What does muscle building training look like?

Muscle building training should differ depending on the athlete’s level of training. This is at least the currently prevailing opinion in the professional world, as the muscle build-up of a beginner differs significantly from that of a “professional”. What they all have in common, however, is the achievement of a progression in training – i.e. becoming stronger or moving more weight.

This serves on the one hand as an adapted stronger stimulus to make the muscles grow and on the other hand as an indirect success control. Because only those who have built up more muscles can move more weight, as long as the other parameters have not changed. Typical for muscle building training is training with mainly heavy weights and a correspondingly low number of repetitions.

The various muscle groups are usually exercised in several sets, with a break between each set so that the muscle can regenerate and then be exercised again with the highest possible load. While a 5×5 system is recommended for beginners, a system in which 5 sets of each exercise are performed with 5 repetitions each, more experienced athletes should incorporate a certain amount of variance into their training in order to keep sending new load stimuli to the muscle and thus stimulate it to grow. In training, often only some of the muscles are exercised per training day.

For example, some muscles of the upper body can be trained one day and those of the lower body the next day. Another possibility is, for example, to divide up the muscles of the abdomen, chest, back, arms, shoulders and legs. These can then be trained together as desired.

However, before any muscle training, it is crucial to warm up the muscles to be exercised in order to prevent injuries and increase the performance of the muscles. As already described above, a heavy load on the muscles is necessary to achieve an adaptation reaction within the muscles. The harder the training of the musculature, the stronger the resulting stress stimulus.

One differentiates thereby 3 basic kinds of the load stimulus:

The subliminal stress stimulus. This remains below the threshold at which muscle growth occurs.
The supra-threshold stress stimulus. Depending on how strong the supra-threshold stimulus is, the muscles are either maintained or increased.
The overthreshold, too strong stimulus.
This leads to damage to the muscle or the nerve plexus connected to the muscle.

According to opinions, this depends on the size of the muscle. Many people tend to train smaller muscles with lighter weights and a greater number of repetitions. This is the case with the shoulder muscles, for example.

For larger muscles such as the thigh muscles, for example, you can work with larger weights and then fewer repetitions. As a rough rule of thumb, however, you can remember that the repetition range should be between four and 14 repetitions. Of course, you can also build muscles outside of this repetition range.

However, it seems to be most effective within this limit. Also at home, a variety of exercises can be performed to build up muscles. Be it without or if available also with equipment.

If you enter the search term “home workout” on YouTube, you will be flooded with an almost unmanageable amount of videos. To emphasize at this point briefly the advantage of the gym: With the help of machines, muscles can be isolated and thus trained in a targeted manner and, especially for large muscle groups, additional weights are available here, which are indispensable at a certain point in the muscle build-up in order to make further progress. This is why exercises for smaller muscle groups are ideal for use at home.

Push-ups or dips, for example, can be performed without any aids. If the exercises are to be made more difficult, the feet can be raised or the “extension and return movement” can be slowed down in order to keep the muscle under tension longer.Also exercises for the abdomen like the classic sit-ups, legraises and the like can be done at home without any aids. If the user has light equipment at his disposal, such as a door barbell or dumbbells, pull-ups, exercises for the shoulder muscles, exercises for holding the abdominal muscles or similar exercises can also be performed.

In the following some exercises are explained:

One exercise for the back extension is to slide into the inverted arm support. This exercise also trains the abdominal and gluteal muscles. The starting position is sitting on the floor with stretched legs.
The heels are placed on a towel or a slippery cloth. The hands are placed directly next to the hips. Now you should pay attention to your body tension and slowly lift your hips.

This will cause you to slowly slide into the inverted armrest. It is now important to keep the tension in your arms, torso and legs and keep your body stretched. The position should then be held briefly before returning to the starting position.

Throughout the entire procedure, the head should always remain in extension of the spine.
The forearm support with hip rotation is another exercise that strengthens the back and builds up muscles. You enter the forearm support so that the body does not sag and forms a line parallel to the floor. Now the hip is rotated alternately to the right and left outside without touching the floor.
The so-called cobra owes its name to the appearance of the exercise for training the back muscles.
The starting position is lying on the floor with the legs stretched out and the arms lying beside the body. Now the head and shoulders are raised as high as possible and the arms are also lifted off the ground to the sides of the body. This position can now be held for a few seconds.

Alternatively, you can stretch your arms in the air in front of your body and perform slight up and down movements. Moving the arms sideways is also a variation. If you want to increase the level of difficulty, you can also raise the legs to increase the body tension and intensity for the back.
The pelvic tilt is an exercise to build up the back muscles.
Lie backwards on the floor with your arms crossed under your head. The feet are placed on the floor so that the legs are angled. From this position the pelvis is now stretched upwards so that the body forms a line from the shoulders to the knees.

This position is then held for a few seconds before the pelvis is lowered back to the floor. The duration of the holding position can be determined individually by each athlete. As training progresses, the holding time increases due to the increase in strength of the back muscles.

Special fitness programs such as Freeletics are designed to build muscle completely without equipment.

However, as mentioned in one of the articles above, muscle building is only possible to a certain extent. In order to achieve the strongest possible load stimulus, the number of repetitions of the exercises is also significantly increased. In principle, this already describes the important aspects that must be considered for effective muscle building without equipment.

The repetition number of 14 repetitions refers to training on machines or with additional weights. When training without machines or additional weights, only the execution speed and the number of repetitions as well as the pause between sets can be used as adjusting screws to increase the load stimulus. This means that pause times are often used that are too short for the muscle to recover sufficiently.

The “simple” exercises such as push-ups, knee bends, pull-ups, sit-ups, etc. are therefore performed with the highest possible number of repetitions and only short breaks. EMS, which stands for electromyostimulation, is actually a procedure from physiotherapy.

Here it is used to counteract muscle atrophy during long periods of lying or immobility. Training with EMS works with low-voltage current impulses that are able to stimulate the so-called deep muscles, which cannot be achieved in this form by normal strength training. EMS definitely leads to muscle building, this has been scientifically proven.

How big the muscles can become with it, however, is questionable. Therefore, in weight training it is used more as a complementary or supporting measure and not as a stand-alone measure.Although EMS can be used to train the whole body, it is often used to strengthen the muscles of the trunk rather than, for example, the shoulder or arm muscles. In addition, many people still think that this is not “real training” and that you are tricking the body without really doing anything for it. However, this is not the case. With EMS, the normal static muscle contraction is supplemented by an additional stimulus from the low current flow, so that this workout is also extremely sweaty.