You look tall and thin, you look at your long arms and you notice a lack of muscle tone in them. Your lower extremities don’t look the way you’d like them to be, and you’re tired of seeing yourself without muscle mass. However, you do not know where to start working to reverse this situation.
Having long limbs and not adapting your workouts to that circumstance is a serious mistake, since this group must follow very specific guidelines to see significant changes in their physique once they begin to enter.
Learn how to train with weights if you have long arms and legs .
4 tips to gain muscle for athletes with long limbs
1. Avoid bad thoughts
This point is undoubtedly one of the key elements to transform your physique since, you must understand and assimilate that increasing muscle mass is a slow and hard process, so you must mentalize yourself so as not to abandon on the road.
Set yourself a goal to achieve and go proposing objectives to meet; In this way, you will help yourself to be motivated and avoid giving up on your goal.
2. Train heavy and limit cardio
Most athletes with long limbs complain of their lack of muscle tone while spending hours and hours a week on the treadmill or elliptical, but why so much cardio if you are looking to gain muscle mass?
Tall people need a greater intake of food , since they generally use more calories than the rest of the people. Thus, if the goal is to increase muscle mass levels, attention should be paid to consuming more calories than are needed and creating a positive balance between calories consumed and expended.
In gyms, the first recommendation given to the group we are talking about are bodybuilding routines in which isolated exercises that involve a specific muscle group predominate. This is a mistake since if we want to gain muscle mass, we need to perform heavy and global exercises, that is, that involve more than one joint.
This type of exercise will allow us to perform a more intense work with less time invested, so the balance of energy expenditure will be positive, allowing in time, the gain of muscle mass.
3. Get enough rest
If you are one of those with longer limbs than the average for the population, you will notice that any lift you perform will seem heavier than to other users. It is physical, the greater the distance of the movement, the greater the force that needs to be used, therefore the fatigue will be greater. This also means that if you do not give yourself enough time for your muscles to recover, each lift will do it with less force and this will prevent your muscles from growing.
If you look at the other users of the weight rooms, the breaks they use are usually low. Their rest time is usually one minute, this is defined as an average time taken to recover the muscles from the physiological changes caused by a stimulus. However, for tall people, this time should be longer, since the effort invested is greater.
So if you’re tall, try to rest for two minutes between hypertrophy sets or five minutes if you’re between sets of a strength routine.
4. Modify the rep ranges
Many athletes continue to work with the dogmas of the old school, without adapting the training to their own person. They think that following those dogmas will lead them to get stronger and with a better body composition. This idea is a mistake, since each person must adjust the training with the appropriate individualization to their physical condition .
Many authors in the beginnings of bodybuilding and fitness, defended the work of high repetitions to obtain muscle gain. Today, high reps have been shown to produce a much lower stimulus than low reps at high loads for muscle development.
High loads and repetitions of between 4 and 8 are optimal when we talk about hypertrophy work in athletes with long limbs , since the work at the muscle level will be greater and will produce more stimulus than the work at high repetitions and lower loads. On the contrary, to finish the training sessions, if isolated work at high loads is advisable: this will produce more muscle congestion, which will help muscle growth.
Conclution
If you are looking to change your skinny and weak physique for another slim one , but you cannot find the way to do it, we advise you to use the advice that we have given you today. These will provide you with an advance in your goal since you will have to adapt the workouts to your body type.
Remember that not everything works for the same people. The principle of individuality is essential when scheduling your workouts.
Reference
- MacCormick, Tom. Hypertrophy Tips For The Long-Limbed Lifter. For breakingmuscle. ⌈Revised October 2017⌋.