Many men want to get stronger and bigger bodies. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it's hard to find out how without being bombarded by advertisements that promise that but give you nothing. Fellas, you build lean muscle by lifting weights. And you're going to find out how to lift weights to build muscle in this article.
Anyone can lift weights. Women lift weights to recover from pregnancies or to tone, athletes lift weights to increase agility, strength or to add an edge to their training, ie running with ankle weights for more explosive hamstring strength. If you want to learn how to lift weights to build lean muscle, you're going to have to first learn how to get lean muscle on your body.
Building lean muscle is a consistent and systematic process that is actually very simple and measurable once you understand your own body, as well as the process of building lean muscle. When you lift a heavy weight that you're unfamiliar with, how do you feel? You should have answered with, "pain". That's natural. Your body sends out pain signals to your muscles to discourage you from lifting that weight again, but another thing happens. Your muscles will grow bigger in an effort to better oppose that pain, in case you do decide to lift it again. Can you see where I'm going with this?
If you're a bit smarter than the others, you would have put two and two together and realized that you can constantly build by lifting progressively heavier weights. Progressively heavier weights means that your muscles are constantly exposed to a force that they have to continually adapt to. If you let your muscles get used to a weight, the exercise simply becomes a regular exercise that burns calories and doesn't help you build lean muscle.
Now, that we've gone through the preschool stuff, let's talk more specifically about how to lift weights weights to best exploit our body's capacity to stack on muscle. If you take anything good from this article let it be the next 4 words: low volume, high intensity. A low volume, high intensity workout is characteristic of of a lean muscle exercise. In simple terms, low volume simply implies a fewer amount of sets of an exercise, while high intensity refers to more "work."
Say you're able to lift a 10 kg weight at 10 reps for 5 sets. Don't you get a feeling that you're simply wasting your time and energy if you can lift a weight that much? All good lean muscle exercises have fewer sets and heavy weights, that exploit more muscle fiber to grow. You're better off lifting 15 kgs at 8 reps for 2 sets, since this will push your muscle to keep on growing. Let me give you an extreme example to think about. If you lift a 5 kg weight 100 times a day, do you think you will build more lean muscle than if you lift a 50 kg weight 10 times a day? In this case, the work you put in is the same 5x100=50x10, but which will help you build muscle?
This leads on to the next bit about high intensity. If you usually lift 10 kgs at 10 reps for 2 sets but think you can move up to a heavier weight and you try 15 kgs at 4 reps for 3 sets, which lean muscle exercise did you do more work in? 10x10x2 = 200 kgs while 15x4x3= 180 kgs. So even though you lifted a heavier weight in the second workout, the workout wouldn't have been as intense as the first.
This article should have provided you with a basic understanding of what it takes to build lean muscle by understanding how to lift weights. Hopefully it has helped you better understand what is required to help you pack on more lean muscle.
Cheng is the owner of http://howtogetleanmuscle.blogspot.com. It's geared towards helping regular men with no experience in lifting weights learn how to get lean muscle.
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