How to Build Muscle as You Age – Part 2: This is Why You Are Not Seeing Results

This is PART 2, of a 3 part series. checkout:

• How to Build Muscle as You Age – Part 1: Effective Technique

Let’s get straight into PART 2 – This is Why You’re Not Seeing Results…

If you’re not seeing any visible results from your:

• Suspension trainer
• Resistance band
• Bodyweight
• Or even gym workouts for that matter

… it’s because you are performing ‘movement-centric workouts’.

What do I mean by that?

Walking is a type of movement-centric exercise, so is running, cycling or an aerobics class.

You don’t really think about moving, you just move.

This movement-centric exercise just burns calories there and then, at that moment.

It does not also burn calories after the activity for a prolonged time. Like muscle-centric exercise does.

With movement-centric exercise you allow the body to activate all the muscles it can, to move. The body is great at this.

It loves to use as many muscles as possible to efficiently move or move a load. Distributing load across a range of muscles.

Many people grab a TRX suspension trainer and do this. They just jump around or push and pull.

Not thinking about how they are moving, just focusing on moving.

The same thing happens when you see people in the gym, grunting and groaning moving a weight that is too heavy for them, up and down in any way possible.

So long as they move it and look strong, they don’t care.

The problem with this type of exercise

The problem with this type of movement-centric exercise (along with mindset) is the even load distribution.

Not one or two singular muscles take all the load and strain to do the work.

Sometimes 10 – 15 muscles do.

So if we take 100% load and share it across 10 muscles, that’s each muscle taking only a 10% strain.

That’s fantastic teamwork by the body and amazing biomechanics of the human species.

But, it is fundamentally useless at transforming our body by developing muscle mass, because the load/weight placed upon the muscles just isn’t enough to elicit a response, a need for the muscle to grow stronger.

10% strain on a muscle is nothing.

The brain and nervous system will gloss over it.

It needs (for the sake of our argument) upwards of 60-80% strain for the body to be like:

“oh my! this muscle needs to get fitter, bigger and stronger to handle this increased load. We better re-build it asap!”

This is why movement-centric exercise is NOT what we seek to do.

It has its place as aerobic activity or for powerlifting (moving an object from A to B in the shortest amount of time)…

but it’s useless for what we want to achieve to transform our body by building muscle. 

Now continue onto – How to Build Muscle as You Age – Part 3: The ONLY Type of Training That Works For Men & Women Over 35