In this blog we will go over 5 Techniques to Build Muscle Without Lifting More Weight.
Tip 1: Shorter Rest Periods
Let’s keep it simple – if you can’t increase your lift weight despite months of training, it’s time to reduce your rest period! You can still overload your muscles and promote growth by cutting your rest period from 90 seconds to 60-90 seconds instead.
Tip 2: Slower Reps and Pause Reps
Slow and pause reps are a must-try! Slow down the tempo by adding 2 seconds to your downward motion and squeeze those muscles for maximum tension. Pause reps, on the other hand, involve holding the weight for 2 seconds at the bottom of your movement to eliminate momentum and force your muscles to work harder. Be prepared to feel the burn!
Tip 3: Change Your Exercise Order
Breaking out of your routine can lead to great results! Instead of changing your weights, try rearranging the order of your exercises to fatigue your muscles differently. You’ll find that some lifts will be more challenging than before and require more effort.
Tip 4: Add Drop sets and Super Sets
This is usually the most common tip used as you may find that when someone can’t hit the reps they was aiming for, they’ll tend to take the weights off and do a drop set. If you are going to do this, I’d add a little more structure when doing so as often people just drop it down to anything.
Firstly think will this be long haul or just for this one particular workout, try remembering wat you dropped the weight to and log it. For example, if your working set is 80 kg for 2 sets and you drop the weight on the final 2 down to 60kg keep track as the next time you do this think can I drop it down down to 65 or even 70kg instead.
Supersets is simply trying to force your muscle to grow by performing another exercise right after to fatigue the muscles even more. The more pressure you can put on your muscle in a period of time the more chance you have for them to progress.
Tip 5: Adding more Resistance
Finally, the last tip is adding more resistance to your workouts. You probably find you’ve seen people in the gym add resistance bands to their workouts for example wrapping it around the bar and bench. This forces you to perform the exercise a little slower and more controlled, almost similar to the slow reps mentioned in tip 3 and adding more weight.
Although you’r not physically adding more weight it is adding more resistance, making the gravity harder. It is a good way to add more resistance without jumping up 5kg as this maybe a little too much of a jump for some.
Like always, check out the YouTube video below for a more in detailed video on all 5 tips!
