Skeletal muscle mass accounts for about 40-50% of human body weight.
If you’re training, you want to know what to do to avoid a plateau. There’s nothing worse than trying to build muscle, yet seeing no results.
Learning how to grow your muscles and maintain that muscle weight will help you see the results you’ve been working for. If you’re looking for muscle maintenance or growth in the long term, keep reading to find out all the tips you need to know!
Take Time to Rest
One of the most important things you can to do improve your muscle maintenance instead of hitting a plateau is getting enough rest. Many people believe that working out constantly is the only way to grow muscle. They couldn’t be further off.
Rest After Training
Choosing to train without rest days is setting you up for failure. Overtraining can result in stress fractures, torn muscles, and other injuries. These injuries will ultimately lead to muscle loss, and all of your hard work will have been for nothing.
Every time you work out your muscles, you are stressing your body both mechanically and metabolically. You can partially solve metabolic stress by eating healthy and supplementing your body properly. For mechanical stress, your body needs the rest to refuel.
When your body rests, the fibroblasts within your muscles can repair the tiny tears that occur when training. Your body also gets rid of metabolic byproducts and toxins that have built up in your muscles during your workout. Instead, it brings oxygen and vital nutrients to the area to repair and maintain muscle.
Rest and recovery are some of the most important parts of athlete training and cannot be overlooked.
Getting Enough Sleep
In addition to resting after difficult workouts, it’s important to get enough sleep every night. When your body doesn’t get enough sleep, it will build up sleep debt. In turn, your body will stop protein synthesis and instead begin a process known as protein degradation.
Obviously, you do not want protein degradation to begin, as your muscles would begin to lose muscle mass. On top of that, a lack of sleep also creates a deficit of human growth hormones, which is necessary for protein absorption.
If you are struggling to get enough sleep, there are a few natural remedies you can try. Before going to bed, take some time off of bright screens and stimulating activities. Take time to wind down, light a candle, and relax to maximize your sleep quality.
As an adult, you should be getting between seven to nine hours of sleep per night.
Maintain a Healthy Diet
Nutrition is the key to supplementing your workouts. If you’re just working out, but maintaining a poor diet, you will not see results because your body is not getting what it needs.
Not only that, but strategically choosing what goes in your body will allow for consistent muscle growth. To grow your muscles, your body needs an essential mix of macronutrients like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
Carbohydrates
Carbs encourage your muscles to absorb amino acids. They also replenish any lost fuel to prevent muscle breakdown. After and before training, consuming carbs along with protein will allow for consistent muscle growth.
Proteins
As mentioned before, proteins are the building blocks of human muscles. Without protein, our muscles would not continue to grow.
Because many foods that are high in proteins are also high in fat, it’s important to know what proteins are the best to eat for muscle growth. Choose lean meats and low-fat dairy when available. Fish and plant protein are also lower in fat.
Fats
Although fat is an essential part of the human diet, the type of fat you consume matters. Eat healthier unsaturated fats like avocados, olive oil, and beans rather than a bag of potato chips. Your muscles will thank you later.
Increase Meal Frequency
Eating a meal directly after training is crucial to refuel your body and give your muscles what they need to continue to grow. However, one meal alone cannot give you everything you need.
Your body requires energy to refuel your muscles throughout the day. If you put your body in a deficit, your body will take energy from your muscles. This will cause a plateau or loss of muscle mass instead of muscle maintenance and growth.
With that said, it’s important to give your body a surplus of calories when training. Your muscles will take those calories and increase their muscle mass.
Again, it’s important to keep an eye on your diet and where the majority of your calories are coming from. Remember to focus on mainly consuming macronutrients.
To determine how many calories you should be consuming per day, you’ll need to take into account your age, weight, and speed of your metabolism.
Invest in Muscle Maintenance Products
There are a plethora of products that are used for bodybuilder training that can help any athlete with muscle growth. Products range from protein powders to amino acids and casein to SARMs, and more.
Protein
Because protein is the building block of our muscles, it’s important to ingest protein after a workout for muscle recovery and growth. Although you can find protein in many animal products, beans and legumes, and other foods, protein powder supplements are an easy way to get your quick protein fix after training. However, you should make sure the rest of your diet is sufficient before supplementing with just protein shakes.
Because your body is constantly using protein to live your everyday lifestyle, ingesting more protein than the average person is needed if you are training. Whatever calories you are not ingesting from protein should be split between carbohydrates and fats.
