Building More Muscle Mass: Target More Weight or Reps?

Becoming an Adonis is a lot of work and the first thing that you will need to start doing, for a competition or just a date, is to start bulking up your muscles.

Changing and increasing your muscle mass and balancing it with the right amount of body fat can easily make you transform from an average-looking builder to an extreme cut.

When building more muscle mass, you need to focus on both the weights you are using and the total amount of reps you are doing. This is how you increase your muscle mass while going to the gym, doing more reps builds the structure of your muscles while adding more weight helps your muscles to grow larger.

However, there are several things that you need to do inside and outside the gym to rapidly increase the size of your muscles.

Most people around the world that are doing these types of training will know that just going to the gym is never enough.

Having a constant flow of proper proteins, training, strength, and focus are what is required to build muscle mass.

What influence does increasing the total reps have on your muscles?

If you are doing reps in the moderate range then you will experience massive muscle mass growth, this is the range that allows for the most proteins to be converted to muscles.

Building muscle mass is all about having the balance of training and stored proteins perfect. Most people that are training will actively need to add more than just reps to their routines.

Reps are what helps to build structure and endurance in your muscles as well, picking one weight that is heavy one time won’t do much for your muscle mass.

However, if you are close to your limit and do around 30 reps with the weights then you will be actively growing your muscles to become larger and stronger.

Most early muscle builders will believe that reps are not nearly as important as the total weight that you can lift, however, these are usually the people that are unable to do much more than move.

Having a balance in everything is where you start gaining muscle mass faster than simply focusing on one type of training.

What does adding more weight to your training do?

When you start adding weight you are breaking your muscles down faster, allowing them to gain size and mass faster.

Having a balance with the number of reps you are doing is vital, as you can overtrain your muscles, causing them to breakdown too much.

When this happens, your muscles will work harder on repairing themselves than gaining mass.

Gaining muscle mass is all about balance, you need to have the right amount of proteins, energy, reps, and weight.

Training the right muscles at the right time can also make a difference, with most people never seeing the muscle mass gains they are hoping for simply because they never take the time to learn how to train.

Adding more weight is an important part but should never the bet the only part you are focusing on; this will cause your training sessions to become unbalanced and usually have muscles be damaged rather growing.

If the weight is too much for your muscles to handle then they will be torn and damaged beyond what can be repaired in a few days. This will slow down your training and cause you to lose almost all the progress you have made thus far.

What do you do inside the gym?

Gaining muscle is an arduous journey and becoming a truly refined muscle man or woman means that you know what to do and when to do it.

Just increasing what you are doing on a normal day at the gym will not see any significant changes in the shape and size of your muscles. It will only mean that you are slightly better at doing what you were already doing.

Bodybuilders and the lot usually start increasing their training regimes and intake regimes inside the gym drastically if they know that they are going to be taking part in a competition.

You should be doing the same, increasing the size and intensity of your training to allow you to comfortably become the Adonis you need to be.

Work Big

This does not mean go to the biggest rack in the gym and starting to pile up the weights. Instead, it means working on multiple muscles and joints at the same time, having a fuller body exercise as well as isolated training.

Bicep curls, followed by squats, pullups, deadlifts, and other similar exercises that will allow your whole body to be trained.

Train heavy

Heavy training is indeed using heavier weights, but not in the way that you may be thinking. While normal daily reps may be doing as many as possible, as fast as possible, having you move between sets with breaks in between.

Training heavy means using heavy weights but moving slowly, using control to slowly go through each set of reps instead of just throwing weights around like a child.

Shake before train

Your body will consume a lot of energy when you are increasing muscle mass, this means that you need to drink a protein shake before you start to the gym.

This is something you should usually be doing, but when you are training to build muscle mass you need to ensure that your shake has the right proteins as well.

Skipping this could be damaging and slow down your training significantly.

Alternate how hard

Going hard is vital, but you should balance it with how you are training, not going super hard all the time.

One day should be training to build muscles while the next day should be a lot calmer, allowing your muscles to adjust and grow.

This is a step that many people do not do and they end up damaging or causing their muscles to cramp up.

Work to the limit

When you do go hard you need to go to the limits of what you are capable of doing, but not always going over it.

This means that you should be using weights that are right at the limit of what you can train with, but never over the limit, extending the limit of what you can do does not mean training with things you can barely lift.

Carb intake after

If you are still in the gym, or you have just left it after training, you need to focus on the carbs you are eating.

It is always recommended to take a lot of carbs after a heavy training session as this will help your body recover faster.

Most extreme bodybuilders have their foods that they prefer to eat, having a few good meals and shakes will help your body recover.

Increase Volume

More training means more muscles built, this means doing more reps, but not always increasing weight.

This is why you need to go to your limit but not go over it, doing more training will mean that you are covering a wider range of your body’s muscles, increasing the mass everywhere.

Eccentric training

Every part of the training has two parts, eccentric and concentric, and concentric is the easier part.

