10 Ways To Increase Muscle Strength At Home
If you’re looking to increase muscle strength at home, you CAN’T skip these ten tips. They’ll help you boost the outcome of your strenuous workout.
Muscular strength plays a crucial role in determining your physical fitness. It is the body’s ability to exert enough force to lift, push, or pull an object.
Developing muscular strength helps elevate bone strength and burn calories, critical for all age groups. They also protect the muscles and bones from the risk of injuries.
One of the most common misconceptions about muscle strength is that it is proportional to muscle size. People tend to believe individuals with massive biceps are stronger as well.
On the contrary, muscle strengthing requires special techniques and training to test the endurance and power of several muscle groups. It may not always be proportional to muscle size.
How To Increase Muscle Strength
If you wish to increase muscle strength, here are ten practical ways to do so:
1. Eat More
Increased protein consumption is the most common advice you hear when you are working out to build muscles.
But when it comes to strengthening your muscles, you need more than just proteins. You need lots of calories.
Strength training means working harder and bigger. You will work with higher weights and different forms of training that require an adequate amount of energy. And this energy comes from burning your calories.
Understand your typical calorie need based on your workout regimen and increase it by at least 500 a day. The intense workouts will burn them and give you enough energy to power through the strength training with complete confidence.
2. Opt Heavy Weights
Building muscle strength requires you to work with heavier weights. Heavyweights challenge various muscle groups that go through greater wear and tear and therefore rebuild stronger.
Working out with heavyweights will activate the high-threshold motor units. The muscle fibers of this category are directly associated with muscle strength, and activating them helps to increase your potential.
But these muscle fibers tend to tire faster; hence you need to choose workouts that offer the best results even in small routines.
Look for multi-joint exercises like squats, pulls, deadlifts that are perfect for heavy lifting.
Focus on moving the weights as fast as possible to activate the high-threshold muscles, which can offer improved strength along with muscle building.
3. Try Speed Lifting
Speed is a critical component to train your muscles for enhanced strength. Moving heavyweights as fast as possible activates the right muscle groups that contribute to strength development.
Explosive exercises involve power and acceleration development that can be quite a challenge for the body. While as a novice, it is best to stick to heavy barbell exercises, with the time you have to approach target specific power exercises that activate all your motor units.
Olympic lifts and their variations are a perfect example of power lifts that shows explosive movements.
Using tools such as chains and bands that help to increase force production during exercises such as bench press and back squats can help to work on muscular strength.
4. Bring Down The Volume
When it comes to muscle-building, long hours of training can bring lots of benefits.
Contrastingly, strengthening your muscles requires you to keep the workout volume low. Here, the quality of your workout with the emphasis on challenging your muscle potential is important for improvement.
Typically, a five sets five reps protocol is useful for building muscle size. But when it comes to strengthening, trim it down to two to three sets.
Focus on the clarity of the movements and speed to challenge the muscle groups for good results.
Your muscles will get tired much faster with heavyweights, hence using the right technique during the short span can help during strength focussed workouts.
5. Watch Your Breathing
Proper breathing technique is crucial to work out better for improved muscle strength. Taking short breaths can reduce your workout capacity significantly. Start by accessing your breathing technique.
Take a full and deep breath and exhale. Did your shoulders crumple towards your ear while doing this? If yes, then your breathing technique is wrong.
The focus of your breathing should be on expanding and contracting your diaphragm and ribcage. It helps to expand the oxygen capacity of your lungs and works in favor of enhancing your endurance.
Diaphragmatic breathing also helps to support faster recovery even after intense training sessions, which is important during strength training routines.
Watch your breathing technique while performing your workouts and correct them for better results.
6. Increase Your Recovery Period
Muscle strengthening exercises are quite tough on the body. Your body typically requires about 48 hours to recover before you can put the muscles through another challenge.
Hence, make sure to give enough time between workouts to recover completely. Reduce the frequency of workouts and avoid strength training on consecutive days.
During your recovery days, make sure to get enough sleep. Eight hours of sleep is recommended for a healthy recovery.
Also, focus on delivering proper nutrition to your body that supports healing and repair.
Giving your body enough time to attend to the wear and tear in your muscle and replenish the energy reserves is essential to make the best of your strength training routines.
7. Avoid Static Stretching Before Training
It is a common practice to begin training sessions with stretching exercises that prepare your body for the workouts ahead.
But static stretches could negatively influence power production during strength training and alleviate agility, speed, and performance significantly.
Hence, explore dynamic warmup techniques as a pre-workout regimen to prepare properly for strength training. They help to add momentum while preparing for your workouts.
Static stretches are more useful for after workout cool-down sessions. Hence save them for later.
8. Access Your Weak Links
Training to overcome your weakness is crucial to enhance muscle strength.
Most of us focus on the prime movers such as the gluteus maximus, quadriceps, hamstrings, pecs, and forget some muscle groups in the process. These ignored muscled groups usually include the abdominals, rotator cuff, trapezius.
Including exercises that focus on training and strengthening these muscle groups is the best way to achieve good results from strength training.
It also reduces the chances of injuries that could arise from weight imbalance.
Access your limitation and technique instead of simply exercising more to overcome the weakness. It will add more value to your efforts.
9. Explore Contrast Training
Professionals suggest utilizing the power of contrast training that embeds strength training with plyometric exercises to elevate results from both techniques.
The benefit of incorporating such workouts in your regimen is that it induces a training mechanism called post-activation potentiation.
The routine starts with a heavyweight strength training exercise that lasts for about five reps. After taking about a 7-8 minutes break, follow up with a plyometric exercise of a similar technique for about ten reps.
Plyometric exercises help to induce momentum and power into the workout, such as tuck jumps and back squats that optimize the effects of the training.
Taking a proper break in between strength and plyometric exercises is crucial to ensure you do not experience fatigue or it could depreciate your performance further.
10. Be Patient
When you start making changes to your training methods or techniques, it is common to lose some strength before your body adapts to these changes. It might reflect on your performance for a short time. But don’t lose hope and give up too soon.
Give your body time to adjust to the new routine and start measuring your progress when you feel ready. Think about the long term benefits of the training and don’t be discouraged by the initial bumps along with the road to building muscle strength.
Building muscle strength can happen outside your gym session as well. Making simple choices every day can help to challenge your muscles.
For example, try to take the stairs instead of the lift. It helps to strengthen the muscle groups along your thigh, hips, buttocks, abdomen.
Adapting these simple tips for muscle strengthening can be beneficial. You will slowly increase muscle strength and develop endurance and power while following these steps.
Make sure to track your progress over time and reward yourself at every milestone to stay motivated and keep going.
