What is the relationship between male fitness and muscle gain?

Simply put, scientifically adapted resistance fitness is the core controllable prerequisite for men to build muscle, while blindly arranged fitness not only cannot help build muscle, but may even consume muscle and hinder it.

Last year, a sophomore boy came to my studio. He was 183cm tall and only weighed 110kg. He used to go to the gym every day with his roommate. He would run for 40 minutes each time, and then follow Xiaohongshu's tutorials for an hour of full-body training with seven or eight movements. After the training, he would go back to the cafeteria to eat vegetable noodles and an omelette. In three months, he had lost 2kg in weight, and he still swayed terribly when wearing a T-shirt. This is a typical example of him not understanding the binding logic of fitness and muscle gain, and all his efforts were ineffective.

Building muscle is essentially a process of breaking first and then building up. You must first use resistance fitness exercises to cause controllable micro-damage to the target muscle fibers, and then replenish enough protein and calories, and get enough sleep to allow the body to start repairing. The repaired muscle fibers will be thicker and stronger than before. This is what everyone often hears about the over-recovery process. Only when this whole process is completed can you grow muscles. If you spend most of your physical strength on long-term aerobic exercise, the resistance training is either too light and does not give the muscles enough stimulation threshold, or the movements are wrong and the joints and borrowing muscles are compensating. After the exercise, you have not eaten enough raw materials for repair. Isn’t it a waste of work? In serious cases, the caloric gap is too large, allowing the body to decompose muscles for energy, and the more you exercise, the leaner you become.

Nowadays, the fitness circle has been arguing about the most efficient way to build muscle for almost ten years, but there is still no unified conclusion. There is a group of people who believe that "capacity is king", saying that as long as the number of sets, reps, and total load of the target muscles are sufficient during each training, even if the weight of a single set is not top-notch, it can increase quickly. A little brother next to me who does amateur bodybuilding practices this way. On the chest training day, there are five movements, 4 groups of 12 times for each movement, and a minute and a half of rest between groups. After half a year, the chest has become almost 2 centimeters thicker, and it is particularly obvious when wearing tights. ； The other group believes in "prioritizing neural recruitment", saying that as long as the weight of the movement can be increased, even if the training frequency is low and the number of sets is small, it is more useful than stacking capacity. The big powerlifting guy who often comes to my place to rub the bench press bar only does chest training once a week, and bench presses one movement each time, 5 sets of 5 times, and rests for five minutes between sets. Now he can press 150kg on the bench press, and his chest latitude is half a size larger than that little bodybuilding brother. In fact, these two ideas essentially hit the core requirement of muscle growth - to provide enough effective stimulation to the muscles, but they are suitable for different people. Newbies who have just started training have poor neural recruitment ability, so they first accumulate capacity to find a feeling of muscle exertion, but they are less likely to be injured. After one or two years of training, the efficiency is often higher when heavy weights are used.

I often make an analogy to the novices who come here to ask questions. You should think of building muscle as adding new rice to the grain storage tank at home. The appropriate fitness training is to dig out part of the old rice left in the tank to make enough space. If you dig too little, you won't be able to hold much new rice. If you dig too hard, the tank will leak out and the gain will outweigh the gain. After eating enough and sleeping enough, you will just pour new rice into it. If you miss any step, you will not be able to save food. Of course, men are born with testosterone levels that are 2 to 3 times higher than women. It is true that the muscle building efficiency is much higher under the same training and diet conditions. However, this buff cannot be faked. If you stay up late and drink heavily every day, and then eat instant noodles after training to make ends meet, then it will be useless no matter how hard you run to the gym.