Think of a squat, when you are going up it is concentric, which is easier to do than the eccentric training because you should not be dropping like a rock.

If you increase the slower movements of your training, the eccentric training, you will train muscles much more than you would with concentric training.

Decrease intervals

Your normal day of training may have a 30-second break between sets, your muscle mass building training should not have these.

Instead, you should be decreasing the time you spend resting between sessions when you would normally rest 30 seconds before moving to the next set, you should be decreasing that to 20 or 10 seconds.

What should you be doing outside the gym?

While your work inside the gym is what will build and define your muscle mass, it is what you do outside of the gym that will determine how effective you are.

Having the right balance for food, shakes, drinks, and being healthy will ensure that you can gain muscles without doing any permanent damage to your body.

This is usually why you will see intense bodybuilders, or just healthy muscled men, have strict diets, to ensure that their muscles have the right foods they need to continually grow.

You must ensure your body has everything it needs to develop properly; many people make the mistake of not doing this and end up damaging their organs and their muscles.

• Eat breakfast: You may have been skipping out on breakfast before, leaving it for after your training session in the morning. However, when training for muscle mass you must start eating a healthy full breakfast every morning. What this depends on you, but should never include traditional or farmhouse breakfasts.
• Every three hours eat: When you are burning and training so much to gain muscles, you are using more energy than you have in your entire life. If you are already overweight when starting it may be less important, but if you were already training then you need to eat much more. Eating every three hours becomes vital, focusing on smaller snacks to eat instead of large meals to consume.
• High Protein: One or two of your meals needs to be a shake, which has a concentration of proteins. You can and should be getting some proteins from your foods, but chances are these sources won’t be enough to satisfy the needs of your body. Increase the protein intake until you become the best, you can be.
• Fruits and vegetables: This should be obvious, but your meals should include a high concentration of fruits and vegetables, as these are healthy and include everything you need. Shying away from them may have been the norm before, but now you need to eat as much of them as possible. Allowing your body, the energy, and food it desires to run properly and smoothly.
• Healthy fats: Healthy fats are hard to define, but generally they are the poly and mono fats that you have been trained to ignore. Like good red meats, avos, and even oils are all in the world of healthy fats. Having these will help your body to be balanced, and they taste amazing.
• Lots of water: You’re going to be sweating and your water intake needs to be slightly increased, not a lot, but a bit. This will allow your body to be balanced and healthy while training, however, please ensure you are not drinking too much as this can cause your sodium levels to drop which is deadly for entirely different reasons.
• Whole foods: Fresh meat, eggs, poultry, fish, and the like are all part of the world of whole foods, which is why you’ll see the rock enjoying a large steak now and then. These whole foods are great at getting your body to be balanced and your muscles to be happy.
• Ice Cream Snack: It is weird and odd, but ice cream as a snack now and then is a good way to add some flavor and balance to your meals. Most people enjoy only plain vanilla when they can as this adds several fats and oils into your diet that you would otherwise have to add into your other foods.

How do you measure the muscles you are gaining?

You will measure muscle mass by the size increase of your muscles and the total weight that you are, this is usually calculated on a BMI schedule that your gym should help you with.

Measuring how much muscle mass you have gained is important to ensure that you are doing the right types of training.

People will not be able to see the gains in their muscles within a few weeks of starting to go heavy into muscle mass increase.

The first steps usually involve decreasing the total body fat content that you have, allowing your body to show the muscles that are already there. This is why you may see people in the gym that can run circles around you but look entirely normal.

Most of the time even the best cut and trained builders around the world will only look like an Adonis when they are doing something specific.

When they are just training regularly they will have clearly defined muscles and body shapes but their body fat ratio will be above 10% as this is the healthy level that you need to be in.

Is there a limit to how much muscle you can gain?

No, there is no limit to how much muscle you can gain, with some people able to balloon up to impossible levels without having to try. However, the limitation is more in the way and the intensity of your training.

If you are not training right then you may have super strong muscles that never become more defined than the average person’s.

This is why you need to speak to trainers and other people in the gym that you are active in, the only way to learn how to train your muscles to be the best that they can be is by shifting techniques.

Many people around the world train daily and then after learning a few new techniques becomes insanely well built with body shapes that most would kill for.

It is not about having the perfect genes, or the broadest shoulders, it is about knowing how to train according to the body shape that you have.

Being able to easily be fit and healthy while enjoying a body that is shaped comfortably is vital to becoming a physically amazing Adonis.

Final Thoughts on Performing Strength Training Weight vs Reps for Results

Increasing the muscle mass in your body is all about having the perfect balance of training and strength.

Many people around the world are constantly trying to either increase just their reps or just their weights, hoping to gain huge muscles. However, this upsets the balance and can cause more damage than anything else.

Whatever you do, just ensure that your body is ready for the training, going through a cold or having a broken bone will do nothing but harm you in the long run!