How to increase muscle strength without gaining mass?

Author: Timko Ilya - master of the whole project and fitness trainer.
2015-05-31

Any man does not want to increase his muscle mass indefinitely. However, everyone wants to increase their strength endlessly! And there comes a moment when the body shape and weight are already satisfactory, but strength is not. Why does this happen? Because a real man ALWAYS wants to be stronger than he currently is! ))

At the same time, many understand that strength equals mass, and mass equals strength. In other words, to become stronger, one must become bigger. But the desire to constantly grow larger diminishes. What to do? Now I will share some tricks that can help you increase strength without gaining mass.

Natural Nutrition

If you do not want to gain weight, you need to consume exactly as many calories as you expend. Here you can calculate how much you expend: caloric expenditure calculator. You can also find suitable menus for men and for women here.

Nutrition is the main factor in maintaining your weight at a constant level. If your caloric intake equals your caloric expenditure, then there simply won't be any additional body weight to gain. Overall, it’s quite simple. Calculate how much you expend daily and eat according to the menus provided.

Sports Nutrition

From sports nutrition, you will need supplements that do not have a DIRECT impact on mass growth but do have an effect (at least indirect) on strength growth. These include:

• Creatine
• Ecdysterone or tribulus
• Vitamin and mineral complexes
• BCAAs
• Joint and ligament protection supplements

Although creatine retains water, it is not in large amounts. Moreover, the water quickly leaves once you stop taking it. Ecdysterone or tribulus stimulates testosterone production in the body. The higher your testosterone levels, the stronger you become. Vitamins and minerals provide at least good well-being, which also positively affects your strength. Meanwhile, BCAAs help recover the muscle structure.

Thus, consuming all of these supplements simultaneously will not directly lead to mass growth. However, they may indirectly affect it. Just remember, you will be eating for weight maintenance, so theoretically, your weight should not increase. However, these supplements will noticeably increase your strength.

Basic Exercises

Everyone knows that strength growth requires basic exercises. However, they also promote mass growth. What to do? Focus on the basics but do them with a low number of repetitions—between 1 and 6 repetitions. Isolation exercises are also necessary, but they should complement the basics. If you only perform basic exercises, especially with 1 – 6 repetitions, you will quickly exhaust both your musculoskeletal system and become mentally fatigued. Perform 4 basic exercises and 2 – 3 isolation exercises per workout.

Cardio

A little cardio won’t hurt. It’s needed so that you can process some extra calories (if they happen to appear) into energy. For example, running twice a week for 30 minutes should suffice. This should not affect strength gains. At the same time, the risk of gaining excess weight will be significantly lower.

If you lead a fairly active lifestyle, such as walking a lot for work or engaging in physical labor, then you probably won’t need cardio.

Conclusions

In conclusion, I want to emphasize a rather important point. The fact is that increasing strength without gaining mass is quite limited. That is, you can enhance your strength indicators without gaining mass only for the first few months until you reach your genetic limit. After that, to increase strength even slightly, you will need to gain body weight.

Furthermore, the more trained a person is, the fewer resources they have for increasing strength without gaining weight. Well-trained athletes, for instance, those who have spent many years in powerlifting or other strength sports, find it virtually impossible to significantly increase strength without also increasing their weight.

And remember, working solely on strength for an extended period is dangerous. This is primarily a risk for your joints and ligaments. Therefore, I recommend focusing on strength for no longer than 3 months. Ideally, 2 months is sufficient. After that, you need to switch to other goals. Good luck!