Quick Muscle Gain - How Long Should You Rest in Your Muscle Mass Building Routine?

Quick Muscle Gain - How Long Should You Rest in Your Muscle Mass Building Routine?

By Hamilton R. Griffin

You've developed a quality and efficient muscle mass building routine. You've taken the preliminary steps to make sure you see the process through. You've investigated the foods that build muscle and stocked your fridge with these essential items. You've laid out your routine for each muscle group, that is, you've planned what to do on what day of the week. But before you can accurately schedule your workouts, you inevitably wonder, "how long should I rest before I continue building body mass?"

Hopefully you've discovered that to achieve quick muscle gain you need to be working your muscles to failure. For those that don't know what this means, it's simply performing a final set of whatever exercise you're doing until you can't do it any longer (you'll need a spotter). This is vital in that it causes significant microscopic damage - actual microscopic tears -- to the muscle tissues. It is only during this period of recovery that protein synthesis undertakes the process that results in new muscle fibers. Confused? To simplify, you are literally creating tiny tears in your muscles when you lift weights. During recovery, the body literally repairs these tears, creating new muscle that fill-in the tears and cover them. This is why muscle size increases.

But how long does this process take? When is it safe to expose these same muscle groups to further intensive exercise?



Scientific studies suggest that muscle fiber degradation takes approximately five to seven days to repair and recover. Any further exposure of the affected muscle to intensive activity will interfere with the recovery process and prevent you from achieving quick muscle gain. However, using the muscle(s) to assist in exercising other body parts or even taking part in low intensity aerobic exercise will not prevent recovery. Therefore, work each muscle group one day a week

in your muscle mass building routine.

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