The relationship between male fitness and muscle gain

Not all fitness behaviors can bring about muscle-building effects. Only fitness that meets the four core conditions of "progressive load stimulation, adequate protein intake, matching rest and recovery, and normal hormone levels" will have a clear positive correlation with muscle growth.； On the contrary, wrong fitness methods will not only fail to build muscle, but may also cause muscle breakdown and sports injuries, which is contrary to the goal of building muscle.

At the community gym I often go to, two young guys who just graduated signed up for the card at the same time last year. One of them arrives on time every day, runs for 40 minutes and then plays with the fixed equipment for an hour. After training, he goes to the next door to play basketball for half an hour. In three months, he has lost 4 pounds, and his arm circumference has shrunk by 0.5cm. Everyone says that he has gained fat but not muscle when he drinks water.； The other only came 4 times a week and practiced for 40 minutes each time, doing squats, push-pulls, and two or three single-joint movements. Between sets, he often slumped on a chair and watched two-minute funny short videos. In three months, his arm circumference increased from 32 to 35, and his shoulder line could be seen clearly even in an ordinary T-shirt.

Many people have a natural misunderstanding about the relationship between fitness and muscle gain. They think that as long as they move, they can gain weight. In fact, this is not the case at all. The essence of muscle gain is that you cause tiny tears to the muscle fibers through training, and then the body uses protein to replace them during rest. During the repair, the muscle fibers will be made thicker than before to cope with the load you impose next time. To put it bluntly, it is a "compensatory upgrade" of the body. If you don’t even get enough stimulation during training, then your body doesn’t think it’s necessary to carry so many extra energy-consuming muscles, so why should you gain weight?

As for how to stimulate people, the fitness circle has been arguing for almost two decades and there is no unified answer. Fans of bodybuilding-style training believe that it is necessary to isolate the target muscles and find a "feeling of force". The interval between sets should be controlled within 1 minute. The stronger the pump, the better the muscle-building effect. I have a veteran who has been training for 5 years. I rely on this method. I can hold a pen in the middle of the chest muscle, and the muscle separation can be used as a fitness poster. ； But powerlifting enthusiasts don’t like this set. They think that the pumping feeling is empty, and gradual weight increase is the king. As long as the weight of the three major items increases, the muscles of the whole body cannot help but increase. I have been practicing for two months, deadlifting from 80kg to 120kg, and my latissimus dorsi has become wider. Even my mother asked me if I have become stronger recently. There are also friends who play street fitness. They rely solely on body weight plus weighted pull-ups, parallel bar arm extensions, and they can also practice to look thin and muscular when wearing clothes and undressing. However, if you want to make a breakthrough in the later stage, you still have to add extra weight. Otherwise, the load of body weight will reach the maximum, and the muscles will stop growing.

Even on the basic question of "should I practice to exhaustion?", there is still no unified conclusion. Some experimental data show that failure can maximize the activation of fast-twitch muscle fibers, and the muscle-building efficiency is 30% higher than that without failure. ； Some studies have also pointed out that repeated exhaustion will continue to increase cortisol, which will affect muscle repair and greatly increase the probability of injury. My own experience after trying it is that novices really don’t need to join in the excitement of exhaustion. It is better to do the standard movements first than anything else. When I first practiced bench pressing, I pushed two more times in order to reach exhaustion. The movements were so crooked that I almost twisted my waist. It took me half a month to recover, but it delayed the training progress. ； For those who have been training for one or two years, arrange 1-2 sets of failure sets every week. You will indeed be surprised by breakthroughs, but don't do it to failure in every set, otherwise the pain will be so bad that you can't even hold your toothbrush the next day, which is really unreasonable.

After talking about training, many people actually don’t realize that factors other than fitness may have a greater impact on muscle growth than training itself. After all, people in the industry laugh and say, “30% practice, 70% food, and the remaining 90% sleep.” It’s not unreasonable. I have seen too many people finish training by eating a hamburger, thinking that it is enough to have a calorie surplus. In fact, when the protein intake is measured, it cannot even reach 1g per kilogram of body weight. The gained weight is all fat, which feels soft and makes a mark when pinched, and is not muscle at all. Some people don’t go to bed until two or three o’clock. Lack of sleep directly causes testosterone levels to plummet, and no matter how hard they train, it’s in vain. I was busy with projects for a while, and I stayed up until two o’clock every day. My training state collapsed. I lost 10kg in bench press weight and 2 kilograms in muscle in half a month. I’m really not alarmist.

Another variable that is easily overlooked is age. Young men in their early twenties have strong recovery ability and high testosterone levels, so they can build some muscle even if they train blindly. For men after the age of thirty, the testosterone level naturally decreases by about 1% every year. With the same amount of training, the rate of muscle gain may be only half of that of a twenty-year-old. This is a physiological law. There is no need to be anxious. If you adjust your diet and rest, and lengthen the training cycle, you will still see obvious changes, just slower.

In fact, to put it bluntly, the relationship between fitness and muscle gain has never been a linear relationship of "as long as you practice, it will increase." It is more like a multi-variable comprehensive question with no standard answer. You have to try it yourself slowly and find the training rhythm and diet structure that suits you. Don't blindly follow the seven-day quick plan of popular bloggers, and don't blindly compare weight with others. Practice happily and without injury. Slowly see your clothes size change from M to L, and your shoulders can hold up a T-shirt. It's better than anything else. Oh, by the way, don’t believe those who sell illegal muscle-building drugs. Natural fitness can gain 4-8 kilograms of pure muscle in a year, which is the ceiling of talent. If someone says that he has gained 10 kilograms of muscle in a month, those 9 kilograms are just water and fat. Don’t be fooled.