In your body, there are a couple of different types of muscle fibres. There are slow twitch and fast twitch. Perhaps you remember hearing about these in your high school physical education class, while you were too busy throwing paper planes or staring out the window.
I know that was the case for me. I didn't care about different types of muscles, I just wanted to actually do physical stuff. But give me 5 minutes of your time and I promise I will make this worth it.
You see, there is a big reason you need to know the basics about the two different sorts of muscle fibres. One will help you build the muscular physique you want, the other will have you looking like an Ethiopian kid on a diet.
I'm not going to go into the details of the two sorts of muscle fibres, I'll save that for another article, I'm just going to give you what you need. Slow twitch muscle fibres are smaller and are useful for endurance. This is why a marathon runner is never going to win Mr Olympia.
And then you have fast twitch fibres. These are much larger and are useful for explosive actions, like lifting a heavy weight. And so, this is what you are going to want to focus on building.
If you want to be building fast twitch muscles, you simply have to train with weights. Tada! Ok, there is a little more to this than that, but basically, if you want to build your fast twitch muscles, then you need to focus on two main components of weight training.
A) Your rep range. If you're in the gym performing 100 reps of every exercise, you're not going to notice a great deal of change. To be building fast twitch muscles, you want to make sure you never do more than say, 10 reps for a certain exercise. Some people will say 4 reps is enough, others will say 8 is. I like to think that there is no "perfect" rep range. Instead, if you continually perform reps in the range of 4-10, you will be building more fast twitch muscle fibres than ever before.
B) The actual weight. Getting the rep range right is simply not enough. But if you're not using enough weight, then you're not putting any stress on your muscles, and you're not going to build any fast twitch muscle fibres. Simple as that.
So now you know the "secrets" of building fast twitch muscle fibres, go out and hit the gym hard.
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