Posts Tagged ‘muscle gains’

Things You Can Do On Your Next Workout to Increase Muscle Gains

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Making certain that your muscles are always developing can be a seriously complex business. Yet strangely, a lot trainers start focusing on the more complex aspects of weight training long before they have ever mastered the very basics. In fact, you can see this in gyms all the time. Trainers pour in, do the exact same exercises that they have always done for God knows how long, without ever making any noticeable muscle gains.

If you don’t want to be a member of the teeming millions who just works without progress, you have to start thinking about some ways you can ensure that you always keep progressing.

Slow it Down

Obviously, you are going to have to use momentum on some more complex exercises, but you should never be in a contest to see how fast you can swing the weights around. By taking your time on every repetition, you increase the amount of stress on your muscle, which ultimately spurs more muscle growth.

Generally, it is preferable if each exercise lasts about four seconds, with two seconds to lift the weight and two to lower it. Unfortunately, even experienced trainers often underestimate the importance of the negative portion of the exercise. Lowering that weight just as slowly as you lift it will help you see bigger gains in the long run.

Do Something You Have Never Done Before

Variety is far more than just the spice of life, it is also the spice of a healthy fitness regimen. Your muscles are surprisingly adaptive, so if you go day in and day out doing the identical exercises that you have been doing for years, you do yourself no favors.

Every six weeks, you should switch things up and start doing exercises that you may not be used to. Yes, it will take a little time to learn proper technique, but you will be rewarded in the end.

Focus on Compound Exercises

The more muscles that each exercise recruits, the better. The compound exercises have numerous advantages over more simple isolation exercises. Firstly, they simply can make your workouts shorter because they work more with less movement. Secondly, by recruiting more muscles, you actually encourage more production of testosterone, which can help your gains greatly.

Cut Your Workouts Down to Size

It’s great if you get a lot of stimulation from going to the gym, but if you really want to see constant progress, each individual weight training session shouldn’t last more than an hour. After this point, all the energy that you are expending is actually causing your body to eat muscle.

If you are one of the those lucky people who happen to have a lot of time on your hands and enjoy devoting yourself to your training, it is possible to manage a split routine, where you split different parts of a long workouts into two separate workouts during the day. For the rest of us who have to hold down a job, keeping it under an hour a day should work sufficiently.


Fitness Expert Chris McCombs is a West Hollywood Personal Trainer California. While walking out of a burrito joint Chris discovered a radical approach to burning fat at a rapid rate which he helps people all over do today. Chris is also a fitness trainer marketing expert and helps personal trainers and other people in the fitness industry to triple their income and cut their work hours by more than half.