6 Hard Truths About Building Muscle

There are a few hard and fast rules about building muscle that everybody knows: You need to be in a calorie surplus. You have to train hard. You need to recover from your training. Yeah, yeah, but beyond those three simple truths are plenty of other lesser-known muscle building truths. Here are six of them that you need to know to maximize muscle growth. 1 – Stop searching for the perfect body part split. One of the most common questions people ask is: What’s the best muscle building split? The answer? There isn’t one. Muscle growth comes down to training frequency and volume, so the more often you can train a muscle with higher volume then, theoretically, the more growth you can achieve. So training a muscle group twice a week should provide more growth than once a week. And three times a week should provide even more growth than twice, right? Sounds like a decent idea in theory, but then again so did communism, and we all know how well that’s worked out. When looking at specific training splits, the number of times you can train a muscle in a given week comes down to the volume you’re using, the load you’re lifting, your training history, sleep, recovery, and nutrition. In other words, it’s complicated. Let’s say your workout split calls for training legs on Monday and Thursday. Sounds great, until Thursday comes around and your legs are still so trashed from Monday’s session that you can barely peel your tender glutes off the toilet seat. The ideal training split comes down to how well you can recover. The better you can recover, the more often you can train a muscle group per week. And the more often you can train a muscle, the higher your weekly volume and the more muscle growth you can induce. Recovery comes down to a few different factors. Calories and food quality are important ones. The more energy you take in, the better your body can repair tissues and manage inflammation (up to a certain point). But calories are only one side of the recovery equation. Sleep also plays a huge role in the recovery process. You can eat all the calories you want, but if you’re not sleeping enough, your body can’t effectively utilize those calories to help you recover. The bottom line? Pick a training split you can stick with consistently and train hard. To become self-sufficient, take notes on the process and observe how you feel. As you educate yourself on what’s best for your body, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your workout split going forward. 2 – Get more sleep. No really. Muscles are broken down when you train. They’re built when you sleep. Sleep is the reset button on our body. When we sleep, our bodies increase the production of hormones like testosterone and growth hormone. Testosterone is obviously important for the growth and repair, as well as staying lean, but growth hormone is also extremely important. Growth hormone stimulates the release of IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor-1. IGF-1 stimulates systemic growth and has an impact on every single cell in the body – muscle cells included. Sleep also has a big impact on two other important hormones: insulin and cortisol. Insulin gets a lot of hate when it comes to body fat storage, but it’s actually an extremely powerful anabolic hormone due to its nutrient partitioning abilities. And nowhere does this play more of an important role than in and around training. The more sensitive you are to insulin, the more receptive your muscle cells are going to be to carb intake. This means harder, more intense training sessions and better recovery, all of which culminates in more muscle growth. But a lack of sleep decreases your sensitivity to insulin, which means a poorer response to carbohydrates, poorer training sessions, and crappy recovery. (1) A lack of sleep also increases the production of cortisol (as a stress response). Not only does cortisol inhibit testosterone production, but it’s also catabolic – it promotes the burning of muscle tissue. Sleep is also the best stress management tool our body has to combat elevated activity of the sympathetic nervous system (which controls the body’s fight, flight, or freeze response). The more this sympathetic nervous system remains elevated (as opposed to being in a parasympathetic state, which is where we should be a majority of the time), the more cortisol it produces, and the more difficult it is to gain muscle. Make sleep a priority and you’ll notice a significant improvement in body composition. 3 – If you’re not growing, you’re not eating enough. Are you eating enough? Well, if you’re not adding weight to the scale, the answer is no. If you’re gaining muscle, scale weight is going to go up. That’s true of almost every situation. And if it’s not, you’re not eating enough, despite what your nutrition tracker is telling you. If you’re hitting the gym hard but not seeing the gains you think you should, follow this: Multiply your bodyweight x 16. This gives you your daily calorie target. Eat
Origin: 6 Hard Truths About Building Muscle