Amino Acids
Amino acids have been found to increase human’s maximum oxygen uptake. There are nine amino acids that are essential for our body’s functioning that are only found in diet and supplements.
Amino acids mix with your body’s protein to build muscle. When used as part of a pre-workout routine, amino acids can ensure that your muscles stay strong and do not lose any muscle mass. They’re also known for speeding up recovery times and reducing post workout fatigue or soreness.
Casein
Casein is a specific type of protein that is slow-absorbing. If consumed before bed, your body will slowly absorb the protein and amino acids. As a result, you’re body is building muscle the entire time you’re sleeping.
Try eating cottage cheese or Greek yogurt to increase your casein protein consumption. Casein protein powders put into a smoothie or shake works just as well.
Creatine
Creatine keeps your muscles supplied with an adequate amount of energy during workouts. With more energy when working out, the longer and more you can push yourself. This in turn leads to more muscle growth.
It does not matter if you ingest creatine before a workout or after, as long as you are consistent with adding it to your daily diet.
Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs)
SARMs have been used in many studies to look into cures for different diseases. However, SARMs have also been found to work in a similar way as steroids.
Typical steroids are known to be androgenic and produce many side effects in humans like acne, an enlarged prostate, and excess of hormones. However, selective androgen receptor modulators are more selective with what tissue receptors they bind to. This specificity allows for reduced side effects.
If you choose to buy sarms, look into reviews and current uses to be sure you’re choosing what is right for your training.
Follow a Workout Program
Muscle maintenance is not about hitting the gym every day or working out until you can’t lift another weight.
The University of Florida found that those who target a muscle group two times per week maintain 80% of those working out the same muscle group three times per week.
Muscle growth is more about targeting specific muscles with a certain intensity, rather than a certain amount of days. For improved muscle growth, focusing on specific muscles to train will give you more results. As you continue to work out, increase the weight you use to force your muscles to change.
Pressing, squatting, and deadlifting provide the best results for strengthening your muscles. Combining these specific strength workouts with high-intensity interval training will benefit your training. The cardio mixed with strength will burn fat and maintain muscle power.
Workout Tips
When trying to build muscle, your training program has to include specific exercises. This targeted focus will improve your muscle maintenance.
Always Warm-Up
Warming up before a workout will not only get your muscles ready to move but will also decrease any injuries you may get if you jump right into it. Start by getting your heart rate up with pushups, jumping jacks, or an exercise of your choice.
Be Aware of Your Form
It’s always important to watch your form when working out, especially when performing squats or lunges. If your form is even slightly off, you may injure yourself. When starting out as a beginner, it’s better to start light than hurt yourself right away.
Training Volume
To increase the intensity of your workouts, you want to increase the number of sets versus the number of reps. Keeping your reps between 8-12 per set maximizes muscle growth rather than endurance.
To make your reps harder and increase your muscle growth, you can also increase the resistance. In other words, put more weight on. Although your reps may decline at first, you’ll be right back at doing those reps soon enough.
As you continue in your training, increase your weight each week. If you started with 100 pounds and 5 sets of 10 reps, go to 110 pounds next week.
The Eccentric Phase
The eccentric phase of a workout is the slower, easier portion of an exercise. For instance, when squatting, the eccentric part is lowering down. Slowing down the eccentric portion of your training and adding more weight is best at triggering hypertrophy.
Plan Your Training Schedule
Start to write down your workouts so you can keep track of the number of sets and reps you do. From here, you can increase the number based on your notes from the previous week.
Writing down your workouts will also help you plan what you should be doing day by day to strengthen your muscles while not overdoing them.
Other Factors to Consider
You may be putting in all of the work and following all of the tips above, but not see any results. If that’s the case, there may be underlying reasons that your muscle growth has plateaued.
Sex
Males genetically have an advantage when trying to build muscle. This is mostly due to an increased amount of testosterone in males. Women typically have to try harder to see muscle gains.
Genetics
There is almost nothing about the human body that doesn’t rely partially on genetics. The same goes for muscle growth. If you are one of the lucky ones born with more type two muscle fibers, you’ll have an easier time training and seeing results.
Grow Your Muscles Today
It’s not easy to consistently build your muscles. However, it just has to do with a few essential things. Increase the weight you are lifting, eat a lot of protein and calories, and get an adequate amount of rest.
If you enjoyed learning more about improving your muscle maintenance, check out more from our health category.
