Paige Harris Make effective and easy changes to your fitness routine to maximize your time, energy, and overall health and wellness!
I want to tell you a story about a girl I know. She was in the gym 5 to 6 days a week, sweating it out, killing her workouts. She ran a weekly split to ensure that she was hitting each body part and hitting it hard. After upper body days, she decided to add in HIIT cardio to get some extra burn. Protein mixed with water was her go-to way to replenish her muscles. She hoped in the back of her mind that it could hold her over until lunch, where she could stuff herself full of vegetables and just the right amount of lean protein. She wanted her dream body and didn’t care how much it hurt to get there.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I was that girl.
I thought that hitting the gym every single day, limiting calories to avoid fat gain, and grinding hard was the only way that I could get the results I wanted, but that is simply not true. In order to grow muscle, your body has to be in an anabolic — or muscle building — state. I had narrowed down the right factors to focus on (training, nutrition, and rest), I was handling them in completely the wrong way.
Optimizing Your Workouts
You do have to hit up the gym in order to build muscle. However, instead of annihilating your muscles with hours of work, you need to stimulate them instead. When you hit each workout so hard that you’re shaking afterward, can’t hold up your phone, or even walk down the stairs, you aren’t doing your body much good. Workouts that are that intense can push the body into a catabolic — or muscle breakdown — state.
Your workouts need to challenge your muscles to maximize their growth, not destroy them. You’ll be able to signal to the body that it should build more of these muscle fibers by pushing your existing muscles hard, but not too hard. Your body wants to be more efficient at resisting the force you’re putting on it.
I recommend following a 3-day full-body program instead of the traditional bodybuilder split. While this may seem counterintuitive or seem like you’re not spending enough time in the gym, you need to trust that it is. By training each muscle group three times a week, you’ll be able to cut back on the volume needed for each group per day while still giving yourself the ability to increase your volume per week so that you’ll never stagnate! Need to get in some extra shoulder work, for example? Tack on one extra set of dumbbell overhead presses each session instead of adding three to one day. Your muscles will respond, and you’ll be able to hold up your phone for that post-workout selfie!
On the days that you’re not in the gym, you can still continue to stimulate those muscle groups through some light, low-intensity exercise using resistance bands or body-weight. These shorter sessions let your body know that it’s still important to build up its muscle reserve so it’s ready to tackle the next bout of resistance training!
Optimizing Your Diet
Secondly, you need to eat enough in order to support your body while it’s muscle-building. This can be an extremely scary idea for women in particular. Women have always been shamed for eating larger portion sizes both by our peers and in the general media. Women are constantly told to eat less; less sugar, less fat, less carbs, just less. But to build muscle, our bodies need fuel! You need to be eating in a caloric surplus — meaning that you need to take in more calories than you burn.
This doesn’t mean that you should go out and eat alllllllll of the fried foods and simple sugars in order to get your caloric intake up — although you definitely could. No matter what, it’s necessary to take in a balanced amount of protein (think chicken, fish, and red meat, or vegan proteins such as tofu, tempeh, or beans and rice), carbohydrates (rice, grains, fruits, and vegetables), and fats (such as butter, ghee, olive or coconut oil) in order to gain muscle. Your body cannot create the tissues that you’re striving so hard for in the gym without enough nourishing food!
Optimizing Your Recovery
Thirdly, you need to prioritize rest in order to build muscle. You start the process of muscle building during your heavy weight training sessions, but the muscle isn’t actually being built then and there. Muscle building doesn’t happen during your workout. It happens during rest: in fact, sleep is the most important factor in muscle building. You cannot out-train or out-eat your way out of poor sleeping habits.
Your body doesn’t have the necessary resources to build new tissues and recycle out old ones without adequate sleep. Growth hormones are released during sleep cycles — the signal that tells your body it’s time to repair and reinforce itself. It’s important to shoot for at least 7-8 hours of quality sleep, though everybody is different. You shouldn’t be waking up every few hours — no matter how ‘normal’ that may be for you.
Wrapping Up
By getting these three factors under control, it’s almost impossible not to gain some muscle! You just have to remember to:
- Get the right amount of exercise for your body. Most people don’t need to spend 3+ hours in the gym!
- Get the right foods for your body. This looks different for everyone, but the most important part is that you’re eating enough to fuel muscle growth!
- Get the right amount of sleep. Aim for at least 7 hours, and be sure that it’s uninterrupted for best results!
Working smarter and not harder can yield great results!
