Fitness Plan Goal: The Key To Beautiful Muscles For Men And Women

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There is usually a catch if a fitness plan goal is supposed to support muscle building.

It doesn’t consider where you currently stand, nor is it aligned with your goal: looking good in a swimsuit.

It’s not enough to simply have “big muscles.” On the contrary, for many, this is “too much.”

It’s about the “sweet spot,” somewhere in between.

Knowing how to adapt your muscle-building fitness plan to your goal is good. That’s what today is about.

Using four scenarios, I will show you how you can customize your fitness plan and find the “sweet spot” between the possible training focuses that will quickly get you to your goal:

Building “soft” muscle mass
“hard” muscle definition and strength development
To save time.

In doing so, we turn the following screws:

number of sentences
Number of repetitions (per set)
Duration of rest periods between training sets.

Here are the four ways you can fine-tune your training program so that you look athletic-muscular-defined and don’t just have “big muscles.”

I call it “hybrid muscle building.”

Fitness Plan Goal #1: Lots of strength + some muscle building

With this approach, you slowly build bigger and denser muscles :

Lots of training sets at
few repetitions per training set.

As you may already know, with a few repetitions, you primarily train your strength and build up myofibrillar muscles.

A high training volume, on the other hand, creates more muscle mass because you tire your muscles cumulatively.

This is the best way for you if you want to build more muscle but are primarily interested in strength and muscle density.

In doing so, you accept that you will gain muscle volume more slowly than with “classic” training for cumulative fatigue.

Fitness Plan Goal #2: Save time + keep in shape

With this approach, you can keep your current muscle mass and save a lot of time during training:

Few training sets at
a higher number of repetitions.

Less training volume also reduces cumulative fatigue, thereby limiting the growth of new muscle mass.

On the other hand, a high number of repetitions promotes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy – i.e., mass building.

The bottom line is that this is a good way to maintain your current muscle mass without investing too much time in the gym.

Fitness Plan Goal #3: Lots of muscle gain + some strength

If your primary goal is to increase muscle size but also want to get a little stronger in the process, this is the approach for you:

Higher rep sets
and longer breaks.

With longer set breaks, you limit the effect of cumulative fatigue, but you can train your strength with heavier weights. Due to the higher number of repetitions, you still focus on building mass.

This approach helps you primarily build more “soft” (sarcoplasmic) muscle volume while slowly getting stronger at the same time.

Fitness plan goal #4: Lots of strength + some muscle building (alternative)

There is more than one way to get there – this alternative route to variant A.

You will primarily get stronger, but you can also slowly increase your muscle volume by:

train with few repetitions and
take shorter breaks in between.

Shorter breaks promote cumulative fatigue (mass gain). Few repetitions train strength (myofibrillar hypertrophy).

Conclusion: You will not get stronger as quickly as if you want to rest longer between training sets.

In return, you will build up a little more muscle mass than if your fitness plan were geared towards “pure” gaining strength.

Case study: Which fitness plan is the right one?

This gentleman is bulkier than those I usually take as an example.

In my opinion, with the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (muscle mass), he has already overshot the goal of “looking good in a swimsuit.”

As far as the proportions are concerned, he can still work on himself (more shoulders, less lateral trunk, possibly fewer arms).

But he’s a good example of an athlete who’s built a lot of muscle mass and has a relatively low body fat percentage.

It would do him well to focus more on myofibrillar hypertrophy now, lower the number of sets and reps, and slow down a bit on the overall training volume.

A slightly less extensive strength-oriented training with longer breaks between sets would probably have a good effect on him.

He has way too much muscle volume for my taste. It no longer looks natural. I don’t think you should aim for that much mass. Otherwise – have fun shopping for clothes.