BENGALURU: Muscle is the only age reversible organ in the body. This may sound confusing. If you have good muscle tone, you can age gracefully. So everyone should train to build or maintain muscle mass.
You will need patience because it isn’t easy to build muscle and it takes years of dedication. So, the next time you hear someone say, “I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to become bulky”, you could either ignore or maybe educate them because it is not easy to build muscle.
Here is the foundation of muscle training:
When muscles are stressed beyond normal demands, they respond. If the stress placed on the muscle is significantly greater than normal demands, they respond negatively. The large scale damage leads to several days of weakness, commonly known as soreness. Excessive soreness may not lead to larger muscle gain and strength
What we need, however, is to systematically stress the muscle in a progressive manner, known as progressive overload.
This means the muscles respond positively when the training stress is just slightly greater than normal. The small scale trauma leads to muscle and strength gain over a period of time
Take-away: Too much soreness is not good. Just a little bit of intensity week over week is all you need for stronger muscle remodeling. But how do you put more structure in your training to ensure just the right amount of muscle/ strength gain? Here is how:
ProgressionShwetambari ShettyShwetambari Shetty
To maximise strength and muscle, you need to add external resistance (dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, etc.) The resistance should be heavy enough to fatigue the muscle within 90 seconds, that’s the limit of the anaerobic energy system. Since it’s impractical to time every set, 15 reps would be a good target assuming six seconds per repetition. Lets put this into practice:
Exercise: Do 15 reps of shoulder press (30 kg). At this weight, you can perform 10 reps in week 1. In the subsequent weeks, you can aim to achieve 12 reps, followed by 13 and so on until you are able to get 15 reps at this load.
Once you are able to perform 15 reps, you will increase the weight by 5 per cent and start chasing the 15 reps target again at the new load (31.5 kg in this case). Please note that the strength gains at some point will stop (strength plateau) and that’s when you will need to variate the exercise and follow the similar process mentioned above.
Specificity
The idea is to achieve the desired objective of training through working the right set of muscles. For example: If the aim is to squat with a heavier load, one needs to strengthen the quadriceps, glutes and core. But that being said, these muscles should not be trained to the exclusion of opposing muscles. Whether it’s a sport or the idea is to improve the activities of daily living, it’s equally important to train all the major muscle groups on a weekly split.
Overload
As per the American College of Sports Medicine, if you are exerting yourself at a certain load between 8 and 12 repetitions, you can assume that’s about 70 to 80 per cent of your maximal strength (1 rep max). A general guideline is to increase the load by 5 per cent every time you achieve the target reps, assuming the exercise was performed until failure to achieve that number of reps. This gradual increase in resistance is known as overload, and if followed religiously for 12-16 weeks, this will facilitate a good amount of muscle and strength gains.
(The author is a fitness expert with Cure.Fit)