How long lean muscle

So if you're after a lean look, set your sights on decreasing body fat and building a healthy level of strength while avoiding some of the factors that are best known to provoke increases in muscle size. To build long, lean muscles, you need to maneuver several different strategies into place: reducing body fat, striking the right balance of sets and reps for strength-training, and introducing postural exercises that can work near-magical results on your appearance in a short time.

Before getting too deep into the lean muscle vs. Sure, the odds of someone putting a gun to your head and threatening to do you in if you can't squat your body weight are pretty low, but a University of Michigan study published in a issue of The Journals of Gerontology found that people with low muscle strength were more than 50 percent more likely to die prematurely than their stronger peers. Meanwhile, having a strong body improves your quality of life by making everyday tasks easier, from hefting groceries to swinging your kids overhead.

It also builds stronger bones and can reduce the symptoms of chronic diseases including arthritis, depression and diabetes. Pumping a little iron now and then has even been documented to help with cognitive function: A study published in in Frontiers in Physiology showed that it both decreased inflammation and increased cognition in a study group of older women with cognitive impairment.

All of that goes to say that even if you want to minimize muscle growth, including some strength training in your lifestyle is an important part of staying healthy. The Physical Activity Guidelines appendix of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans provides an ideal baseline to maintain: Aim to strength-train all your major muscle groups at least twice a week.

Now that it's clear that strength training should be part of any fitness plan, no matter how lean you want to look, the road map to your lean-body lifting plan should include:.

While it's true that many bodybuilding experts recommend compound exercises for building muscle , there's a lot to make them appealing in a lean body workout too. They mimic real-world movements more closely than isolation exercises such as biceps curls and hamstring curls, and because they work more muscle groups at once, they get you in and out of the gym more quickly. Compound exercises, such as squats and lunges, also work your core muscles , which are particularly important for avoiding injury.

Many women worry that strength training will make them "look like a man. Your calorie intake: If you don't eat enough calories on a daily basis, you won't build muscle even if you eat a lot of protein. To build muscle, your body must create new tissue, and it can't create something from nothing.

Extra fuel from extra calories expedites muscle recovery and growth. This is one reason many people never reach their muscle growth goals -- they aren't willing to deal with the extra body fat that comes along with a muscle-building phase. Your sleep schedule: Lifting weights while sleep-deprived isn't a smart strategy. You might see some gains, but you definitely can't optimize muscle growth when you don't give your body a fighting chance to recover. Your lifting routine: If you're trying to build muscle, you should know about two key strength training concepts: frequency and volume.

Frequency refers to how often you train a muscle or muscle group, while volume refers to the total load you stress a muscle with. For example, if you perform three sets of 10 reps on squats using pounds, your total volume is 3, pounds. More volume and higher frequency typically equate to more muscle, unless you reach the point of overtraining.

Your training age: The more advanced you are, the less muscle growth you'll see yeah, that sounds backward. Everyone has a maximum genetic potential for muscle growth, and the closer you get to yours, the harder it gets to build more muscle.

Your actual age: Like a lot of things, building muscle gets harder as you get older. Sarcopenia , or loss of muscle mass and function, is actually a big problem in older adults. That's one reason why it's so important to stay active as you get older. But is it realistic—or even honest? Muscles contract and stretch to move bones, kind of like stretchy rubber bands, but they technically have fixed lengths.

Which is to say: Baby, you were born this way. The answer is a combination of two things: how they train and what they eat. Isometric contractions think: tensing a muscle but not actually moving, like holding a plank utilized in workouts such as barre or yoga develop muscles differently than dynamic or isotonic movements, where the muscle stretches and contracts through a range of motion, like push-ups. Plus, perfoming a high number of reps of tiny, controlled movements engages and strengthens a different set of muscle fibers slow-twitch than big, explosive movements, which work fast-twitch fibers.

There are pros and cons to each method, but on a structural level, both isometric and dynamic exercises lead to greater strength, firmness, and tone in the muscle, says Tanya Becker, certified trainer and co-founder of Physique In fact, doing a combo of both is ideal for getting quick results.

Your rate of weight gain, genetics, training schedule, and type of food you choose are all important factors for promoting healthy weight gain in the form of more muscle over body fat. But the biggest determining factor might be your starting body composition. Studies suggest that naturally lean individuals are more likely to put on weight in the form of muscle over fat.

And similarly, those with a higher starting body fat percentage were more likely to add more body fat than muscle 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9. But this has really only been evidenced in people who are naturally lean, not necessarily those that have dieted down to a lower body fat percentage.

And good news for newbies, research suggests that beginners tend to gain muscle more efficiently than those that are highly trained Of course, this rate starts to decrease as you become more fit over time and some of this mass gain might be skewed due to increased water retention in newer lifters Bulking diets , just like weight loss diets, put a slight strain on your body. And being on a long term weight gain diet is not typically recommended for most people.

The longer you bulk, the more muscle you potentially gain, however, you're also gonna add a decent amount of fat in the process. Many will aim to do a slower bulk lasting anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks during winter months when they don't mind gaining a bit of body fat, or during a time period where they require adequate fuel for their training.

You can certainly bulk for longer than this or until you achieve your desired weight. However, you might find more success cycling through a series of bulks and cuts to achieve your ideal physique. If you are worried about fat gain, cycling through cutting and bulking phases is another way to approach this and get your desired results. The body composition effect works the same in reverse. In other words, those with higher body fat percentages tend to lose fat more easily and maintain gains better than naturally lean individuals.

Not to mention increasing the size of your muscles, will result in a potential increase in your metabolism - meaning you can eat more calories. This matters because your higher calorie burn makes losing fat a bit easier. If you are at a satisfactory lean starting body composition start with a bulk for 12 weeks, then rest for four to eight weeks, followed by a six to 12 week cut - depending on how much fat you gained.

It's important to include maintenance or reset periods lasting at least four weeks in between to allow your body to adjust to a new normal before jumping into the next phase. This will help your metabolism settle and allow you to maintain as much of your muscle growth as possible. Dieting results in a temporary metabolic adaptation where your metabolism and rate of fat oxidation slows - meaning you are prone to store more fat when calories are increased again 12 , So if you have recently gone through a cut to have a lower starting body fat, you might want to consider maintaining your lower weight for a few weeks first to allow your metabolism to stabilize before trying to bulk.

And vice versa. Jumping into a cut too soon after a bulk could result in some unintentional loss of gains.