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What Makes Muscles Grow

What Causes Muscle Growth?

If you want to build your muscles, it would greatly assist you to know exactly what causes muscle growth - that way you can achieve your goals as quickly as possible without wasted effort.

Building muscle is based on the following three factors, which all need to be in the proper balance for growth to occur:

1. Resistance Training – Of course you know you have to workout to build muscle, but you also need to realize the workouts need to be intense enough to both break down your muscle fibers and to use up some of your muscles energy stores of both glycogen and phosphocreatine.

Another important point is the workouts need to be progressive, meaning you need to add reps or weight on a regular basis, if you can curl 100 pounds for 10 reps and you never try to do 11 reps or 105 pounds then your body has no reason to change.

2. Proper Nutrition – Once you have stimulated muscle growth in the gym, you need to have correct nutrition to insure that growth will occur. Your body can’t make muscle out of nothing; it needs to have enough of the right building blocks to do so. It’s very hard to build muscle if you are not taking in enough calories, so you need to make sure you take in more calories than your body needs to maintain it’s current mass.

You need protein to rebuild the muscle fibers. You need carbohydrates to replenish your muscle glycogen stores. And you also need some healthy fats to help keep your testosterone levels high. Lastly taking a creatine supplement is very helpful in restoring muscle phosphocreatine.

3. Sleep and Rest – This is one of the most important yet also one of the most overlooked factors in the muscle growth equation. The fact is your muscles don’t grow when working out, that only gives the stimulation for muscle growth. Your muscles grow when they are first stimulated and then give the recovery time needed to rebuild and grow. If you workout too long or too often you simply tear your body down when you really want to be building it up.

Too many people also neglect getting enough sleep, 6 to 7 hours is not going to cut it – you need more like 8 to 10 hours for maximum muscle growth. Have you ever heard you grow when you sleep? Well it’s true! In fact did you ever wonder why guys in prison get so big without even a good diet or supplements? A prison guard once told me their secret – they sleep like 12 to 16 hours a day!

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