By Dr. Marco Martone
In the fitness and bodybuilding sector there are many diversified and often conflicting theories, which, due to the huge amount of data and the incompatibility between the various concepts, can lead to confusion for those who use this information. The situation seems to be worsening nowadays, in the era of targeted and super-fast information, thanks also to new technologies such as the Internet and numerous increasingly specialized magazines.
On how to develop lean mass, then, there are too many theories.
In this ocean of information, you will undoubtedly have come across unscientific theories and training schedules lasting two hours or more. Or you will be successful in following the training, also by marathon in length, of the instructor who works in your gym, who is ready to swear to you that he grew up with that card; but even if you have zealously committed the results they are late or, worse still, there is nothing at all.
The truth is that you need to train totally differently from these individuals, both because they are different from you in terms of genetics and because they do not explicitly admit the "cycles" they do to support a type of training that a natural body cannot tolerate.
Now you will be thinking that some results have been achieved by those methods in the beginning and then, right here, I want to emphasize that when you are a beginner, any type of training to grow is fine; even the absurd one of 2 hours or more 5 times a week.
You must be aware, in fact, that the first months of training, when you are neophytes in weight training, are very different compared to the months in which you can consider yourself intermediate or even in an advanced stage of bodybuilding practice ( from 6 to 18 months of training seniority you can be considered intermediate, after this interval you can generally be considered advanced).
This is because your body is not used to any physical shock at first, so it reacts by increasing tone and muscle mass, but then things change over time and certain parameters must necessarily be respected to grow, such as:
the need for greater recovery necessary for growth;
increased strength in multi-joint exercises;
a training time that does not exceed 70 minutes including heating.
All parameters that cannot be followed if you continue to train following the most weird and often not very functional theories for you, that you have both a normal genetics and the common sense not to use drugs that artificially alter some variables facilitating growth and / or recovery.
Now let's see what you need to do to grow in a progressive but above all healthy way.
The human body is a very adaptable "machine" and with the constant practice of training it will perceive less and less the latter as a shock, which is ultimately the only purpose for which you practice. Shock is the fuse that triggers supercompensation and, subsequently, growth. For this reason your workouts must continually aim to shock the body in order to trigger the coveted supercompensation and this will only happen if you subject your muscles to increasingly greater loads in a progressive way.
Through some notions of neurophysiology and muscular electrophysiology I will try to explain to you why to grow you need to lift increasingly heavy weights on exercises considered multiarticular, the only way to shock the muscles and cause them to grow.
CONTINUE: second part »
