Everywhere and everyone tends to say that you need rest days to build muscle mass. I am looking to gain muscle mass since I have pencil arms, but I don't want to have to go on rest periods at the expense of missing out on daily yiquan/kung-fu strength training. I'm really interested in the affect of kettlebell training too. How to get the best of both worlds? Any insights?

A couple quick notes: Use breaking down muscle fiber as part of your warmups before yiquan. follow the firedrills as a model. bodyweight exercises are key. don't apply force with just one part of your body. u r an integrate whole.

Also you can wear weights on your ankles and wrists during taichi this will make you work less faster.

(resv 4 more later)

When your holding plank etc when you start to experience "effort" relax and belly breath, try to feel the posture supported by the expansion and contraction of your breath. Relax every muscle except the lines that are needed for your support.

I don't know of the firedrills, just climbing into the corner and sanding the floor, but I can apply all of your other advice.

Rest periods only apply to the muscles you are looking to build up. For example, say you do press-ups/push-ups to gain muscle mass, simply don't exercise your shoulders and triceps during your rest periods... During a rest period for one set of muscle groups you can work on other muscle groups.

Diet plays a key role in how fast muscle mass is developed. Eat a good source of protein at least 1.5 hours before doing any intensive muscle building training.

If you're into weight training, look at lifting/moving the heaviest weight you currently can and do as many repetitions as possible - if you can do more than 5 reps, increase the weight.

Seeing as you're wanting to build up your arms, I would recommend pull-ups and push-ups. Doing these in different ways builds up different muscle groups. Variety is key to overall arm strength.

Oh, and if you've got a spare bit of cash, a PowerBall wouldn't be a bad investment

Yours humbly,
James

Just to add, kettlebells are good but you probably need someone to show you how to use it properly.

Pranaman

strength training and building mass are two totally different things

in strength training like qigong standing you build neurotransmitters like cultivating the dantian and opening the channels and relaxing and so on. in time you accumulate neurotransmitters and your body rejuvenate itself and become strong because the nerves and tendons are like steel but muscles don't grow. you don't need to eat much because you optimize your energy consumption in your body actually you begin to eat less and less until you reach an equilibrium between what you need and what you consume

methods like kettlebels or calisthenics are very good for strength training but muscle will grow up to a certain level to adapt themselves to the effort and when the body adapted, the muscles will not grow anymore but the neurotransmitters will be consumed and exhausted and you need long periods of resting until the body rebuild naturally the reserves. for instance you will know when you exhausted the neurotransmitters reserves you begin to tremble when relaxing after an intense effort. normally after an intense strength exercise you need 3-5 min rest just for that to recover the neurotransmitters.

in building muscles by intense strength exercising you tear the muscle fiber and you need to let body to rebuild the fiber bigger and thicker. for that you need to eat protein because it is the material that body uses to rebuild the teared fiber and you need one or two days rest between training sets while you need to eat and sleep a lot.

I advise you to eat carbohydrates before exercising and never proteins before because you burn the proteins instead of carbohydrates and proteins are always more expensive, but eat proteins after the exercise in the recovery period , you can eat proteins even before going to sleep because the body recovers best during sleep.

just be careful and listen to your body maybe your body energy does not allow you to build muscles. to build muscles you need a strong liver and a strong spleen. just be careful to alternate the training which destroys and exhaust the body with recovery periods else you will loose more than you gain

I should probably gain mass in all the muscles on my arms. but I also need to be gaining strength in my arms. I need to be doing pushups and pullups everyday if I want to keep up in my class. At the same time i'm trying to lose the extra fat I have. Sifu not only says to do these exercises everyday, but he also says that I need more muscle mass. I'll ask him what to clarify what I should be doing at home.

Right now i'm practicing the fat loss theory at The IF Life, as well as doing 16 hour intermittent fasts daily, as well as HIIT jogging/sprinting 60sec/30sec.

