|
Building Muscle
Building
Muscle
Building Muscle with Aerobic Exercise
Aerobics and muscle mass gains are inter-related. The inclusion of aerobics in your training program caters to fat burning, cardiovascular health and improved recovery mechanisms. All these are necessary in building muscles.
There are many bodybuilders who prefer not to undertake aerobic exercise, especially in the building muscle season as they fear that aerobics may cause loss of muscle mass. They fail to realize that a bodybuilder who loses muscle during a period of aerobic training is doing so because of not eating enough to compensate for the calories spent by the aerobic activity. With proper intake of calories you will preserve muscle mass while your body fat drops. This may even lead to building muscles. Aerobics forces oxygen through the body and increases the number and size of your blood vessels. The expansion of circulatory network is called cardiovascular density. Improved density facilitates improved supply routes to transport oxygen and nutrients to body tissues and carry waste products away for muscular growth repair and recovery.
Your ability in building muscle is limited by your degree of cardiovascular density. Aerobics and muscle mass gains are so related that without aerobics in your total bodybuilding program, your body can not create any new supply routes for your newly developed muscles. Your workouts can be longer and more intense if you have more and bigger blood vessels. In other words, the better your cardiovascular density, the greater potential you have for building muscles. The best time to do aerobics is in the morning before breakfast for 45 to 60 minutes.
Most people don't understand the relationship between aerobics and muscle mass gains. Many books, training schedule, trainers and instructors have urged you to achieve your "target heart rate" during aerobic activity. Target heart rate is enhancing the pulse to approximately 60 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate (this is considered as 220 minus your age). After reaching target heart rate, it needs to be kept there for at least 20 minutes. This boost the general cardiovascular conditioning. It is also believed that if you exercise at your target heart rate long enough you burn more fat and this helps in building muscle.
Scientifically it has been proven that optimal cardiovascular is not achieved by just raising your heart rate, but by increasing oxygen uptake. This represents your body's maximum capability to deliver oxygen to the working muscles. This can be achieved by exercising so intensely that you start to breath very hard. The harder you breathe the more energy you expend, and the more fat your burn - thus indirectly building muscle.
For building muscle, the bodybuilder needs to train consistently, and that leads to some important metabolic changes to take place inside the body. First, the cellular furnaces where fat and other nutrients are burned, increase in size and total number inside muscle fibers. Second, muscle fibers build up more aerobic enzymes. With correct training and combination of aerobics this leads to building muscle.
|
