Our economically and technologically-driven society moves at an ever increasing speed.
More demands are put on us with seemingly fewer resources available to meet those demands.
We are all increasingly subjected to more and more stress in our daily lives.
Stress management has become a viable cottage industry.
However, stress in the right place and time can be a good thing.
Super Stress And Super Muscle Growth Take bodybuilding, for instance.
It is well known that if you want to make your muscles grow you need to stress them.
But, it is often not clear how much stress we should subject our bodies to and how often? Here we will outline is the best way to manage stress if you want to build muscles as efficiently as possible.
Rule Number One: Focus Your Stress Muscles left to their own devises are happy to abide.
They have no inclination to grow or become stronger.
For muscle growth you have to apply stress.
The actual growth occurs during the resting periods.
But without tension, strain, or trauma there will be no spark to light the growth fuse.
Rule Number Two: Make Your Stress Intense Here is the trick.
Make your workouts intense in terms of both time and resistance.
That is, start timing your workouts.
Now intensify your efforts by completing your workout in the shortest time possible while still hitting your resistance (weights), reps and set goals.
At the same time, maximize the intensity of each exercise.
The best way to judge the intensity of an exercise is to multiply the number of reps by the amount of weight used.
The bigger that number, the more intense the exercise.
Rule Number Three: Make Your Stress Extreme Here your goal is to engage each and every muscle fiber in a given muscle group.
Make this an extreme sport.
You want to exceed the capacity of the muscle.
The only way to do this is to apply enough weight to make the muscle group fail.
The body will respond to the shock by repairing the damage and increasing both the size and number of muscle fibers.
This is called hypertrophy, or more commonly, muscle growth.
Rule Number Four: Continuously Increase Your Stress The idea here is not to continuously add more reps and sets as you get stronger and bigger.
This will only make you burn out and begin to plateau or reverse your gains.
Instead you want to increase your work capacity while you gain strength.
This naturally leads to muscle growth.
Progressive increases in intensity (Rule Number Two) and resistance (Rule Number Three) are the keys to continued increases in strength and muscle growth.
Rule Number Five: Make Your Stress Short Long and moderately stressful workouts are the antithesis of strength and muscle gains.
For maximal results, you want relatively short, highly focused and extremely difficult workouts.
You want to maximally stress each muscle group in an all-out, take no prisoners, uber-set.
Long workouts are inefficient, boring and ultimately will zap you of energy.
Rule Number Six: Make Your Stress Infrequent Muscle repair and growth occur during the rest period following a stress stimulus.
If workouts are scheduled too frequently, it becomes difficult for the body to find the time and resources to repair and grow new muscle fibers.
Plan your recovery periods wisely.
As a rule of thumb, you should shoot for a goal of stimulating each muscle group only twice every five days.
That sums it up.
Make your stress focused, short and not too frequent; yet intense, extreme and continuously increasing.