I start doing 50 light kettlebell swings.
I'll switch every day doing 3 "10sec down 10sec up" push-ups along with maxing out on doing pushups as fast as I can. The other day i'll max out on explosive medicine ball pushups the max out on diamond(both hands on ball) medicine ball pushups. One minute plank everday. I'll do the 3 pullups I can everyday.

Do 70% max only 5reps/5sets on bench press, than feeling out how many reps for 20lb dumbbell curl. everyday.

Do as many more pull-ups or chin-ups I can. everyday. Then i'm done.

This all was not including standing, which I think i'm going to start doing after kettlebell swings because it seems to bypass the muscular discomfort stage of standing, and go straight to relaxed tremoring.

my memory was really scattered on this post so sorry for the very rigid read.

the general rule for body building is as follows

1-3 repetitions for mass
3-5 repetitions for strength
5-8 repetitions for growth

i did a program where all the exercises where on a 5x5 scheme (as in, 5 sets of 5 repetitions) and my body was strong but not defined; i have then switched to a 3x8 scheme and my muscles are now both larger and more well defined.

also, a type of mantra i try to repeat to myself in the gym is "quality over quantity." in other words, do as many as you can with good, solid form, instead of doing a ton of sloppily done repetitions. doing push-ups or pull-ups fast isn't as productive as doing them slower with good form.

peace

the reason for fast push-ups is to develop speed and I believe to recruit fast-twitch muscles(for the drop down is sometimes a relaxed freefall, then you and your reflex catch yourself on the pushup). For endurance and strength is why we do ten seconds down and ten seconds up.

I didn't do the curl bench press today, I felt like my muscles needed a day off.

In Defense of Frequent Training
This is an article from dragondoor.com on frequent training and many people who have used it with success. Arthur Saxon is one of them.

Yep. These certainly work. I was taught a method where you push yourself off the ground, clap your hands together and then, as you so poetically described it, descend in a relaxed freefall.

I used to train every day in my school gym and ended up with a body like the famous statues of David...

Nowt wrong with frequent training, in my opinion. Simply listen to you body.

Yours humbly,
James

I suggest taking anything you read on dragon door with a grain of salt. I am biased against them, because I feel like I wasted the first year or so of my training taking pavel's advice as gospel. there's a reason why the things he says are controversial -- some of them are deeply rooted in his own prejudices, and some of them are simply not true.

the frequent training thing is an example. pavel hates bodybuilders. he thinks having big muscles is unhealthy. he thinks being able to lift a big weight a couple of times is more manly than being able to lift a medium weight for hours on end. stick him in a gulag breaking rocks apart and see how he feels about it.

and pavel looks a lot like arthur saxon. neither guy is that big. well, you say, I'd be happy looking like pavel. that's fine, and once you look like pavel or arthur saxon, maybe you should start training like them. but the methods pavel promotes do not generally produce muscle development. it's true that building muscle is unnecessary if you already have a good supply, but if you are an unmuscular guy, you need to do the following, in this order:

1) condition your joints to bearing a load
2) build muscular endurance so your muscles can handle doing a lot of lifting
3) increase mass so you have more muscle to work with
4) increase muscle fiber recruitment (aka strength)

pavel/dragondoor's techniques cover 1 and 4, but not 2 or 3. and the truth is, for most people endurance is a more valuable attribute than strength anyway.

building muscle mass is a slow, painful process. in order to bear enough load on your arms to build muscle
there, you will have to build muscle in your back and shoulders first. muscle growth is metabolically very costly, and your body will not do it unless you push hard.

muscle development is also very genetically determined. some people benefit from frequent training, and some people benefit from hard, infrequent training. some people grow fast and some people grow slow. if you were the kind of person who grows fast, you would probably be buff already, so be prepared for a long haul.

I thought i'd say that i've only been doing frequent training for a week.

Come yiquan class, and I feel slow and far more unable.
I don't advocate this type of training for a person like me with my goals and body.
Back to basics.

Paradoxes of Internal Training Come Up & Down
Body weight exercises to warmup are best for baseline.
Isolation exercises make break one part apart from the whole.
Internal exercises focus on integrating the whole structure.