Growing your muscles is not only about how much weights you lift. It is also about how you arrange and plan your life. If your life is better planned, you will not have to do much before your muscles begin to expand significantly.
The following are three strategies you can incorporate into your life, to increase the effectiveness of whatever you are doing to build muscles.
1. Lay down strength targets
Have you heard that saying “a man who fails to plan, is planning to fail.” It is very true in this case. If you set down a target of how big you want your muscles grow, it will be easier and quicker to achieve it.
Writing it down or keeping it in your mind motivates you and gives you the mental strength, you need to go on, when you want to quit. You can aim that by so and so time, you must be able to lift this amount of weight or be able to repeat a certain exercise.
2. Food journal
Your diet is almost as important to building muscles as training is necessary. If you are taking excess amounts of fats or nutrients, that can be converted to fats in the body, you will be wasting a good amount of your workout routine, trying to burn those fats off, before you even start to train muscles. Record what you eat, the calories it contains, the time you ate it and what exercises or activities you did, that could burn off excess calories.
Just like laying down targets motivates you, keeping a food journal also lets you know how you are doing, and hence how much more or less as the case may be you need to be doing.
3. Go to bed early
Your workout routine will do you nothing good, if you do not sleep. When you are exercising, muscles are strained and micro tears appear on them. It is when the body is now repairing these micro tears when you are sleeping that muscles become bigger.
So if you do not sleep enough, your body does not have all the time to repair, those micro tears and hence your muscles do not get as big as they could. Instead, those micro tears could worsen into major damage to your muscles.
Image courtesy of: breakingmuscle.co.uk.
