What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to show you how to grow bigger muscles in just 22 days.
I guarantee what I'm going to show you here is going to work.
The cool thing is, it doesn't really matter what you're training next because you can
apply the four training strategies here, I'll tell you and it's going to work no matter
what you're doing.
Here's the thing, guys.
I throw these quotes up around bigger because you don’t have to grow bigger muscles for
them to look bigger.
That's due to a difference between muscles size and the muscularity of a muscle.
I'll get to that in a second.
That's good news because we know it would be pretty damn challenging to try to grow
bigger muscles that quickly.
In 22 days, especially if you have a lot of training experience.
The longer you've been training, the slower those gains are to come.
Even in the case of Jesse who's certainly make some impressive gains.
No matter how many gains he makes he's never going to look like Thor Bjornsson.
We're not talking about the same genetic makeup.
That's okay because we love Jesse.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it gives us some optimism that we do have some strategies
that will allow us to overcome the fact that those might be difficult to come by.
Those strict size gains.
We can rely on those difference sizes in muscularity.
So, what are we talking about?
Well, we're talking about the difference between here, the size being the overall circumference,
and then the resting tone and what it looks like when it's really not even flexed or contracted.
You can see that my arm has some good tone to it – resting tone – even when I just
stand.
That has to do with the excitation of a muscle.
How much nervous system activation there is of a muscle at rest.
We see this, unfortunately, in the world of PT in hypertonic states when we talk about
kids with cerebral palsy.
They're hypertonic.
Their muscles are firing too much without the ability to relax.
We're talking about degrees of that.
How much excitement is there in your muscles when they're at rest?
You see, this is not just about body fat and differences in body fat.
Some people say "No, it's just that one guy's leaner, or you're leaner than somebody else."
No, you can see here in a comparison of my pictures over the course of 10 years, I didn't
change that much in terms of bodyweight.
I'm talking about a pound or two up or down.
The same thing with my body fat.
My body fat has always been consistently pretty low.
It's the fact that the same strategy that I'm going to show you here today, out of necessity
a lot of times, were implemented into my training that have made a lot of the differences that
you see.
They're very, very helpful when you apply them to the right series of exercises.
The accessory movements while you're still working on your foundational training.
What are we talking about here?
We're talking about applying some principles.
The very first principle is one that literally did come out of necessity because of the issues
I had with my shoulder dating back to my Met days.
You have to make sure you're muscling up the weight and not momentum-ing up the weight.
We know that's not a word, but it fits.
The fact is, what do you do when you lift.
You can see me doing shoulder raises here.
I could tell you that back then, when my shoulders were this size, all I was focused on was trying
to progressively overload, do my overhead training, and even when I was doing some of
my accessory lifts like the shoulder raises, just swing the weights as much as I could
just to get them up.
I learned a very important lesson here.
That was, out of necessity I had to lighten the weights.
But because I lightened the weights I went slower.
I took away the momentum.
I was no longer swinging the weights up.
I was no longer using bouncing at the bottom.
What happened was pretty interesting.
My delts grew and they grew pretty significantly and that's because the muscles probably, for
the first time in their lives, were undergoing a lot more attention than they ever had.
Even if I was using heavier weights the delts themselves were being shut out of the equation
by the momentum.
So, if you can start to take the exercises that you're using and try to eliminate momentum
as often as possible, you're going to see muscularity increase dramatically and it doesn't
take that long to happen.
Again, this is a neurological thing.
We can neurologically awaken this connection that we have with our muscle to become more
heightened at rest.
That's a good thing.
We move on here because there are more principles.
The second thing I want you to do is not just concentrate on moving the weight from A to
Z, but instead, enjoy that journey from B through Y.
That's a big difference.
You see, even if you look at something like the crossover here, horizontal adduction – as
we've covered here many times – is a key component of a full chest contraction.
But if I just focused on going from here to here, I'm missing out on all the things I
can do all the way through.
I know that another accessory motion to horizontal adduction that's going to increase the activation
on the chest is going to be internal rotation of the shoulder.
