie Surplus
▪️This can be hard to get used to , especially for those who are used to counting calories within the hopes to burn fat. But to most efficiently build muscle mass quickly (that means weight gained, not lost), you have to consume more calories than you burn every day.
▪️That’s because, when your body senses that you are in a calorie deficit which means that you’re consuming fewer calories than you’re burning each day—it lowers your body’s ability to create new muscle. After all, if your body thinks food is on low supply, getting swole isn’t going to be its main priority.
▪️Consume roughly between 250 to 500 extra calories per day to make sure that any weight gained is from muscle. A 2014 Pennington Biomedical research facility concluded from a study of people that ate a high-calorie diet rich in protein stored about 45 percent of these calories as muscle, while people following a low-protein diet with an equivalent number of calories stored 95 percent of these calories as fat.
musclehacking.org 