Getting buff in a hurry
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I have added a few articles on nutrition, motivation and cardio exercise so far, but I haven’t touched into resistance training yet. This is the first post for people wanting to add a little muscle to their bodies. Even though it is difficult to have a caloric surplus for adding muscle and at the same time lose fat, it should be possible by following my general guidelines to nutrition. That means including sufficient proteins and calories.
It is much easier to lose a pound of fat than adding a pound of muscle. Adding muscle to your body is actually a very slow process and a normal person (not on steroids) can at most expect to produce 1-2 pounds of muscle a month if you do everything right (nutrition, exercise, sleep). People can be confused when they look at their weight and see gains of several pounds from day to day, but that is all due to water retention in the body.
Since my focus in life is get as much out of my time as possible I opt to go for exercises that take little time, but give me good results.
Here are some principles that work when you are in a hurry:
- Lifting your body weight: When lifting your own body the body responds with a higher anabolic hormonal output. HGH (Human Growth Hormone) and testosterone are shown to rise more if you use these types of exercises compared to machines.
- Doing compound exercises: Using several muscles in sequence you get many of the same benefits as you do when lifting your body. You want to focus on doing compound lifts for the big muscle groups (Deadlifts, Squats, Dips, Pull-ups, Press ups)
- Getting the pump: Studies from japan has shown a benefit from restricting the blood to the muscles when training (occlusion training). I personaly think this is a bit far out for me so I prefer doing training to failure and then add a isometric hold (pressing against something standing still) which is suggested to give some of the same benefits.
- Several sets until you slow down: This is a training form that I have found very rewarding to me recently. The general idea is that you train the muscle until it is slowing down. That means the big, fast muscle fibers are starting to get fatigued. After a short break (15 seconds) you do another set. You repeat for about six sets. It is speculated that it is a form of occlusion training.
- Negatives (Eccentric loading): Negatives means that you are lowering the weights pretty slowly. This sort of training was popularized within the HIT training system with nautilus machines in the eighties. It has grown a bad rep due to the hard core free weight trainers. The method can be used for free weights and give good results. I found it gave me pretty slow responsive muscles when I was doing martial arts.
- Fast training without failure: Lift the weight as fast as possible to use the big muscles. When you slow down you should stop the set and rest. Slowing down means the smaller muscles are taking over. This type of training can be done frequently.
As a last note: Allways remember to add proteins and fast carbohydrates to your workout as it will benefit your results.
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