7 Powerful Ways to Become a Muscle Building Machine

Not seeing anymore gain in your weight training? Then it's time to revamp your normal routine with this 7 powerful methods

In order to build muscles and increase overall lean body mass, you must supply your body with the right conditions to grow. And resistance training is one of the good ways to stimulate your body for muscle growth.

But as those who have been training regularly would know, our body adapts quickly to training routine and muscle mass gain will diminish equally fast if you do the same set of exercises or use the same amount of loads day in day out.

So it is important to introduce varieties into your training so that your body does not get used to the demands placed on it and thus, preventing it from kicking into maintenance mode.

Here are some ways you can use to spice up your training and keep your body in muscle-building mode. The key to success here is not to pick and choose only those that you like from the list below, but to use all the methods--one at a time. When you've exhausted the list, mix them all up in different combinations to keep your muscles guessing.

1. Use Higher Loads. Increase the amount of weight, however small it may be, you can lift in every bodybuilding session without sacrificing good form and proper technique.


2. Drop Reps to Up Loads. There will come a point when you find that you can't add more weight to a particular exercise. But, don't be fooled. There is actually an easy way to get around that. Go ahead and increase the loads, but instead of lifting it for the usual number of repetitions (reps), try decreasing the reps while keeping the overall work done slightly higher. Say you can usually complete a 10-kilo dumbbell biceps curl in 12 reps. Now if you increase the weight to 12.5 kg, but decrease the number of reps to 10, you would have effectively increase your overall work done from 120 J to 125 J--a small but definite improvement.


3. Be Creative. Don't restrict yourself to the machines and weights you can find in the gym for your training. Replace some of your machine or free weight exercises with body weight exercises periodically. Experiment with other equipment like kettlebell, exercise band, or even a towel to perform traditional weight training exercises.


4. Play with Time. Kick your muscles out of their comfort zone by changing the speed you lift weights. If you are usually a hare when it comes to completing a rep, then go slower, and vice versa. For instance, you can slow down the negative portion (that is the lowering phase) of an exercise by counting to 4 seconds to complete the move. The weight will feel heavier when you go slow and that's a good sign, because your muscles will feel the same too.


5. Sets aren't Cast in Stone. Have you been performing all exercises in sets of 3 religiously? Then it's time to vary the number. But bear in mind that when you change the number of sets, you will need to adjust the number of reps or the amount of weights you lift accordingly.


6. Don't be a Bore. There are many ways to work a muscle group. So there is no reason why you should keep doing the same old exercises. Even a seemingly done-to-death exercise can be rejuvenated. For example, a conventional bench press can be performed in many ways: with dumbbell or barbell, on an incline, decline or flat bench, and the angle of incline or decline can be further tweaked to give subtle emphasis to different parts of the pectorals.


7. Super-charge Your Training. Instead of performing your weight training exercises sequentially one after another, do two different exercises back-to-back with no rest in between. This is commonly known as supersetting. Not only will this increase the intensity of your training, it will also increase your productivity in the gym and shorten your training time. There are many ways to introduce supersets into your training routine. Have fun experimenting!