We are a group of students from Universidad de Alicante who are studying a degree in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences. This blog is made in order to help people to keep fit and improve their sport performance at home.
Hi! Today I bring you a link to a Google presentation where I explain through text and images how to perform exercises at home, in this case, of the lower body specifically.
As you can see, most of them I don’t use any specific gym apparatus in order to do at home but you can use any object that opposes resistance, like bricks, bags with weight, a big bottle of water caught with a towel, etc.
I hope it helps you to train at home, and if you have any questions, leave a comment.
Hello! Today is leg day and that is why I decided to put an example of training to gain muscle mass in the lower body. In the same way that in the example that I published of the upper body, I add a video so you can see the exercises executions and the same exercises without gym apparatus.
In this case, today’s training consists of:
-4 sets of 10 repetitions with a weight with which you can perform 12. (4x 10 (12) -Recovery 60-90 “
– Execution speed: maximum concentric and medium-low
eccentric.
You will not lose time to go from home to gym and viceversa
-YOU SAVE MONEY
You will not have to pay a monthly fee to train.
-YOU HAVE MORE PRIVACY
You will have all the privacy possible, since there will be
no people around you trained and watching.
-YOU HAVE LESS DISTRACTIONS
Due to the previous point, you will be more focused on training, avoiding chats, distractions, etc.
-FLEXIBILITY OF SCHEDULES
You will not be subject to schedules to train, so the days you have little time do not lose it coming and going from the gym, you can use it completely in training.
– YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT TO USE ANY MACHINE
Forget the queues to train, at home you will be the only customer of the gym, unless you invite friends to train.
-HYGIENE
You will not have to worry about if people use towels for the machines, if they smell good, or if the changing rooms are in perfect condition.
However, it is true that paying a monthly fee you “force” to go to the gym and therefore tend to fail less training.
I hope that information is useful for you. See you!
1.Be a “low responder”. This is a person who has difficulty building their muscle mass because of their genetics and the type of majority fibers they have (there are slow fibers and fast fibers, as we comment in previous posts)
2.You may be stuck in your training and need to use a different method of overload to cause more muscle growth. It is necessary to combine programs of pure muscle hypertrophy (70-80% with 6 to 12 repetitions) with others of maximum strength (85-90% con 3 a 5 repetitions).
3.Your diet is not adequate to achieve good muscle development. You need to be hypercaloric with a sufficient supply of nutrients, proteins, complex carbohydrates and polyunsaturated fats of the Omega-3 type. Because of this, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain large gains in muscle mass without a hypercaloric diet.
4.You need sleep more. The greatest anabolic newspaper of an athlete for building muscle tissue occurs during sleep. It generates a great anabolic hormonal discharge (Testosterone and Growth Hormone) and recovery of training. Sleeping at least 8 hours (minimum 7 hours) is an intelligent way, not only to take care of yourself, but also to make your work in the gym more efficient.
5.Finally, you must be very clear about your main objective, be strong (Powerlifter), be big (Bodybuilder), be explosive (weightlifter), be functional (athlete), or have a more balanced physical (Fitness). The body works much better and is more efficient when it is directed to only one objective at a time.
I usually see people train muscle failure, affirming that in
this way greater gains of muscular hypertrophy and strength are obtained, but
is it really like that?
In this post I include a pdf where I explain what muscle failure is, if people really reach it, and what are the positions of the most prestigious researchers on the topic.
Many times I hear people saying that if they do not go to the gym they can not train because at home they do not have specific material and buying it is more expensive than paying the monthly fee for the sports center in your city.
Well, today I bring you a link to a Google presentation where I explain through text and images how to perform exercises at home, in this case, of the upper body specifically.
As you can see, in most of them I use a bottle of water, but you can use any object that opposes resistance, like bricks, bags with weight, a big bottle of water caught with a towel, etc.
I hope it helps you to train at home, and if you have any questions, leave a comment.
Today, we are going to talk about the benefits of this type of strength training, because not only we train with the objective of gain muscle mass, also we can improve our health and lifestyle.
In this case, I agree a document (pdf) where I have written only 7 benefits, if this information is useful for your’s, I will post more benefits!
Current evidence suggests that maximum gains in muscle hypertrophy are achieved by training regimens that produce significant metabolic stress while maintaining a moderate degree of muscle tension.
A hypertrophy-oriented program should
employ a repetition range of 6–12 reps
per set with rest intervals of 60–90 seconds between sets. Exercises
should be varied in a multiplanar, multiangled fashion to ensure maximal
stimulation of all muscle fibers.
Multiple sets should be employed in the context of a split training routine to heighten the anabolic medium due to a greater training volumes may be beneficial in enhancing muscle growth (Schoenfeld et al., 2019), so they are recommended between 3-6 series per exercise.
Concentric repetitions should be
performed at fast to moderate speeds (1–3 seconds) while eccentric repetitions
should be performed at slightly slower speeds (2–4 seconds). Training should be
periodized so that the hypertrophy phase culminates in a brief period of
higher- volume overreaching followed by a taper to allow for optimal
supercompensation.
The evidence indicates that
frequencies of training twice a week promote superior hypertrophic outcomes to
once a week whether training a muscle group three times per week is superior to
a twice-per-week protocol remains to be determined (Schoenfeld, Ogborn, &
Krieger, 2016).
In terms of intensity, the evidence
recommends working in a range of 70-85% of 1RM to obtain benefits in muscle
hypertrophy. However, because we will work at home, and in many cases, we will
not have such high external loads, we will quantify the intensity through the
Character of Effort (CE), which is the relationship between the repetitions you
make and the ones you can do. In the case of hypertrophy it will be a
high-maximum CE, which may be 10 (12), for example.
Finally, from 6 to 10 exercises per training session and from 2 to 4 exercises per muscle group would be adequate to obtain the greatest gains in muscle hypertrophy.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Contreras, B., Krieger, J., Grgic, J., Delcastillo, K., Belliard, R., & Alto, A. (2019). Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 51(1), 94–103. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000001764
Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1689–1697. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8
Hi everyone! My name is Raúl Ferrández and I’m going to tell you about muscular hypertrophy training. First of all, I’m going to describe you that concept:
Hypertrophy is, by definition, the enlargement of an
organ or tissue from the increase in size of its cells. Not to be confused with
hyperplasia, the process of increasing the number of cells,
hypertrophy is the process of increasing the size of the cells
that are already there.
This occurs through a physiologic process that leads
to an increased number of contractile proteins (actin and myosin) in each
muscle fiber.
Hormones and cytokines play an integral role in the
hypertrophic response, serving as upstream regulators of anabolic processes.
Elevated anabolic hormone concentrations in- crease the likelihood of receptor
interactions, facilitating protein metabolism and subsequent muscle growth (Schoenfeld, 2010).
It is hypothesized that 3 primary factors are
responsible for initiating the hypertrophic response to resistance exercise:
mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress.
1-Mechanical tension: Mechanically induced tension
produced both by force generation and stretch is considered essential to muscle
growth.
2-Muscle damage: Exercise training can result in
localized damage to muscle tissue which, under certain conditions, is theorized
to generate a hypertrophic response.
3-Metabolic stress: An anabolic role of exercise- induced metabolic stress and some have speculated that metabolite accumulation may be more important than high force development in optimizing the hypertrophic response to training. Metabolic stress manifests as a result ofexercise that relies on anaerobic glycolysis for ATP production, which results in the subsequent buildup of metabolites such as lactate, hydrogen ion, inorganic phosphate, creatine, and others
I hope that information is useful. In next posts we will explain more concepts about this type of resistance training in order to apply at home. See you!
FIT AT HOME 