Weight lifting and muscle growth generally go hand in hand, but different types of weight lifting produce varying degrees of muscular growth. Your body's adaptation to weight lifting corresponds with the type of stress your workout session imposes. Muscle growth also depends on the presence of raw material your body needs for muscle building and time to use that material effectively.
Impact
The impact of your weight lifting session determines how much muscle growth occurs. Higher impact training sessions correspond with heavier weight lifting and lower repetitions. High impact weight lifting breaks down the contractile proteins, actin and myosin, in your muscle fibers. Greater impact generally produces more muscular growth, because your muscles adapt by repairing the contractile damage and synthesizing more muscle tissue. Therefore, you must progressively increase the impact of your training sessions to stimulate muscle growth with weight lifting.
Repetitions
The number of repetitions that you perform for each set affects the amount of muscle growth your workout stimulates. Your muscles contain very fast, fast and slow-twitch muscle fibers. Repetition ranges that target the faster fibers result in the most growth, because these fibers have the most contractile proteins. You may target fast-twitch fibers by performing exercise sets with 12 to 15 repetitions, or target very fast-twitch fibers with four to six repetitions per set, according to the National Federation of Personal Trainers. You must select a weight that you can perform four repetitions with, and increase the weight only after you can perform six complete repetitions to target the fastest twitch fibers.
Recovery
Muscle growth from weight lifting depends on adequate recovery between workouts, because muscle growth only occurs during rest. Your muscles may need two or more days rest between high-impact workouts, such as workouts using sets of four to six repetitions. Dividing a full-body workout into three days can help ensure that each muscle group gets at least two days to recover. For example, you may target your back and chest on the first day; shoulders, biceps and triceps on day two; and quadriceps, hamstrings and trapezius on the third day.
Nutrients
Nutrients in your diet provide the material that your body needs to build new muscle after each weightlifting session. Consuming 500 calories more than the amount required to maintain your weight on workout days supports muscle growth. You can determine the number of calories required to maintain your weight by adding your basal metabolic rate to the number of calories that you expend through physical activity and exercise. The National Federation of Personal Trainers recommends supporting muscle growth by getting 15, 60 and 25 percent of your daily calories from proteins, carbohydrates and fats, respectively.
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