Training

The Training Principle

My 3 key principles; simplicity in movements; minimalism in workout routines and progressive overload makes the journey enjoyable and the physique achievable.

How do you build muscle?

1. Progressive Resistance

Simply, increasing the ‘work’ done – over time.

The principle of progressive resistance holds that in order to stimulate muscle growth and thus increase size and strength you must, over time increase the resistance to your exercise. This can be done most easily by adding more reps, slowing down the reps or reducing the rest time. It can also be done by adding more sets (doing more volume). For example completing 3 sets of 5 reps at 50, 60 and 70kg. Similarly 3 sets of 10, 11, 12 reps of push ups also stays true to the principle. When you increase the resistance/difficulty of the exercise your body adapts by growing bigger and stronger. See how I utilise this principe on my Push Ups page.

2. Muscle Damage 

Damage (microtears) caused to the muscle fibres will, upon intake of adequate nutrition and sufficient rest allow the muscle to adapt to deal better with the damage caused.

3. Metabolic Stress

This involves the use of high reps to ‘burn’ or ‘pump’ the muscle to it’s metabolic limit achieving muscular failure.

The research is clear (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/128681) Progressive Resistance is the number 1 factor for muscle growth which means – if you want to build muscle you need to get stronger.