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Doing this might help you get stronger and promote more muscle gains
It doesn’t matter whether you are a man or woman — we should all lift some weight ????????. Weight lifting isn’t only for people that want to get big and bulky — like your stock standard bodybuilders. Using weight-bearing exercises helps us change our body shape, strengthen our bones and help ward off many metabolic diseases. Once you start to lift, you can’t ever stop. It feels great, but the changes you see in your body make it easier to keep going. Then we also have the inner growth phase — those limited beliefs we initially had that caused us to believe some made-up theories in our heads. These could range from:
- I can’t lift that much
- I can’t push myself
- It’s impossible
- My body won’t ever change.
These false theories will turn to dust once you start lifting, allowing enough time to pass and attain these benefits. Once that happens, you will see those empowering beliefs in your daily life! It is the most exciting part exercise plays. It is empowering you to start believing that you can do anything! As you get stronger and see those marvellous changes in your body begin to form, you want more. How do we begin to get even more shapely and move ahead of where we are now? That’s simple, and it’s probably one small thing you may not have realised. This experiment was based on 16 males. These men completed resistance exercises interspersed with either one minute or five minutes of rest. The researchers then took biopsies during different training intervals. One at 0, then 4, 24 and 28 hours post-exercise to define how much growth was produced during each rest interval.
Here is what they found
- Short rest intervals for one minute (the stock standard) produced superior hormonal responses (as in fat-burning responses), but muscle response is blunted somewhat. So this is not an ideal timeframe for increasing your muscular growth — but great for burning body fat and increasing your endurance.
- More extended rest periods of up to 2–3 minutes in between sets give you a better chance to get the necessary muscle response, increasing growth.
I wanted to highlight that the difference is quite significant. We have a 76% increase with shorter rest periods and a whopping 152% when you extend it. That difference is substantial if your goal is to increase the growth of your muscle. One important note here is that as experienced weight lifters, you may not experience blunted muscle growth response by decreasing your rest period. You might not have much to worry about if you have trained this way for a long time. Nevertheless, extending your rest periods between sets is still a good idea to maximise your muscle growth potential. Extending or shortening your rest time between sets is a great way to eliminate the chances of getting stuck in that dreaded muscle growth plateau. But again, if you are an experienced lifter — it may not be a big deal as you will still get some gains. Using both alternatives regularly will help you push past that sticking point.
Key takeaways
These two training methods will help you increase your endurance in different ways. They provide the necessary potential to push past growth plateaus continually and increase your metabolic potential — the worst thing you can do is do the same exercises day in and day out. You only have to tweak something relatively simple to get the better results possible.
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