Improving your fitness level is a simple process. You exercise a few days a week and include balanced nutrition. Yes, for the most part, that is the whole deal. Understanding a few key factors, often overlooked, will give you a better idea of how you can optimize your fitness routine even more.
1. The Body’s Adaptation Process
Building muscle is due to your body adapting to the situation and adapting to the environment. You’re performing an action requiring your muscles to push to their limits or beyond (i.e., to failure). By doing so, your body is saying, “we need to get stronger to prevent this same action from perhaps injuring us or worse next time around.”
Exercise will cause temporary microtrauma to your muscle tissue, cueing an immune response. We now have blood carrying carbohydrates, protein, and other nutrients to the damaged muscle tissue for repair (tissue regeneration). After the repair process, your muscle cells become more significant or stronger to withstand the previously difficult action.
2. Energy Efficiency
Your growth in the first month might not be visible yet, but it surely is present, and you’ll most likely feel the changes. After any new training regimen or load change, the body will get more efficient at engaging the already present muscle volume. Only after this process will you truly notice visible differences.
Your body doesn’t like to waste energy. Muscle growth costs a lot of energy, so step one is working more efficiently with what you already have. When that is not enough, your muscles must grow stronger to overcome that (the visible changes).
3. Consistent Stimulation
It takes consistency (AND PATIENCE) to keep up with the current level of strength and size. You need to stimulate a muscle group (Or muscle groups) at least once per week to keep growth consistent.
Three to four weeks of inactivity or lack of fitness can cause your development to stagnate. Inactivity past three to four weeks, you can start losing muscle mass, strength, and endurance. Remember, our body does not like to waste energy. Maintenance is no longer required if the muscle mass you built holds no purpose.
4. Lack of Sleep = Lack of Muscle Growth
Sleep is the foundation of a solid muscle-building and fat-loss routine, with nutrition close behind. It gives us rest and recovery to challenge ourselves during workouts and implement new habits. The sweet spot is 8 hours of sleep, but I understand that can be difficult for many. If 8 hours is not possible, the bare minimum would be at least 6 hours of sleep.
How exactly does sleep help?
- Inflammation: Better sleep helps to reduce inflammation, speeding up the muscle recovery process.
- Cortisol levels: Getting quality sleep will reduce chronic cortisol levels. As a result, this will reduce muscle breakdown and increase muscle growth.
- Nutrient delivery: A lot happens in our bodies during sleep, including the delivery of nutrients to build on more muscle tissue. Quality sleep leads our bodies to prefer getting stored energy from fat rather than muscle, allowing for leaner muscle growth.