This is good internal rotation because it's happening on a level below the shoulder height
here, parallel to the floor.
So, if I internally rotate, dive that thumb down toward the opposite pocket as I go, you'll
feel an increased contraction of the chest.
In addition, if I were to take my shoulders and keep them back with my chest more pronounced
out in front, I also know I can make the demands be placed a little more highly on the chest
here.
Once again, getting more from it.
Even by going slower through the repetition, I'm able to get better at recruiting muscle
fibers to the task.
If you just rush your way through A to Z, A to Z you don’t have the same opportunity
to build that mind-muscle connection to bring more of the muscle fibers into play here to
help you achieve what you're doing.
Another key way to increase the muscularity of a muscle.
The third thing I want you to do here that I guarantee is going to work, and work quickly;
I want you to squeeze every, single repetition like it's the last one you're going to do.
Don’t worry about all the ones leading up to it.
We tend to fall into this trap all too often.
I covered this concept in my "Three Sets of 12 Is Killing Your Gains" video.
That showed we do tend to focus on a number.
But if you look at how I'm doing this lat pulldown, I'm not really worried about numbers.
I'm worried about the quality of every, single repetition.
It doesn't matter if the number I had in mind is not the number that I reach, as long as
I give my all to every, single repetition.
You can see, as I hold these contractions, as I take my time, additional muscle fibers
are recruited.
You can see the upper traps and mid traps becoming more recruited as this repetition
prolongs.
You could do this.
The reason why a lot of us don’t do it is because it is a little more difficult.
The tradeoff here is that you do happen to become more focused on what you're doing.
You can't be thinking about 50 other things and the repetition you're doing being the
last thing on your mind.
Instead, you've got to bump that up to a priority.
What you're doing at that moment is what matters the most.
If you do that here, you can see much better gains and it doesn't have to be on a lat pulldown.
It can be on any exercise.
Which brings me to my last point.
That is: sometimes you don’t want to just think about the moving muscle, but if there
are other muscles that can work, that will help the moving muscle do its job better,
then you should take advantage of that.
That's exactly what I do in this bicep curl.
Here, I'm not just worried about the biceps.
Why?
Because I know that I can get much better activation, and control, and production from
the biceps if I heavily engage the core.
We've talked about this concept before because we know if the weights are coming up in this
direction toward my back, if I can get my core to be more engaged, and keep these stabilized
here, and grounded, then the biceps will be able to do a better job.
They'll have more leverage.
I can ground myself as well by really tightening up my hips and my glutes.
Even as I bring these dumbbells up, I can activate the chest and the lats as well to
keep these arms tightly adducted into my sides to prevent that drift and flow that would
normally happen when the biceps are trying to get some additional help.
Maybe sometimes from the delts to cheat that way up into the curl.
We don’t want that.
What we want is more effort from the muscles we're trying to use, but at the same time
taking advantage of the fact that other muscles can help that happen.
The fact is, all these techniques can be applied to a lot of different exercises.
But yes, they do require a little more focus.
And yes, they require a little more work.
But guess what?
They work.
And they work every, single time.
When that muscularity increases, the appearance of the muscle will dramatically change.
It doesn't have to grow in size to have a change in appearance.
You probably have friends who have these differences and you're always wondering "Why do my muscles
feel soft and theirs always feel like a rock?"
The fact is, we can increase and change the resting tension of our muscle.
We just have to be more focused on doing that.
It works in perfectly without having to sacrifice your overall strength training and the goals
that come from your foundational lifting.
Guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
If you did, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up and let me know what else you
want me to cover and I'll do my best to do that for you.
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If you're looking for programs where we lay this all out and I show you important these
concepts are – this is part of putting the science back in strength to the complete picture
of training.
It's not always just about pushing weight.
Sometimes it's about controlling it as well and we need to have the perfect blend and
mix of all of them.
All of our programs demonstrate that and they're all available over at ATHLEANX.com.
All right, guys.
I'll see you back here again in just a few days.