How To Gain Muscle Mass And Strength With This War Analogy! | Ronan Oliveira

In the video of a few weeks ago, I showed you a couple of exercises that you can do at home. But then the question is, how do you use those exercises to build strength and muscle mass? My name is Ronan. I am the head of Health and fitness at mindvalley, and I work with people from different fitness levels. And this is something very important of where you are in your health and fitness journey. To know what type of exercises, but especially what you do with those exercises to build muscle and strength. It's not just because you have your favorite exercises and you do them over and over. That means that you're gonna grow big muscles or that you're gonna get stronger. That is, until when you do those exercises, how you do this, how often, and you know, how do you progress over week? So to get an idea of what makes Mosul grow, let me give you a different analogy. So first, imagine that you are the leader or the emperor of a nation in war, and you have a conflict, and you have different types of armies that you need to send to the battlefield. The first army that is sent for any type of conflict is a bunch of soldiers holding knives. You know, you have lots of them, and you use them for any type of light conflict. You send them to the battlefield. You have a lot of these guys, and they can fight forever because they don't have ammunition until they fall super tired, they can fight. But then let's say that the conflict gets a bit hard, the enemy starts dropping bombs, and at this case, you need reinforcement. So you call the army that holds machine guns, and these guys can fight over distance. So the good thing about them is that you can put them for heavy conflict, but you have a smaller amount of those soldiers because the machine guns are more expensive than the knives. And also they have limited ammunition. At some point, after maybe a couple of hours, they need to stop and recharge. But if the war gets really serious, the enemy brings tanks or dragons or what not, at that moment, you are desperate. Then your last resort is to call Rambo, John, Rambo, Sylvester Stallone. This is a guy who explodes everything. The disadvantage is that you have only one of them. And then he holds, like, six grenades. He explodes things for half a minute, and then he needs to come back to the camp to recharge. And then, let's say, all right, the conflict is done, and all these soldiers come back to the camp. Now you have a few of them that are injured, and even Rambo has a scratch on his face. Now, this is when you know that things were serious and so you call for a recuperation process. So you bring all the medical team and they bring their equipment and they run their procedures on the soldiers to patch them together. But because even Rambo got a scratch on his face, you call the general and say, hey, this cannot happen again. When we go for a conflict, we need to be better. So the general trains the soldiers, he increases the size of the army and he changes his strategy. So as a result of this whole conflict, now you have a stronger and bigger army, which is a good thing for you. Now, with muscles and exercise, things happen more or less similarly. So let's say that you go for a type of exercise, but it's a light intensity. So you are standing up from a chair, or you're just walking around. You're using the muscles of your legs and you're recruiting some types of muscle fibers, but you have different types of of muscle fibers, just like you have different types of army. And for a light intensity type of exercise, you bring the slow twitch muscle fibers. They are like the soldiers with the knives. You use them for light intensity exercise and they exert low force. They cannot be, you know, push a lot of weight. But the good thing about them is that their endurance is super high. Just like the guys with the knives that don't have a problem with ammunition. You can use those muscle fibers for a long time, but if you increase the intensity of the exercise a little bit, now you need reinforcements. So then you bring in the fast twitch muscle fibers, type A. They are more or less like the guys with the machine gun because they work for high intensity. They can exert more force, force, but they get tired after a couple of minutes. You know, you have limited ammunition. You need to stop and recharge those muscle fibers after some time. But if you really increase the intensity of the exercise, you want to go for your maximum strength. This is when you call Rambo. So this is when you bring in the fast twitch muscle fibers, type B. They work for super high intensity. They do your maximum strength, but they fatigue very quickly. You use them for half a minute, for one minute, and now you're done. It may take you minutes or maybe even days to be able to recover these guys. So then when the exercise is done, you bring all the muscle fibers come back home and some of them are scratched. They have literally micro tears. So then it's time for you to run your recuperation process. But also your body looks at the intensity of the exercise and thinks about the same as the general. You know, this cannot happen. Again, if we go for another exercise, we cannot get this amount of damage. So we need to create some adaptation, and the body develops a better coordination for using those muscles. It also increases your capacity for contracting those muscles and grow the muscle fibers so now they are wider. And then as a result of that exercise, now you are in the process of having bigger and stronger muscles. So this is more or less what is happening or what needs to happen in the background while you're doing exercises either at home or in the gym. So let's say that you have your goal as building strength and muscle mass. For this to happen, you will need to fulfill a couple of strategic objectives. There are three of them that we can summarize. The number one is to safely and efficiently recruit as many muscle fibers as possible. That means that there is conflict. You need to bring all the armies to the battlefield because they are the ones who will be trained afterwards. They are the ones who get better afterwards. So for you to achieve this strategic objective, what you want to do is first use exercises that effectively bring all the soldiers together. And this is when you choose compound exercises. When you're doing some type of weightlifting, you can have exercises that use two or more joints, something like a bench press or a seated