Episode 21: The Benefits of Building Muscle (And How to Get Started)
Resistance Training is a style of exercise focused on improving the health and strength of your skeletal muscles.
As we age, our muscles naturally decline in size and strength. This, in turn, negatively impacts our coordination, balance, metabolism, and cognitive health.
The best way to stay healthy and keep your muscles strong is to live an active lifestyle–meaning your muscles are stimulated with exercise on most days. Experts recommend doing resistance training to challenge the muscles on at least 2-3 days each week.
In general, muscle gets stronger when it is challenged.
The goal of resistance training is to challenge the muscles by making them perform a movement against some kind of resistance (weights, bands, machines) to the point where they get tired and start to give out. As your muscles get tired, microscopic tears form in the muscle tissue, which the body then repairs and fortifies after your workout while you’re sleeping.
Over a long period of time doing resistance training 2-3 times per week, you will get noticeably stronger. The exercises in your workouts will become easier and you’ll be able to perform more repetitions, use more weight, and do more overall exercises without tiring as easily. You may also notice that your physique and appearance change as certain muscle groups become more defined and visible.
It’s important to keep a few basic principles in mind so that you can get the maximum benefit from your resistance training workouts:
👉 Learn Your Muscles
👉 Use the Right Weight
👉 Practice Progressive Overload
1 Learn Your Muscles
Knowing the names of different muscles and understanding their functions is essential for getting the most out of your workouts.
Taking time to learn your muscles will help you to perform your exercises correctly. Knowing which muscles should be fired up and where you should feel “the work” will allow you to know whether you’re doing an exercise correctly or not.
Knowing your muscles will also help you to maximize muscle engagement during the exercises so that you can fatigue the target muscles more effectively.
You don’t need to learn the names and functions of all 600 muscles in your body, however you should learn the major muscle groups that are in your lower body (legs), upper body (arms/back), and core (torso region).
Over time, you’ll be able to connect with your muscles better and fire them up more easily–a skill called proprioception or “mind-muscle connection.” Improving your proprioception will improve your coordination and exercise technique over time. It will also help you in the future when you learn new exercises!
Check out the charts below to see the major muscle groups in the body:
When you do your workouts, be mindful and pay attention to what it feels like to stretch and contract the major muscles.
2 Use the Right Weight
Remember: your muscles need to be challenged in order to grow stronger.
It’s not enough to just go through the motions of the exercise. You have to actually fatigue the muscles by using the right amount of resistance (i.e., weight or band level).
How do you know whether or not you’re using the right weight or band? You should feel the target muscles for each exercise burning at the end of each set within the recommended number of reps.
For example, if the recommendation is 8-12 reps per set, then use a weight or resistance level that has you feeling the target muscles starting to burn at around rep 8, 9, or 10. When you feel the muscles burning, keep going until you feel like you could only do 1 or 2 more reps before your muscles give out.
👉 If you’re able to easily get to 12 reps and feel only a little burn, you need to add more resistance (either use a heavier weight or a heavier band).
👉 If you can barely get to 8 before your muscles give out, try a lighter weight or band in your next set.
It might take some time for you to find the right weight to use during each exercise. But once you do find the right weight, use that weight again during the next workout and try to do more repetitions. Once you’re able to do the top number of recommended reps easily, increase the weight again until you feel the muscles burning and fatiguing within the recommended range again. This is how you can practice the principle of progressive overload.
3 Practice Progressive Overload
Every time you train, you should give your muscles more work than what they’re used to. Otherwise, it’s very easy to hit what’s called a training plateau (a point where your body doesn’t change much and you aren’t getting stronger or building muscle).
To prevent a plateau, you’ll need to always train with a form of what’s called novel stimulus–that is, a new challenge for the muscles that triggers the repair and growth process.
One way to get a novel stimulus is to do more repetitions and use more resistance (i.e., weights or bands) over time. For example, in Week 1 of a new training block, you may feel challenged doing sets of 10 repetitions of Biceps Curls with 5lb in each hand. 8 weeks later, you should be doing the same exercise either for more than 10 reps per set and/or using heavier dumbbells.
Another way to challenge the muscles is to try different exercises and new variations of exercises. For example, if you spend one block doing Goblet Squats for your legs, try doing Barbell Back Squats in a new block to give your body a novel stimulus.
Experts recommend changing up one or more aspects of your training every 4 to 12 weeks to keep your muscles challenged with novel stimuli.
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ABOUT ME
Hey there! 👋 I’m Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), and I’m a personal trainer and health coach. I help people build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with my online coaching programs. Check out some of my coaching videos on Youtube, or join me live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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