There is a widespread thought among women, that if they lift heavy weights, they are going to be bulky. Women who get into fitness generally want a flat stomach with sexy abs; and a round, firm, and perky butt. “But I don’t want huge thighs!” is the phrase you’ll certainly hear them claim quickly after mentioning they want to tone their tummy and build their derrière.
Let me explain. If you want to give your butt a round and firm shape, body weight exercises can do the job. Just look at Yogi girls and you’ll see that they are usually super skinny with a small, round butt. However, if your goal is for your butt to gain more volume, meaning not only giving it a round shape, but also growing it, then you have no choice but to lift weights because body weight exercises simply won’t suffice.
The most common mistakes people make when they train and that prevent their workouts from being really efficient even if they feel tired afterwards, are:
– Not executing movements correctly, which results in not soliciting the targeted muscles properly. If you’re new to the fitness world, make sure you look at explanatory videos or ask trainers before performing your exercises because even movements that seem easy and pretty instinctive like a sit up, requires your arms, hands and chin to be positioned a certain way in order for the exercise to produce greater results and to avoid injuries.
– Not doing the full range of motion. When I started exercising, all I cared about was having a bomb body. I didn’t really enjoy training and wanted the workouts to pass by as fast as possible. As a result, I would perform the circuits as quickly as I could, not to feel the burn and get it done and over with ASAP. What happens when you perform the movements quickly is that you not only the risk of an injury because you probably don’t perform the exercise correctly, but you also miss out on an essential part of muscle gain, which is doing the full range of motion of each exercise and feeling the burn.
– Working only specific parts of their body, thus resulting in an imbalanced physique, bad posture and a higher risk of injury. Each muscle group has an opposite group with which it works. For example the opposite muscle group of the abs is the back. If you overtrain your abs and don’t exercise your back, you increase the risk of back pain, and will likely have bad posture.
In order for a workout to be productive, you must keep in mind the five factors that will stimulate muscle growth.
- Stretching Tension
When a weight forces a contracted muscle to stretch out back its stretching position, the confrontation between these two resistances (the weight against your muscle that’s trying to stretch) leads to cell damage; That’s exactly what happens during the negative phase of a repetition. Imagine doing a bicep curl: you bring the weight to your shoulder and then stretch your arm to bring the weight toward your thigh. The negative phase is the “bringing the weight toward your thigh” phase. It’s whenever you stretch your muscle to bring it back to its initial position. In order for the growth potential to be fully exploited, the negative phase of each repetition has to be correctly accentuated. - Contraction Tension
The more a muscle will struggle to contract, the more it will have to strengthen. It’s only in challenging muscles with heavier weights that we can guarantee significant muscle hypertrophy. - Time Under Tension
The time during which the muscle stays under tension is another key factor of muscle growth. The heavier you lift, the less repetitions you’re able to execute, thus resulting in lower time under tension. On the other hand, if you lift light weights, you’ll be able to stay under tension longer, but the weight will be too low for the growth signal to reach muscles. Studies show that the ideal weight to lift is around 70 to 80% your maximum strength. - Muscle Burn
The influx of acid lactic in your muscles sends you the signal that the letters have reached the limit of what they are capable to endure metabolically. The longer you are able to endure this burning sensation, the more you bring your muscles on the brink of metabolic rupture and force them to grow. - Congestion
When you perform rep after rep, muscles become saturated with blood. That’s what we call congestion. Congestion brings nutrients and deforms muscles in an unusual way. The more intense the congestion, the more muscle fibers become compresses against one another. The mechanical constraint is not as stimulating for muscle growth as the four other factors mentioned above, but since this technique is less traumatizing for muscles, it can be practiced often, particularly to accelerate recuperation.
