Technique To Gain Lean Muscle With Just 12 Minutes Workout Per Week

You just discovered The Big 5 program for strength training, bodybuilding and complete fitness – that’s awesome! All you are missing now is the knowledge of correct technique. A way of carrying out The Big 5 forms your essential knowledge on your journey to lean muscle mass for the 12 minute workout per week. So keep reading.

The Big 5

In the world of million types of training, the one you must trust is the one that is based on research and science. In the blog post ‘Muscle Gain – All You Need Is A 12 Minutes Workout Per Week To Gain Lean Muscles’ you discovered The Big 5 program for your ultimate and time saving goal. You learned about the following:

Equipment you should use to gain muscles (with examples)
Positive muscular failure
The Big 5 programme
Details of The Big 5 exercises
Rep speed
How slowly you should lift and lower weights
Time Under Load (TUL)
You could also download ‘THE BIG 5 WITH FREE WEIGHT’ freebie

Click here to read ‘All You Need Is A 12 Minutes Workout Per Week To Gain Lean Muscles‘.

Click here to download your freebie ‘THE BIG 5 WITH FREE WEIGHT’ from the above post.

Now let’s dive deep into the uncovered technique.

Understanding the in-road process

Reaching a state of positive muscular failure with The Big 5 has positive adaptive change of many factors.

There is a strong cardiovascular component as your cardio respiratory system services the mechanical functioning of your muscles. Hence the higher the intensity of your muscular work then the higher the degree of cardiovascular and respiratory stimulation.

There is also a large production of accumulated byproducts of fatigue in that metabolic waste on your muscle gain path. Best example is lactic acid that accumulates faster than it can be eliminated by the body. This effect creates an environment in which certain growth factors are released. Those are the first stages of muscle growth that are stimulated by load or weight.

How vein system looks in lean muscle body when exercise

Exposure to heavier weight causes microscopic cellular damage that initiates muscular adaptation and is essential for stimulating the increase process.

Also muscle and bone mineral density are present and contribute to the stimulation process when the mechanism of in-roading or weakening of the muscles is active. Did you know that the high intensity muscle contractions, during which you reach the point of your muscle tissue to weaken, is a powerful stimulus for positive change? That’s why it is so important for you to have a firm intellectual understanding of what it is you are striving to achieve and don’t give up.

Why is slow better than fast?

When you are about to start your weight-lift choose resistance in which you expose your lean muscles. It must be meaningful and between 75% and 80% of your starting level of strength.

If your resistance is too light your muscles will recover at a faster rate than they will fatigue. At this stage you will just perform a series of repetitive weight movements up and down, and will not be close to any muscle building process. In other words, with slow protocol you will not see any result as no in-roading will occur.

Start with 10 seconds lifting phase (called positive) and 10 seconds on the lowering (called negative).

This slow lifting eliminates momentum increase and keeps your muscles under load for the duration of the set.

When your strength starts to drop your rate of fatigue in fibre muscles increases. You will know when this occurs as you will feel that the repetitions are getting harder. You know that your body instinctively doesn’t like to be fatigued so you will start getting negative thoughts which typically manifests in a desire to quit.

Desire to quit. What to do?

Increase your concentration and maintain continual loading of your muscles. Don’t break and don’t unload your muscles as the difficulty level increases.

You will grow anxious because you will sense that muscular failure is approaching. This feeling is a normal reaction. You will begin to really struggle at this point – again, it is normal.

If you will be with your instructor or friend, they should keep you focused by encouraging you not to speed up, rest or pause during the movement. You must realise that this moment is the essence of your exercise. If you will stop now, you will unload the lean muscles and provide rest which is the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

Motivational sign for exercise to gain muscle

If you are exercising alone, don’t quit like 99% of people – TRY ONE MORE REPETITION.

This last lift is now so difficult for you that it may take you 15, 20 or even 30 seconds to complete before you will slowly begin to lower the weight. Now, you must try another positive repetition. Come on, it is all about your dream of muscle gain. You feel the burning sensation in your muscles and you naturally start to panic. As you do, your body will defend itself and you will have another set of negative thoughts. They can run in series of, e.g. ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘if I lift this, I’ll break my bone’. This is all rubbish and you know it!

AND ONE MORE lift. YOU KNOW YOU CAN, AND YOU WILL – GO! Now your strength diminished well below the resistance level. You can unload from the weight.

By the time you finished your set your strength reduced to approximately 60% of what it was prior to starting the exercise resulting in an in-road of 40% being made. CONGRATULATIONS!

Woman lifting weight to gain lean muscle

This whole process occurred over 2 minutes but during this time your lean muscles became 40% weaker.

Now your muscles are weaker. What does this mean?

This occurrence represents a serious threat to your body because it was not aware that you are exercising. Neigher your goal is to gain muscle. All it recorded is that you were fighting for your life with a lion. To your whole body this was a profound metabolic experience hence you could not move.

