Five gym secrets of professional rugby players - Page 3 of 5 - Ruck

The secret fitness techniques of professional rugby players

SECRET THREE: FOUR SECONDS TO BIGGER MUSCLES

Lifting increasingly heavy weights isn’t the only way to sculpt muscle. Changing the timing of your lifts can also deliver big results.

“When you are looking to build muscle, you need to stress the muscle to literally cause damage (on a micro level) to the muscle,” says Dams. Only then will the muscle adapt by growing back stronger.

“An efficient way to do this is to increase the amount of time the muscle spends under tension,” continues Dams. “If you change the tempo – that is, change the speed of either the concentric (shortening) or eccentric (lengthening) component of the lift – you can change the time under tension to help stimulate hypertrophy (muscle growth) and gain mass.”

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