How to Get Muscles by Sleeping

When lifting weights it is almost more important to maintain a proper amount of downtime than it is to go to the gym. This is because muscles hypertrophy (or grow) when they are resting, not when you are lifting weights in the gym. This is why over training is one of the number one problems that are limiting the gains made by amateur weight lifters and body builders. By constantly working one muscle group, and never giving the muscle any time to rest, the muscle will not grow. You will be very tired, and the muscle may be "feeling the burn" but it will not be growing.

How is it then that some people lift weights every day? What would be the benefit of that? Most people that lift weights every day target different muscle groups on different days. This practice is generally referred to as creating "splits", by creating splits you are giving each muscle group you work on nearly 48 hours between lifts. Before we dive any further into this slightly obscure fitness topic it is important to understand how the body builds muscle.

By lifting weights, you are creating microscopic tears in your muscle. Your body will them come along and repair these small tears, but when they repair them, they will make them even bigger. You can think of weight lifting as creating lots of small cuts in your muscle that will in turn come back with a significantly greater amount of "scar tissue" (its not actually scar tissue, but it makes for a good comparison) upon your muscles. It is generally a good idea to give your body about 48 hours (with plenty of rest) to restore its torn muscles, at which point you should tear them again! Training the same muscle group every single day may not be as efficient as once every other day because the muscles would permanently be torn, and would not have time to regenerate.

Now that we know the importance of using proper splits, how on earth would one go about separating muscle groups into different days to work them on? The fact that many exercises work not only primary groups of muscles, but also secondary groups only complicates this even more. A common split includes working the upper body on one day, and the lower body on the next day. This is generally a good place to start, but if you wish to give your muscles even more rest then you can investigate using a push/pull split. This would be where you push with one muscle on one day, and then pull with it the next day.