Are You Actually Building Muscle? Why Exercise Execution Matters
When you're trying to build muscle, it's easy to focus solely on the numbers. More weight. More reps. More sets. And while progressive overload is an important part of building muscle, there's something that comes before all of that: How you move the weight matters. You can be adding weight to an exercise and increasing your reps, but if you don't know how to move that weight properly, you may not be getting the muscle-building stimulus you're working so hard for. It's not just about moving the weight Building muscle isn't simply about getting a weight from A to B. It's about creating enough tension in the muscle you're trying to develop. Take a dumbbell row, for example. You might be lifting a heavier dumbbell and completing more reps, but if you're using lots of body movement to swing the weight up, shortening your range of motion and dropping the dumbbell quickly on the way down, you're changing how the exercise is performed. The number on...
