Gaining muscle mass requires workouts that stimulate muscular growth. You must provide your body with larger amounts of raw material to sustain muscular growth, as you impose greater demands on your musculoskeletal system during your workout. Giving your muscles time to grow and practicing a dietary regimen that supports muscle-building are critical components of gaining muscle mass.
Overload Training Principle
The overload training principle dictates that you must progressively impose greater demands on your muscles to gain muscle mass. If you can't gain muscle mass, you might not be imposing enough stress on your muscles during your workouts. Gaining muscle mass requires performing more repetitions, weightlifting exercise sets or increasing the weight that you use. The National Federation of Personal trainers recommends working out with weightlifting sets of four to six repetitions to failure. Applying the overload training principle while performing this number of repetitions to failure requires selecting a weight that you can only perform four repetitions with and then increasing the weight only after you can perform six complete repetitions.
Insufficient Recovery Time
You can't gain muscle mass unless you give your muscles enough recovery time between workouts -- you only gain mass during your post workout recovery. Targeting muscular growth requires high-impact weightlifting, which effectively damages contractile tissues in your muscles. You gain muscle mass during your post-workout recovery as your body repairs the damage and adapts to the demands by building new muscle tissue. Reparations and muscle-building require sufficient recovery time between your workouts. You can divide a full body workout into three days to ensure that each muscle group gets at least two recovery days between workouts. You can target your chest and back on the first day and your shoulders, biceps and triceps on the second day. Day three can include quadriceps, hamstring and trapezius exercises.
Calories
Calories are a measure of the energy stored in the food you eat. You can't gain muscle unless you ingest enough calories to provide energy for your workout and post-workout recovery processes. Gaining muscle mass might require ingesting around 500 daily calories more than the number of calories required to maintain your weight, according to the National Federation of personal Trainers.
Protein
Your body needs protein to maintain and build tissue that increases your muscle mass, and you can't gain mass unless your diet provides enough protein. Each gram of protein contains about 4 calories, and gaining muscle mass may require ingesting dietary protein for approximately 15 percent of your daily calories. Bodybuilding.com recommends ingesting between 0.65 g and 0.8 g per 1 lb. of your bodyweight.
Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates are a primary source of energy that your body uses during your workout and during post-workout recovery processes. Ingesting insufficient carbohydrates prevents you from gaining muscle mass because your body turns to protein for energy if your carbohydrate intake is too low. This reduces the amount of protein avail be for muscle-building. Each gram of carbohydrates contains approximately 4 calories, and ingesting carbohydrates for around 60 percent of your total caloric intake might spare enough protein for muscle-building.
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