How to Make Your Muscles Grow Faster
Want to tone just one part of your body? Get-Fit Guy explains the best technique for strengthening a single body part during your workouts.
Ben Greenfield
When it comes to getting bigger muscles, one of the most important considerations is when to actually train the muscle you want to get bigger.
In other words, let’s say you want to get a better butt. Should you train your butt at the beginning of the workout, when it’s fresh and unfatigued? Or at the end of the workout, when you’re exhausted but perhaps able to better push your butt muscles to complete fatigue?
It turns out that this has been studied! At the Brazilian Navy Sergeants School participants were divided into 3 groups: a LG-SM (large-small) group, a SM-LG (small-large) group, and a control group. The control group did no exercise. The LG-SM group did weight training for 12 weeks. During their workout the subjects started with the barbell bench press, then did lat-pulldowns, followed by the triceps extension machine, and finally a standing biceps curl with a straight bar.
The SM-LG group trained in exactly the same way – but they performed the exercises in a different order, and first trained their biceps, then their triceps, then their lats, and finally their pecs.
It turns out that the muscles trained earliest in a workout are the muscles that get the biggest!
The study, which appeared in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, was called “Influence of exercise order on maximum strength and muscle thickness in untrained men”opens PDF file and it reported that:
“…exercises that are particularly important for the training goals of a program should be placed at the beginning of the training session, whether or not it is a large or small muscle group exercise.”
So which muscle group do you want to get the best results from? Whatever it is, train it earlier in your workout!
Do you have more questions about how to get your muscles to grow faster? Leave your thoughts over at Facebook.com/GetFitGuy.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.