Progressive Overload ⠀ ▪️ What does progressive overload mean? ⠀ ▪️ Progressive overload is when you continuously increase the demands placed on your body through exercise. ⠀ ▪️For the most part, the goal is improve muscle hypertrophy (muscle growth) or strength. ⠀ ▪️Most of the time people plateau when doing this because they only try to increase the weights, but that can limit you if this is your only strategy. ⠀ ▪️So Yes, you can add more weights, but unless you’re ok with only having a hammer in your toolbox, it’s best to put a variety of tools in your toolbox. ⠀ ▪️Doing this can get you a diversify your progressive overload strategy, and ultimately, increase your hypertrophy and strength gains. ⠀ ▪️ You can also change the tempo of your lifts, decrease the rest intervals between sets, increase the amount of reps or sets, as well as incorporating different training methods such as the rest-pause or drop sets. ⠀ ▪️So there are definitely numerous ways to progressively overload than just increasing weights.
▪️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.
▪️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.
▪️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.
▪️It’s known in the fitness industry that regular and consistent exercise can help mitigate the negative effects of everyday stress.
▪️Going to the gym regularly can make the brain more resilient to stress and reduce some of the risk factors between stress and cardiovascular disease, according to scientific research.
▪️However, stress can overwhelm your system and also take a toll on your workouts. If you’ve ever tried to do a light workout during a particularly stressful week at work or school and felt weak, sick, or just flat-out terrible, then it’s not that you’ve suddenly lost all your strength.
▪️Everyday stress can limit your perceived strength at the gym, and limit how well your muscles recover after a workout
▪️Eggs are a great source of high-quality protein.
▪️In comparison to all whole foods, eggs contain the highest protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS)
▪️The PDCAAS is a score that measures a protein’s quality and digestibility.
▪️Eggs also helps you stay full longer by decreasing your appetite.
▪️Even though the protein quality is excellent, you could experience less fullness because egg protein powders are usually made from egg whites rather than whole eggs.
▪️Eggs are a complete protein source, in other words they have all nine essential amino acids that your body can’t make itself.
▪️Egg protein is ranked second to whey protein as the highest source of leucine, which is the BCAA that is the biggest portion of muscle health.
▪️The only negative aspect is that egg-white protein hasn’t been studied as much as whey or casein.
▪️Egg white protein is definitely a good option for people that have dairy allergies who prefer a supplement based on animal protein.
▪️Try this workout to target your glutes, quads, adductors and calves
▪️You can do this workout at home, using a couch or a chair
▪️Make sure that you are keeping your weight in your heel, while your head, hip and back knee is aligned. Try to keep your front knee aligned with the middle of your front foot
▪️Your front foot further away will target your glutes, but bringing your foot closer will target your quads
▪️Make sure that you maintain perfect form and aim for 8-15 reps
▪️Take your workout to the next level and add weights
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