Are Growing Muscle Mass and Living for Health and Vitality Mutually Exclusive Goals?

You would do the same things, I don't think that it would be more. So what you're doing with your training, it will be more. So what you're doing with all the other things within your life if your goal is to build muscle, but also be overall healthy, then you want to make sure that you are, you know, optimizing what you're doing in your training.

So making sure you're following a plan that is structured that you enjoy doing, that's fun for you that you can stick to consistently, that's probably gonna be the biggest thing. So for example, you know, if your goal is to build muscle, but you really, really enjoy doing CrossFit or Olympic lifting, you can still build muscle doing those things, it might not be the most optimal or efficient way to build muscle. But if that's what you enjoy, and that's what you can stick to on a consistent basis, then that's what you should do. Because if you, you know, if you're someone who is like, I totally can't go to the gym and just lift bodybuilding style for three days a week, I won't follow that for more than a week, then what is the point, right, so if you enjoy, you know, CrossFit or orange theory, or things like that, that's or Olympic lifting, or powerlifting, or whatever it is, you have to pay attention to that that might not be like the most efficient and fastest way that you'll build muscle because it's probably not.

But if you can stick to that on consistent basis, and that's what you enjoy, then do that, if your goal is to build as much muscle as possible, in the most efficient way, then you're going to want to focus on hypertrophy style training, where you're doing more so like bodybuilding style training, which people talk about, where you're actually doing exercises within the gym, that you are able to get as much tension within those muscles as possible, you're working out within specific rep ranges, you're recovering optimally, you're progressing, you know, week to week, the issue I see with, you know, CrossFit style training or Orangetheory style training is that one, there's a lot of high intensity cardio aspect to that.

So you're going to be doing a lot of different things, you're also going to be working your cardiovascular system a lot. So that's there can be a little bit of overtraining that occurs with that. So for me, specifically, I used to do CrossFit a lot. And I loved it, I loved the community atmosphere. But when I actually was forced to take a break from it, because I actually got injured because I was overdoing it. And I switched over to more of a bodybuilding style traditional training, I saw a complete change in my body composition. And as because I actually started to pay attention to my recovery, and I stopped doing super, super high intensity workouts. And then also I was able to track what I was doing. So within, you know, classes like circuit style classes, CrossFit, Orangetheory, things like that.

The issue, you know, aside from just lack of recovery within that is also that you can't really track what you're doing session to session week to week, if you're not following a program where you can actually see like, Hey, I did this amount of reps, or I did this amount of weight. So I'm going to try to beat that next week. There are ways that you can do that. But I've just found from my experience and from, you know, working with clients, that it's a lot harder to track that progression over time. So you might feel like you're going into that workout, you're working hard, you know, you're sweating and all of that, like are you actually sending that signal to your body that says, okay, you know, this is hard, I'm getting close to failure. So I need to adapt so that next time, I can build more muscle, right.

So, again, this is a little bit of a confusing topic. But if you are someone who enjoys, you know, other training besides you know, just going to the gym and lifting weights, and that's what you can stick to then do that. But if your goal if your main goal is to optimize as much muscle growth as possible, you need to make sure that you're following a program that is hypertrophy focused, and you need to make sure that you're eating enough food to stimulate that muscle growth and to recover properly. And that's my answer.

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