Your body knows its biological function and it will arm you with greater strength for the next ‘life threatening’ situation. Because if you can’t move you can’t acquire food and you can’t avoid becoming food for other predators. Therefore, your body will respond if you give it sufficient time to do so. That time is 7 days. Shorter this period and you will be on a trajectory to an injury in a few months time if not sooner.

Now that you understand this process you must:

employ slightly more resistance during your next workout to stimulate your body to produce another round of metabolic adaptation.
override the instinct to attempt to escape because you understand that what you’re trying to do is achieve a deep level of muscular fatigue you can.

Not prematurely quit or shut down to get out from under the load.
Not care if the weight stops moving. Just keep pushing in the same manner that you did in the beginning.
Intellectually override your instincts in order to achieve this degree of fatigue.

The most important thing for you to grasp is the nature of the process to be able to push to the point where physical activity becomes a stimulus for productive change. It will help you to understand that it’s okay to feel a little anxious or panicky during the set. After all, the purpose of the exercise is not to make the weight go up and down. It is to achieve a deep level of inroad to reach the point where you can no longer move the weight but still keep trying. And that’s how you achieve a positive adaptive response from your body.

Breathing

The fundamental technique is breathing. Breathing throughout the performance of each Big 5 exercise should be continuous and natural. This means that you must perform it with an open mouth.

Yes, you read this correctly – with an open mouth. You are not diving under the water so drop the not natural in-through-your-nose and out-through-your-mouth. Come on! Once your body will start feeling the pressure of weights you will be hovering for air like fish on the beach. And before you notice you will be breathing right back as human. So don’t confuse yourself with the meditation type breathing and perform your exercises with an open mouth.

As the exercise becomes more difficult and the lactic acid begins to accumulate in your muscles causing that burning sensation, you should deliberately breathe faster or hyperventilate.

This step will help you and stop the urge to hold your breath as I don’t want you to do this for few reasons:

It unnecessarily raises blood pressure.
It raises intravascular pressure on the Venous circulation (system for blood return to the heart).
It increases intrathoracic pressure (relates to your lungs) which decreases Venous return to the heart
Within muscle it provides an internal mechanical assist, one you can notice with powerlifters who hold their breath and strain to make record lifts. Doing so undermines your goal of fatiguing and in-roading the muscle and it is a potentially dangerous thing to do.

Muscular failure

If you are a beginner, you may still have a logical question about your point of fatigue that you should target. You should try to go to a point of positive failure right from the start to gain lean muscle mass.

If you find that you have misjudged the resistance and you exercise for too long, more than 90 seconds, keep going until you hit positive failure. After 7 days break, increase the weight by approximately 5 to 10% or whatever amount is required to get you back under the 90 second time.

If you have been sedentary for a long period then the concept of in-roading your muscles will be a foreign territory. You will want to quit the exercise well before you reach a point of positive failure. In such situations, use your point of voluntary shutdown as a tentative definition of positive failure for a workout or two. When you will start developing a skill set and exhaustion that allow you to achieve muscular failure. Once you will get acclimated to this condition then adapt in-roading to the point of positive failure.

I believe that this is safe to do because what you can bring to yourself is pretty much limited by your current capabilities. I want you to plant in your mind that this state is indeed ‘current’ and as long as you continue with the exercise you will experience growth.

Frequency

You must perform The Big 5 workout once every 7 days if you really want those lean muscles.

A petite woman or man whose intensity level is determined by toleration of discomfort could easily work out twice a week and not have any concerns about overtraining.

A relatively athletic person who goes to true muscular failure may need to work out only once every 7 days.

A petite person will eventually have to add recovery days to its time off between workouts as she/he grows stronger until she/he too is training only once every 7 days.

The 7 days rest is predicated on the absolute mechanical work that a person is performing to gain muscles and not hurt themselves.

If you’re doing everything appropriately and working hard the amount of resistance you’re using should progress in a step fashion. This means that you should be matching or bettering your TUL at an increasing resistance from workout to workout.

When you are starting to have difficulty with progression then that will be your signal that you need to start inserting more recovery days. This is because you are now accumulating enough strength to produce enough of a workload that it is proving difficult for you to recover at that particular frequency.

Rest periods between exercises

You must move quickly from one exercise to the next one. It should take you between 30 seconds to 1 minute.

There are metabolic conditioning benefits to be achieved by moving briskly as you accumulate the byproducts of fatigue. Also the amount of resistance that you can use drops if you take longer breaks. The in-road that you’re achieving as you progress through the workout, within 30 seconds to 1 minute, is increased ideally.

Hence, avoid having breaks for chats in between. Your pace should be such that you produce a fairly profound metabolic effect.

But not that you’ll quickly feel lightheaded or nauseated.