Let’s see how to increase muscle strength and power
Have you been going to the gym for a while and still don’t see the results you were aiming for? Your physique is certainly well defined but you still haven’t managed to put on mass? Do you want to increase muscle strength but don’t know how? In this article we will tell you how to increase strength through perseverance, hard work, targeted training and supplementation with the right nutrients.
Going to the gym and not achieving your goals can be frustrating, but don’t give up, remembering that every physique responds differently to stimulus, so if your muscle mass and strength don’t increase as they should, try changing your training type and monitor your body’s reaction to the effort.
Our advice is to write everything down, right from your first workouts: the centimetres in the main areas of your body (arms, abdomen, legs, calves, shoulders), your body weight, the kilos you can lift, the number of repetitions, everything that can give you a fair assessment of the direction you have taken.
Different types of strenght
Before discovering how to increase strength, let’s try to understand what it is. Muscular strength is the motor capacity to overcome or oppose resistance through the development of tension in the muscles. There are different types of strength, the main ones are:
- maximum strenght: the highest force that the neuromuscular system is able to generate with a voluntary contraction.
- endurance strenght: is the force to which the body resorts in order to resist fatigue during training
- rapid strenght: the ability of the neuromuscular system to overcome resistance with maximum contraction speed.
How to increase strength
One of the main goals of strength training is to reduce the percentage of fat mass and increase that of muscle mass. Usually, good training for increasing muscle strength is carried out through the use of an external resistance that can cause the right tension in the muscle, such as, for example, the use of certain loads, the use of elastic objects, increased intensity, the use of gravity or inertia, and structural changes in the training environment.
It is important to know well what your maximum load is, which varies from person to person and corresponds to the highest load you can lift at one time and for one exercise only, and it is a good idea to use a weight of between 85 and 100 per cent of your maximum load during exercises.. Without entering into the details of specific training, and advising you to rely on an experienced and well-prepared trainer, , it is good to remember that by varying the number of repetitions and intensity it is possible to train different types of strength:
- few repetitions at high intensity, train maximum strength
- many repetitions at low load, train endurance strength
- 4-8 repetitions at maximum speed with loads of the same amount train rapid strength
The importance of integration
Lots of work followed by proper rest, a correct diet and adequate supplementation of specific nutrients are the basis for the best possible sports training. In answering the question of how to increase strength, one substance stands out among all others in the field of sports supplementation: creatine.
Synthesised by the liver, pancreas and kidneys, creatine is an amino acid naturally present in the body that is essential for muscles to produce ATP. By binding with a phosphate group, creatine is converted into phosphocreatine and acts to meet the energy demands of the alactacidic anaerobic mechanism. As natural reserves are depleted very quickly, replenishing creatine with specific products can increase the supply by up to 40%..
CREAFos by Sprintade® is the perfect sports supplement for increasing strength. Thanks to the high creatine and fructose 1,6-diphosphate content, it can be consumed regularly in order to increase muscle creatine and phosphate reserves.