How to Gain Strength – Improve Your Body

Whether you are an expert in training or beginner, your aim is to boost your strength. There isn’t any magic pill that will make you able to lift heavy weights overnight. It takes time, devotion, energy and will to put into it. But, if you are a determent in it, I can guarantee, you WILL see results.

Here we will talk about the importance of strength, can you achieve more strength then most of the population, how to actually gain more strength, and if not, what are you doing wrong.

Importance of Strength

We all know the importance of this. Our skeleton could not be carrying our weight without our muscle structure. We use our muscles and accordingly our strength in everyday life. Whether it is walking, singing, washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning the house, performing our daily job… So many things that we need our muscles for.

But when it comes to training, that is where we want to use our potential to maximum, we want to use our muscles in a proper way so that they can grow and same time get that what we want: STRENGTH!

Superhuman Strength – Myth or reality

When you think of superhuman strength, what comes in mind first? Superman? Hulk? Picture of you lifting heavyweight? The problem with the first two is that they ARE myths; they don’t exist. But you lifting that weight in the bench press or from a deadlift or doing push-ups… THAT IS REAL! Whatever it is, it CAN BE achievable!

Our body is made impressively, it is designed to move. Same way, it is designed to grow, in size as we grow older, but also in muscles as we train. What happens when we put our muscles to work? When you lifting weights you are doing microscopic tears in the tissue of your muscles.

Although it may sound scary, it is actually an important part of growing our muscles, hence the strength, as that triggers the healing process and also your body will try to prevent this type of damage in the future. Therefore, our muscles and strength get increased.

How to Gain Strength

So how actually to achieve that? There are many ways, but the same principles apply, which I will cover here in this section

• Reps and sets. This must be ordered properly. Typically, you want to work until muscle failure, not above that, which means you will do as many sets you can make IN PERFECT FORM. No cheating, that can only result in injury. Perfect form means to do a workout you are doing the way it should be done. And the amount of reps and sets you will do depends on yourself. Let’s say you can do 30 push-ups from one time. Then you could have, for example, 4 sets of 10, 8, 7 and then 5. And those last 5 would have to be the hardest one to do. That is how you determent your sets and rep.
• Rest period. If we are talking about the rest period between sets, then the rest period should be about 30-45 seconds, but you can take even to 1 minute if you are working with heavyweights. Also, typically, you should have 1 day rest to let your muscles recover properly.
• Calorie surpluses. When you are working out, your body burns calories. And if you are in deficit while trying to gain strength, your body will think there is a shortage of food and will store calories in fat and use your muscles as energy, so you get downside effect. Calorie surplus should be around 300 to 500, depending on your type of training.
• Nutrition. We could talk here a lot, so I’m gonna keep this short as possible. Proteins, low-fat food (food that contains saturated fats are considered to be “unhealthy”, a better option would be food that contains unsaturated fats), yogurt, whole grain bread with vegetable. Keep it simple and healthy. Your whole work is wasted if you go too fast food stores and order something that will not only replenish your calories but have so much fat and sugar that would take you to do two more same workouts just to burn it.
• Supplements. This is common to use among not just bodybuilders but “regular” people also as it has much-needed ingredients required to recover your body properly. Some of the good choices would be protein powder which is essential for muscle growth and provides them with amino acids, creatine which boost your performance during a workout and promote the natural growth of muscles, HMB (Beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrat) that prevents muscle protein breakdown, helps muscles to grow and speeds up recovery rate.
• Sleep. Now, I can not point out how much this is important. 7 hours minimum is needed for our body to work normally, 8 hours should be optimal. I know that today’s lifestyle gives us less and less time to sleep, but you should aim toward this 7 or 8 hours, to give your body what it needs to recover.

What am I Doing Wrong?

Sometimes you just can’t get results, or you can’t see them. It could be if you are not following a plan or if you are not doing it right, even if you aren’t tracking your progress. How can you know does it work if you don’t track it?

Following simple guidance from what we mentioned earlier, you should be on the right track. Make a diary, write what type of workout you did, how many sets, what weight was it, what did you eat that day… All that can help you to see your results later on.

And when you see that in the first month you could make the bench press of 15kg 10 times, and in the second month 15kg 12 or 13 times or 20kg 10 times….. That is progress! That is a success! it means YOU ARE DOING GREAT!

Conclusion

Let me be perfectly open with you: in order to see results, you will need at least 6 to 8 weeks of training to see first results. In order to get a body that you want, we are talking years.

People magically want results in the first month, but let me tell you: if you want to learn to play guitar, or a piano, how much time you think you would get to be good at it? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Well maybe in 6 months you would be good at it, depending on the effort you put into it. And how much time would it take to get it mastered? 1 year? 2 years?

See, people understand that to learn some skill, it takes time. But when it comes to working out, when it comes to seeing results, they want it to be instant. It doesn’t work that way…

And don’t get discouraged if your progress is slow or your body is not as in the picture of some bodybuilding magazine. Remember, you are doing it for yourself! That is not your everyday occupation, you aren’t devoting 10 hours per day in the gym for 6 or 7 days per week.

You want your body to be great? Take time, make goals, work on them, and I can 100% guaranty you, you will get results properly!

As always, I would love to hear from you. Share your opinion, though about this. Did you like it, did you find something helpful? I value every comment and I hope I have encouraged you in getting there where you want it: to gain strength and improve your body.

You can also send me a message at dalibor@best4yourbody.com and I will personally answer all of your questions.

Dalibor.