1. Do Some Strength Training Two to Three Times a Week
The first step in gaining lean muscle mass is doing strength training several times a week. You don’t necessarily need a ton of equipment in order to do strength training properly. You can choose what kind of workout you want to do for your strength training.
A few common strength training workouts include lifting weights or attending a power yoga class if you prefer. In addition to this, you can also go through a high-intensity interval training circuit or HIIT circuit if available. Another choice for a strength training workout is performing bodyweight exercises.
2. Perform Isotonic and Isometric Exercises
One important thing to note is that you don’t need to lift weights to build lean muscle mass. You can simply exercise using your own body. You can enjoy similar benefits if you train with lower amounts of weight and increased repetitions than if you go with more weight and a lower amount of repetitions. The key is to exercise until you need to rest your muscles. A good starting point is three sets, and you can increase this amount as you continue to increase your strength.
Contracting your muscles in any way will give you excellent results. Isotonic exercises are more traditional exercises for building lean muscle mass. Isotonic exercises include crunches, squats, push-ups, triceps dips, and even donkey kicks. You’ll want to add a combination of isotonic and isometric exercises into your exercise routine.
You should try to hold these exercises for about 30 seconds at the start and go from there. Isometric exercises are somewhat more unconventional exercises. Some of these include the Warrior Pose, other poses from yoga, planking, and even wall sits. The glute bridge exercise and the boat pose are a few more examples of isometric exercises. Regardless of whether you are doing isotonic or isometric exercises, we recommend that you do three sets either way.
3. Do the Exercises That Give You the Best Results
This tip probably seems obvious, but it is important to identify which exercises are contributing the most to you gaining muscle mass. One good thing to do is to identify which exercises are compound exercises. Compound exercises are exercises that work out several different muscle groups or muscles, so they are the most efficient kind of exercise for building lean muscle mass. This is true whether you are performing multiple reps or maintaining a certain pose while doing compound exercises.
Mountain climbers, burpees, and side-plank rotations are good examples of compound exercises. These help increase your heart rate and provide you with a bit of cardio. You can benefit from these exercises even more if they are part of an exercise regimen from a HIIT circuit.
4. Alter Exercises for Your Particular Needs
You can also change exercises to meet your body’s needs if necessary. For example, you can do push-ups at an incline utilizing something like a wall or bench if you can’t do standard push-ups yet. There are ‘sister moves’ to many exercises, too, so you can also simply do those instead of the standard variation of the exercise. One example of this is doing chair squats instead of standard squats if you aren’t quite able to do standard squats yet.
