A few days ago, one of my new clients asked me why his muscles disappeared a couple of hours after training, also telling me that this made him wonder if he was doing something wrong.
I immediately realized that this doubt could be common among people who train with weights and I decided that it would be the topic that I was going to deal with in this article that I am giving you today.
Why do your muscles disappear after training?
How many times, at the end of your exercise routine at the gym, have you seen yourself in the mirror and thought “I want to always be like this”?
“Why do I take a shower and all these muscles that I just defined disappear? Do I go home without taking a shower and enjoy them along the way, or do I think how I could make them not disappear?
To clarify all these issues, today I am going to talk to you about temporary hypertrophy, that situation in which we would all like to stay after a few hours of weight training.
I will also give you the best tips to maintain those muscles even after the shower, and I will even offer you a typical session to hypertrophy your muscles forever.
What is temporal hypertrophy?
After a hard weight training we find a phase scientifically called “temporary hypertrophy”.
Before we delve into how to get this temporary hypertrophy to become chronic hypertrophy (large muscles throughout the day, before and after training), we must clearly understand this first concept.
According to specialists such as Willmore and Costill, temporary hypertrophy is defined as “that phase produced during and immediately after exercise that disappears after a few minutes or several hours and whose origin is found in an accumulation of fluids (edema) in the required muscle areas” .
This is the main reason why the “fading” of your muscles occurs, since you have not increased the size of your fibers, but you have requested a lot of fluid in those muscles to be able to train effectively and without injuring yourself.
Therefore, it is normal for all of us to reduce the swelling after a few hours, because we redistribute all that liquid again through the body while we recover.
But what is the goal really? Exactly! Chronic hypertrophy, another well-known concept that, unlike the previous one, is maintained during and after training.
How to get chronic hypertrophy?
First of all, I will remind you of the basic principles that you can find in detail analyzed in the article “You want to get bigger or stronger”: Training, nutrition and rest.
With this clear, the next step is to carry out a good exercise program with resistance forces like the one I present below:
Hypertrophy program for trained people (preses and trunk work):
Perform 2-3 sets of 12-10-8 repetitions with 1-minute rest between sets and no rest between exercises.
Dumbbell bench press
Spine rotation on machine or pulley
dips
Spine flexion on machine or pulley
Incline Dumbbell Bench Press
Spine extension on machine or pulley.
Before finishing, I remind you of the importance of adapting the routine to your level and experience.
I recommend that, if you start in this world of force, you stop by our online consultation area where you can solve all the doubts that have remained in the air. It is better to be cautious.