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8 Ways to Build New Muscle

6. Focus On Form Above All

Your muscles have friends called tendons and ligaments. You may only think about these guys when they’re complaining, but their importance goes beyond avoiding injury. Your tendons must be healthy if you want to apply proper stress to muscle tissue. You can build muscle with sloppy form, but your connective tissues will eventually cry uncle, interrupting your relentless quest—and painfully so.

Your goal is to create stress to muscle tissue that can be repaired in a day or two—not to cause so much damage that you get injured. When you perform free-weight moves with proper form, you’re strengthening, these crucial support structures rather than damaging them. That helps lead to greater muscle growth.

How to do it: Don’t assume your form is perfect. It probably isn’t. Plenty of people think their squat is just fine when…yeesh. Have someone take a look, and prepare yourself for criticism.

6. Form is of utmost importance

Your muscles are attached to these things called ligaments and tendons. You may have heard of them only in an injury-related conversation where someone has either tore or overstretched one. Their importance, however, is beyond avoiding injury. They need to be healthy if you intend to put proper stress to your muscle. You can still build muscle with a disastrous form, but the connective tissues will eventually “surrender”, putting a sudden stop to your quest for more muscle, and making you aware of their existence in a painful way.

The aim is to create stress to muscle you can recover from in a span of two days, not one where you injure yourself, making you unable to train in the long-term. When you are executing these exercises with a proper form, what you are basically doing is strengthening these tissues which act as support structures rather than inflicting damage, which in turn leads to increased muscle growth.

Solution: Don’t make the assumption of thinking you have nailed down your form. It is quite probable it isn’t. You can ask your training partners to take a video of you executing the exercise, so that you can honestly evaluate what your mistakes are.

7. The more muscle tissue you have, the harder you’ll add new one

Sadly, the muscles grow much more slowly than we would like them to. And there’s more bad news: Once you have added a considerable amount of muscle to your frame, it becomes even harder to add more.

For the strong-willed, that is exactly what makes training so extraordinary. There are no shortcuts to your ideal body, no legal ones at least. You need to put in the time and effort, so you can rip the rewards of your hard work.

Solution: This is a marathon, not a sprint. Patience is a virtue, as well as discipline. Keep grinding day in, day out. Challenge yourself. Change the training variables. If you get too cocky and try to rush things, that’s when you are most likely to injure yourself and set yourself back. It is not possible to train your entire life and not get injured, but you can avoid most of them by training in a smart way.

8. Bulding muscle is building health

Bodybulders often get criticism from other people that their pursuit is a superficial one. While trying to look good naked and feel good about your body isn’t a bad thing per se, we should not neglect the enormous health benefits bodybuilding provides.

Besides getting health benefits in the very act of training, having more muscle mass is making you healthier in itself. Having more muscle fires up your metabolic furnace, prevents your body in storing fat and also acts a protective shield you can rely on when being under extreme stress in the form of injury, illness or surgery. Also, life expectancy has been proven to be proportional to the overall amount of muscle mass you have, as well as having a greater ability to endure stressful live-altering circumstances.

Solution: Ignore the criticism. There will always be the ones trying to downplay your success simply because your success makes them feel inadequate and lazy. But that’s their problem, not yours. Maybe they will come to their senses one day, maybe not. And if they do, you’ll be there to take them on the same path.

 


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