Feed muscles for growth with feeder workouts

For those of you that love pumping the iron, it’s likely that you’re aware of the holy trinity that’s needed in order to make muscles pop; vigorous-intense workouts, a diet to feed and repair the muscles and rest and recuperation.

Neglecting one of these aspects of training will no doubt make your training sessions less productive and make it harder to achieve your goals, whether they may be fat loss or to gain lean muscle mass.

Whether you’re a complete novice or an expert bodybuilder, any gym rat will tell you the importance of maintaining a strict diet when partaking in any training program. Quality complete protein is needed in order to repair and build muscles and depending on your goals, you need to alter the amount of fats and carbohydrates in your diet accordingly. This is a fairly self- explanatory concept. Quality food along with a quality training program will help to build quality muscles. But the third factor in the holy trinity of muscle building and arguably the most important is one that many people neglect.

In today’s day and age with people taking on heavy workloads, trying to juggle work, family and hectic social lives, finding the time to train for 1.5-2 hours a day and consuming 6+ meals is hard enough. But with the world at our fingertips in the age of the smartphones, laptops, tablets and smart TVs, coming home at the end of a busy day and trying to get in a good 8 hours sleep is nigh on impossible for most. Sleep will not only refresh, restore, reinvigorate and replenish the body and mind but it’s also a vital component of muscle building. After all, muscles grow when resting and sleeping, not when they’re in the gym being pounded and strained with heavy weights.

Now if you’re a fitness aficionado you’ve probably heard the term ‘less in more’ being thrown about in various circles. This is mostly a term used by lazy people to justify working out for the short amount of time they do. If you’re one of these people that believe in this concept, then the idea of training a body part twice in two days, feeder workouts, may have you foaming at the lips.

Yes, the muscles need to be allowed time to grow and recuperate and rest is essential, but the aim of feeder workouts is to aid this process. After training a body part, biceps for example and after tearing apart the muscle fibres, they need to be allowed time to heal. By doing a feeder workout the next day, preferably just before bed, you’re pumping the bicep, not tearing apart the fibres, essentially feeding the biceps with blood, supplying them with fresh oxygen and nutrients to speed up the healing process. This will not only mean that you’ll be able to train your biceps more frequently, but will also fuel your muscles for growth.

The aim of a feeder workout is not to cause excessive stress to the muscle, so those of you who are ego lifters, do your feeder workouts in the privacy of your room just before bed so you’ll be able to hopefully leave your ego at the door and just concentrate your efforts on the pump. Get yourself a relatively light pair of dumbbells and begin to bicep curl, seating or standing, whatever your preference may be. Carry out your reps quickly and concentrate on really squeezing the bicep. Initially, keep your reps in the 20-30 range and do 3 sets with no more than 10 seconds rest between sets. After about a week, increase your reps and sets until you’re doing 5 sets per body part and each set consists of 100 reps.

This training regime may seem excessive, but remember by doing feeder workouts you’re not damaging the muscle, just pumping and feeding it with everything that is required in order to make it grow. Feeder workouts can be applied to any muscle group and don’t necessary need to be carried out the day after you’ve hit that particular body part.

Bodybuilding and lifting weights is about developing your body in a way that appeals to you, so take a look in the mirror, see what body parts are lacking and which ones that you’d like to build and work these particular areas more often and do feeder workouts for those particular muscle groups.

If you’ve hit a plateau with your weekly training program, incorporate feeder workouts into your daily ritual, stick at it and see what improvements you make. It could just be the new stimulus your body needs to shock your system into an anabolic state. Famous athletes and bodybuilders swear by feeders so give it a try and pump those muscles with feeder workouts!