Sneaky Ways To Trigger Muscle Growth

Photo Credit: Katie Tegtmeyer

Thanks to Chris from ZenToFitness for this guest article.

Muscle growth is easy at first but then it becomes elusive, time passes with little change in body composition in spite of good eating and hard training in the gym. For me it even comes to a point that my muscle size and strength totally stall unless I use something to trigger them out of the slump. Over the years I have picked up a few ways to spur muscles into new growth and hopefully you can pick up some tips and techniques to add to your repertoire….

Be warned though and do not use them all at once; use them sparingly and when needed. See which ones you respond best to and utilize them to your advantage.

Intermittent Refeeding

We hear a lot about Intermittent Fasting, which is great for fat loss, but hear very little about eating huge amounts in one sitting. Remember back to the days before you became interested in diet and training; the days when food was just food and you got really hungry from time to time. Before getting into fitness and lifestyle training I would easily put away a whole pizza and a few slices of cake in one sitting (probably close to 2000 calories) without even thinking about it, now though, I know this is not the smartest thing to do. Well, not the smartest thing to do regularly anyway….

I find eating a huge amount a few times a year, especially when timed for after a workout can have amazing results at triggering anabolic hormones and setting yourself up for strength and muscle gains. So go wild every now and then eat to your heart’s content of any food you like, this is especially important if you have been dieting for a while as it works to reset leptin receptors which are vital for body fat regulation…..

So refeed your body intermittently from time to time and make sure you are really really hungry for best effects though.

Focus On The Muscle

Let’s say your chest is lagging, or maybe your calves. What would you do if you didn’t know any better? I bet you would pound the muscle day after day with stubborn force literally forcing it to grow.

• Want a bigger chest? Do 100 pushups daily on top of your normal chest workout.
• Want a bigger back and biceps? Do 30-50 pullups a day in supplement to your normal back workout.

You get the idea. Simply by adding in bodyweight exercises daily (spread throughout the day) on top of your weight workouts at the gym, you can really target a lagging muscle or trigger some new growth.  Be careful though; do not use this all the time as your muscles need their rest to grow, try it for a 2 week period per muscle group and then back off.

Stop Training The Muscle

A while back I was having trouble adding size to my biceps, funnily enough this was not long after I first started training. It was all due to the fact I was doing too much arm work (as most newbies do). I asked a trainer at the gym what he suggested I do, to which he replied with something along the lines of “do no arm work whatsoever for 4 weeks then train them again” this seemed crazy as I was so used to training my arms and was scared they would shrink further if I followed his advice. Grudgingly I tried it out, and did no bicep or triceps work for a month or even longer. When I finally got round to training my arms again they got extremely sore and pumped, it was like I had never trained before……

And it worked very well, my arms became noticeably harder than before and they didn’t decrease in size during the 4+ weeks I took off. I haven’t tried it for other muscles but I see no reason why this technique would not work for chest, back or even legs.

Negatives

These are probably the most underrated exercise out there.  I have spoken about them before at my blog (guide to rockstar abs) as I am a huge believer in the power of slow negative reps. They can be used with any exercise and are really easy to perform – Simply do the negative portion of the exercise several times (6-8 reps) for 10-15 seconds or as slow as you can go with a heavy weight, they work best on the following exercises:

• Chinups
• Dips
• Bench Press
• Bicep Curls
• Leg Press

Keep this in mind.  When negatives are done correctly, these are extremely hard and will have you feeling zonked. Also, do not do them too often as they are very hard on the Central Nervous System. However, they do trigger some awesome muscle and strength gains. I learnt these from the old school HIT methods of Ellington Darden.

So there you have it. 5 tips to trigger some muscle growth in those lagging, stubborn muscles. Give them a try but use with caution; they are tools to use sparingly.

Chris is the author of A Simple Guide to Eating Well and writes about staying fit while living life at Zen to Fitness.