row. These are called compound exercises, and they are recruiting a big amount of muscle fibers at the same time, as opposed to isolation exercises, that is when, like a bicep curl, that you're only moving one joint, that you're focusing on a specific subset of one army. So for you to efficiently recruit as many as you can, you use compound exercises. But instead of really getting attached to an exercise, what you want is to cover some types of movement. So imagine your upper body, and then you have a horizontal and a vertical plane of movement. Here you can push and pull things. Here you can push and pull things. And the same thing with your legs, you can push and pull things with the leg. And so with five to six types of movement, you can cover all the muscle fibers using one exercise per each. In that video about how to workout at home, which you can access here, you can see some of these exercises that I can do with resistance bands. But if you go to the gym, you can use machines as one of the ways to get started, because machines help you guide the movement and learn the coordination. Now, the second strategic objective is now that you have all the exercises that are covering your entire body. All the armies are into the battlefield, but then you want to make sure that they come home with at least a scratch, at least rumbo needs a scratch on his face, because otherwise there is no strategy to get them better, because they are not even getting injured. So for you to cause these micro tears, a couple of things that you can do is one, when you're training, you train closer to failure. Whether you are in the gym or at home, you do an exercise up until the point that you can barely do one more repetition. So if you're doing something like push ups at home, you will do it until it's harder to lift yourself up from the ground. Not when you feel you're tired or maybe it's hurting a little bit, but when your muscles cannot take this anymore, because this means that even Rambo is getting a scratch on his face. And an easier way of doing this if you are, especially at the gym, is to increase the intensity. You know, you increase the load or make it lift heavy weights, because then you need to do less repetitions to get to that point of fatigue. But it's not only enough to do this. When you are training today, this needs to progress over a week. So the principle that you apply over weeks is called progressive overload. That means that every time that you do the same training, or every time that you go into the battlefield, you need to improve, increase a bit of the intensity. You need to increase a bit of the stimulus that you give to your muscle fibers so they keep on growing week after week. You keep on causing these micro tears. How do you do this? Let's imagine that you have an exercise like a seated row and you have a range of repetitions that you're doing with them. And you're using resistance bands because you're doing at home, and you do a minimum of 10 repetitions and a maximum of, of 12 repetitions. If today you did seated rows with your resistance band and you arrived anything between 10 and 12, that means that the next time that you're doing this, you will keep the same thickness of the resistance band, the same weight of the exercise, but it try to improve, increase one repetition when you're doing this again, but you go beyond the maximum amount of repetition, so you go beyond 12. This is the time that you increase the weight for the next time you train, so you get a thicker resistance band. Or if you are in the gym, you increase the weight. But then if you do something that is too heavy, that you don't even get to your minimum amount of repetition, in this case 10. This means that next time that you're training, you decrease the weight, so you either get a thinner resistance band or you decrease the weight in the machine of the gym or the free weights get something a little bit lighter. And by doing this, you're always making sure that you are progressively overloading the muscle. And with this now, muscles come back home and they are scratched, they are injured. So then you optimize, you give everything that you need for your body to run the recuperation and adaptation process. So your strategies for this could be one, you don't do this exercise all the time. You don't put your army in the battlefield every single day because otherwise they don't have the time to recover. So this type of workout with five to six exercises close to failure is enough to be done two to three times a week. Especially if you're starting strength training right now. And then while you are at home, you give the raw material for your muscle to rebuild itself. So that means that you give protein, you increase the amount of protein during the day. And one of the easy ways of doing this without really counting the amount of protein is just to make sure that you have one serving of protein per meal, whether this is an animal source or a vegetarian source. And then thirdly, you want to make sure that you are well hydrated. At least half a gallon of water per day should be fine, but your body will tell you more or less how much you need. But make sure that you are well hydrated. And then fourth, you need to make sure that you have adequate sleep. Because all the training, all the battlefield is when your army is getting injured. They actually get better, they get stronger, the army grows while you're resting. So one of the best ways of doing this is sleeping enough so that you wake up without an alarm clock. Because that means that is your body naturally running all the recuperation process for the mind and for the body and waking up naturally. And this is how you use some strategic objectives to plug into your exercises. So now you're using your exercises effectively to develop strength and to build muscle mass. If you have any questions, please just leave them in the comments below. Or if you see that I am missing something as well, please I would love to know. And if you want to know more routines, different types of exercises to continuously improve your strength and muscle mass, we have a whole quest about it called the Longevity Blueprint with Ben Greenfield and myself. So I'll leave the link for this quest in the description of the video. If you want to check more about it. Next week we are going to move a bit into nutrition and give you the five mistakes of intermittent fasting. So if you like videos like this. Subscribe, and you know when the next one comes up and I see you in the next video?