These 6 muscle building techniques and mindset tips will help you to grow bigger muscles no matter what decade you trained in. In this video, I’m going to show you some of the greatest principles that you should apply to your workouts to get the most muscle gains out of your hard work. We will dip back into the strongman era and show you the most effective movements and strategies that have stood the test of time up to today.
We start by looking at the common thread of using ground based compound movements as the basis of training. It doesn’t matter which exercise you look at, the strong men of old performed most of their feats of strength with both feet planted firmly on the ground. There is a good reason for this. When you are lifting and want to be athletic, you want to spend as much time performing ground based, closed chain movements as possible.
Exercises like the squat, deadlift and clean are all performed off the ground. The feet have the opportunity to generate force into the ground which then transfers up the kinetic chain and across multiple muscles and joints. This symphony of movement is something that allows us to hit many muscles at once and allows us to maximize our strength output and progressively overload most effectively. When we are looking to build muscle, we know that progressive overload and getting stronger is one of the ways that we will be able to do this most effectively.
Next, we also realize that training bilaterally alone is not enough. Real athletes and strength coaches realize that the benefits of unilateral training cannot be ignored. Training one side at a time not only helps us to address muscle imbalances hidden by the bilateral movements but to challenge the core more significantly during the exercise. These exercises also allow us to challenge planes of motion that normally don’t get incorporated by always training in the same plane.
Bodyweight movements are also critical to creating a complete physique. It isn’t enough to just get strong. You need to be able to apply that strength to moving the most important weight that you’ll ever lift – your body. This is where calisthenics and bodyweight exercises come in so crucial. You want to be sure to include some bodyweight exercises into your workouts and I will show you some examples of that here.
Finally, you want to be sure that you are not overlooking the value of isometric exercises into building muscle. While the action of an isometric alone is not necessarily a significant muscle hypertrophy stimulus, it is the impact they have on muscle fiber recruitment and the efficiency of this into any other big exercise that you perform that holds the real impact these exercises can have on your muscle gains. Learn to recruit muscle better into your big lifts by not forgetting to include isometrics into your complete routine.
From a mindset standpoint there are two other points worth mentioning. The first is, don’t approach your workouts like exercise, but rather as training. The difference between the two lies in the purpose behind it. If you are just drifting from workout to workout without a plan, then you are exercising. If you are following a path and know where you want to get to, the you are training.
The second is no matter how you slice it, there is no escaping hard work. The only formula that will ever matter is that consistency plus intensity equals results. You cannot skip scheduled workouts and lack consistency and think you should get great results. Likewise, just showing up is not enough. If you lack intensity in your training then you will never see the gains you are trying to achieve.
If you are looking for a complete workout program that puts the science back in strength and shows you how what to do step by step, be sure to head to the link below and start building muscle the smart way starting today.
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Jeff Cavaliere M.S.P.T, CSCS
Jeff Cavaliere is a Physical Therapist, Strength Coach and creator of the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs and ATHLEAN-Rx Supplements. He has a Masters in Physical Therapy (MSPT) and has worked as Head Physical Therapist for the New York Mets, as well as training many elite professional athletes in Major League Baseball, NFL, MMA and professional wrestling. His programs produce “next level” achievements in muscle size, strength and performance for professional athletes and anyone looking to build a muscular athletic physique.
