Increase Muscle Mass For Athletic Performance

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first, increasing your muscle mass to aid your sporting performance rarely means pumping up your pecs and biceps and getting peoples attention as you walk towards them. It’s the muscles they’ll notice as you walk away that will have the greater impact on your performance. The frequently mentioned ‘posterior chain’ is now getting the attention it deserves in the strength and conditioning world. The most powerful and dynamic athletes have strong calves, hamstrings, glutes and spinal erectors. Developing these muscles as part of a balanced exercise routine is a sure-fire way to improve your sprinting, jumping, throwing and punching. When training to increase the size of these muscles for performance there is a few lifts that should be the foundation of your programming. The Squat and power clean should be the first exercises on your programme and should be completed several times a week. I have had my athletes squat 3-4 times a week while doing power cleans 2 times weekly. I always suggest completing several sets and low reps to keep the focus on strength acquisition while adding some muscle. An example of this could be something along the lines of 10 sets of 3 reps @ 90%. This is just an example and could be extremely easy for a beginner and nearly impossible for an elite athlete. When you are squatting several times a week you can vary this prescription to have heavy and light days. Don’t think light means easy though. You need only look to the infamous Smolov squat routine to see that the lightest squat days start at 4x9 at 70%. I only promised you would get bigger and stronger. To increase mass, we of course must consume more calories than we are burning so nutrition will also play a vital role here. The details of this could fill a book and are far beyond this article. There are endless documents detailing the nutritional ideals for muscle gain so you can find them with relative ease. Good information is not so easy to come by so be careful in your selection of resources. All of these resources can only be a guide, as everybody is different and so trial and error is essential. Beyond the obvious aspects of nutrition and exercise there are other factors that play a significant role in your physiological development. The boring one that we don’t have time for is also of great importance, sleep. The former soviets dominated the world of weightlifting for many years and it is documented that they slept more than ten hours a night and often had a nap of over an hour each afternoon. In today’s busy society this probably isn’t an option for most people but what we can all try to do is ensure our sleep is of good quality. There are several studies showing that if you just use your bed to sleep rather than lay around watching tele you will turn off quicker at night. You can also turn off/cover and lights on electrical goods and roll a towel up by the bottom of your door. This will make your room as dark and quite as possible and hopefully lead to an undisturbed sleep.

The final point I’d like to highlight is the most important thing that should be in your kitbag and will help you achieve your training goals, a diary. If you are not recording what you are eating, what training you are doing and general lifestyle notes then you are not progressing as well as you could be. This is absolutely essential and if you speak to any high-level athlete they will be doing this (or at least have a coach doing it for them). For next to no money and a few minutes of your time you can have a comprehensive piece of information that you can look back on to see what factors lead to your new PB and what had a negative effect on performance.