How to Build Muscle Mass
How to Build Muscle Mass
To maintain and build muscle mass during the off season period is important. There are two divergent approaches to off season training. One philosophy is to train primarily on heavy basic exercises all the year-round, with reps only slightly lower in the off-season than prior to a competition. With the idea of continuing to build muscle mass the only difference between off-season and pre-contest training is that the trainer can not maintain peak training intensity for the entire off-season preparatory cycle as he does during his pre-competitive phase. In the off season training cycle he, instead, alternates periods of peak intensity with mini- cycles of lesser intensity, making sure that each peak in the intensity cycle is a bit higher than the last. This will enable him to gain muscle mass, in spite of not training at the peak.
Many other champion bodybuilders follow a power lifter approach to their workouts during the off-season, training with relatively low reps primarily on basic movements and with maximum poundages. This approach is intended to help the champion gain muscle mass, although the case may not be true.
Aerobic training bas become quite important to competitive bodybuilders specially for building muscle mass. Therefore during a pre-contest phase many body builders engage in 2-3 hours of steady-state aerobics. During an off- season cycle, however, you should keep your aerobics threshold low (perhaps doing only one hour i per week of aerobic training merely to maintain a minimum level of conditioning), so you can receive a greater response from your aerobic workouts once you kick heavier aerobic training back into your program.
You must have two goals during the off-season training: to build general muscle mass and improve a weak muscle group or two. It's virtually impossible to bring up a lagging or weak body part during a pre-contest cycle, so you must do so in the off-season using the Weider Muscle Priority Training Principle and plenty of heavy, high- intensity workouts.
It's very difficult to gain muscle mass during a precontest cycle and hence you need to build all the muscle mass during the off season training period. Therefore, you will be in a prolonged off-season phase until you reach the point where you decide to enter your first competition and therefore initiate a specific peaking cycle. Your initial off-season training cycle, then, can last two, three, or more years.
Once you have entered your first bodybuilding championship, your off-season phases will become somewhat shorter, but I still feel that they should be a minimum of 3-4 months in length. With a shorter off-season cycle, you simply won't have sufficient time to gain the muscle mass that you may need in your next championship.
The younger and inexperienced bodybuilders make a mistake of entering competitions almost every other week. It is a mistake because they simply don't allow themselves sufficient time to grow, and to improve and build their muscle mass.
Some very senior bodybuilders even say that one competition once a year is enough to keep them motivated to train at peak intensity, as long as they are sure that this off season period allows him to gain more muscle mass. For most of the young bodybuilders, two competitions per year-equally spaced-is best because it allows sufficient off-season training time to build muscle mass, yet keeps you highly motivated to train as hard as possible. Competing every six months gives you approximately four good months to build muscle and two more months to diet and train down to reach optimum condition.
|