The American College of Sports Medicine endorses weight training a minimum of two to three days per week as an essential component of an exercise regimen. Weight training can contribute to health and building muscle as well. To increase muscle size, incorporate specific practices in your strength-training program.
Exercises
If your goal is to build muscle mass, focus on combination of multi-joint exercises, such as the squat, and single-joint isolation exercises like the biceps curl. Use variations of the same exercise. Rearrange the order of the exercises at each session, leading with the muscles to be emphasized that day.
Training Program
The number of repetitions you perform are crucial in determining the outcome of your strength routine. For general fitness, chose a lighter resistance that you can complete in 12 to 15 repetitions. For building muscle choose a weight that will elicit muscle fatigue in seven to 12 repetitions. Be careful though not to lock yourself into that range. Your muscles may also occasionally need stimulated in a different way, so switch up the repetitions periodically to stimulate your muscles past a plateau. Everyone responds differently to training, so the number of sets you incorporate into your workout depends on the results you are seeing. If you are not seeing results, t adjust your sets up or down.
Progression
One of the critical pieces to increasing muscle mass is to make sure that you increase the amount of resistance, repetitions or sets you are using with each workout. The National Strength and Conditioning Association points out that progressively overloading the stress on your muscles, even in small increments, prevents your muscles from adapting to the exercise or resistance. Steven J. Fleck and William J. Kraemer, the authors of "Designing Resistance Training Programs," recommend first increasing repetitions before increasing sets or resistance to avoid overtraining. For example if during your previous workout you were only able to perform seven or eight repetitions, during the next workout you should aim to complete more than eight repetitions to enhance muscle building.
Rest
When you strength train, you are actually breaking down the muscle fibers. The increase in strength comes from the body's response to rebuilding of the muscle. When you don't rest, you don't allow the body to rebuild those fibers. Allow at least 48 hours rest before working the same muscle group. Depending on your program design, the number of workouts per week will vary. You can do a full-body routine two or three times per week, or you can work out you upper body two days and lower body two days for four days of strength training per week. Both models work; the key is to rest the muscle groups sufficiently between the workouts.
References
- The Build Muscle and Gain Weight Fast Guide: Weight Training Programs that Build Muscle
- "Designing Resistance Training Programs"; Steven J. Fleck and William J. Kraemer; 2004
- "Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning"; National Strength and Conditioning Association; 2008
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