Fundamentals: Building Muscle & Progression

Following on from my initial post on fat burning and energy balance, I want talk about a critical principal of muscle building. The idea of these "fundamental" posts is to lay out the basic key principals that if incorporated into your routine, will point you in the right direction and go a long way to helping you stay on course to achieving your goals.

You've likely heard of the principle of progressive overload. This is one of the most important training factors when it comes to building muscle. Any training routine with the goal of building muscle should have progressive overload at it's core.

If you are progressively adding more weight to the bar and lifting more weight over time, you are getting stronger. If you're getting stronger your body is adapting, and there are several factors that can attribute to this strength gain including neuromuscular adaptation, muscle fiber recruitment, improved motor programming & technique, as well as increased muscle mass. It is true that you can gain a certain amount of strength without adding muscle mass, but at some point, if you continualy increase the weight you are lifting for reps over time, your body has to build new muscle fibres in order to achieve this strength progression. 

If you are not progressing, this is a sign that something with your routine is likely to be suboptimal and preventing your strength and muscle gains. Tracking your workouts will highlight any plateus with your progress. This is something you might not see if you're not tracking you workouts. If you find that you're not improving then you know that there are elements of your routine / nutrition / recovery / lifestyle that need to be improved, and so you can take action.

When we are always trying to improve and lift more weight its all to tempting to "cheat" in order to complete a rep. As exciting as it is to see strengh gains and hitting new personal bests it's important that we don't allow this focus on progression to negatively effect your form within a given lift. Training should be hard, and in order to progress we have to push our limits. When we are lifting heavy, or as we tire towards the end of a set, our body instinctively tries to find the path of least resistance. Without the correct mental focus this can mean our form gets a little skewed in those last couple of reps, meaning less focus is being put on the muscle we are really trying to stimulate, and potentially putting us at risk of injury. We have to remember here that moving the weight isn't really the ultimate goal, the goal is to maximise tension within the target muscle as we move through the range of motion against resistance. So as we are adding weight to the bar over time, we have to ensure that we do so whilst always whilst maintaining proper form throughout the momement.

Training should be fun, and you should feel motivated to train. If you note down and track your progress, you can see when you gain strength. When you see yourself getting stronger and the amount of weight you're able to lift increasing, it's rewarding, its fun and you feel motivated to continue progressing. If you write down your weight, sets and reps for your lifts each workout, then the next time you go into the gym you immediately see what you have to beat next time. For example, take weighted pull ups. If you completed 5 reps with 30kg strapped to you waist last workout, then your aim should be 6 reps of 30kg next workout, or 31.25kg for 5 reps. It's all too common to see people lifting the same weight for months even years and they are not progressing, because they are not tracking their efforts. 

If you are serious about improving your physique, get a notepad & pen or a smartphone app and start tracking your progress.  

Fundamentals: Energy Balance is King

I wanted to lay out some fundamentals before delving deeper into other subjects. I saw no better subject to start with than how and why we lose or gain fat.

Burning fat, at its core is very simple. As you're probably aware, the amount of body fat you hold on your frame is ultimately the result of energy balance over time. If you consistently take in more energy than you expend, you will store fat. Thankfully, the opposite is also true. There are many different factors that effect this equation, but ultimately whenever you have lost fat, its because you have expended more energy than you have taken in.

There's a huge plethora of training and nutrition strategies aimed at achieving this energy deficit, some more popular than others and some more effective than others. Some more sustainable, some more difficult, some "fads", some even dangerous. Whatever the strategy, if it has ever worked for anyone, its because it created an energy deficit, meaning the body had to use it's stored body fat as fuel.

If you are looking for a long term solution to sculpting and maintaining a physique you are happy with, then you have to find the most enjoyable method of getting and staying there. If you take an approach that you really hate, then it's going to be extremely difficult to achieve your goals, let alone maintain them.

This is where things start to get a little more complex, and hence why there is so much literature and conflicting information on the subject. You've probably heard the phase, "you've got to find what works for you". As cliche as this sounds, there is some truth to it.

When it comes to reducing bodyfat, just understand that regardless of what route you take, this basic law of thermodynamics underpins everything.