Increasing growth hormone is one of the very most effective ways that a bodybuilder can improve their gains and get more from their workouts. The entire purpose of a training session is to create tiny traumas to the muscle fibres which the body will then rebuild thicker and stronger with the help of amino acids in your diet. It is growth hormone that signals the body to make those repairs and so without it bodybuilders would never recover from training sessions and wouldn’t be able to grow. Conversely, the more GH you get, the better your results will be.
Most bodybuilders know this and will aim to increase their GH levels through the use of high-volume compound training to increase their hormonal response. The squats are hailed as ‘king’ for bodybuilders looking to add mass primarily for this reason.
But if you really want to see results, then you may want to consider occasionally straying out of the free-weights section and towards some of those much maligned cardio machines. You may have come to associate those with skinny types who don’t care about burning muscle if it means they can improve their marathon time, but actually they have very powerful effects when it comes to boosting GH and thus hypertrophy. And as it happens those benefits may be even greater than the ones garnered in the squat rack. The king is dead! Long live the king…
Benefits of Running for HGH
Running is one of the most well-known and effective ways to boost growth hormone levels – and sprinting is actually even more effective. Running is also well known for increasing levels of serotonin and other ‘feel good’ hormones which are responsible for what is known as the ‘runners’ high’. This may be somewhat related to its ability to increase GH as several studies have actually demonstrated there to be a link between dopamine and growth hormone.
More to the point though, it’s important to remember that growth hormone doesn’t only serve to build muscle. Another of its functions is to help the body burn fat for energy, which is highly useful when running long distances.
Finally, running will target your leg muscles and all the supporting muscles that help you to stay upright. This means you’re causing microtears across the largest regions of muscle and that in turn will trigger more growth hormone response as there will be more microtears to repair.
High Intensity Training for Growth Hormone
But all this is true of any kind of running – what’s so special about high intensity sprinting?
With high intensity sprinting, the idea is to run faster that you normally would on a treadmill for short bursts. This might mean sprinting for a minute for instance and then jogging for three while you recover before repeating the process. Ultimately you end up alternating between sprinting and jogging and this increased intensity allows you to speed up your heart rate and push yourself past your normal limitations.
In particular, these brief periods of sprinting will put your body in an ‘anaerobic state’. What that means is that you’ll be running faster than your body will be able to get energy from oxygen, meaning that it will be forced to get it from fat stores. That’s good news if your goal is weight loss, and it’s even better news if your goal is growth hormone stimulation.
Furthermore, these bursts of speed will engage the super-fast twitch muscle- fibres in your legs. These are the fibres that are used only for the very most explosive of movements such as sprinting and which trigger the biggest release of growth hormone of all. They’re also very beneficial to train for the simple reason that you probably don’t train them that regularly under your current regime.
For Even Better Results…
While doing this kind of training on a treadmill is good, doing it outside is better still. The reason for that is partly because you’ll be getting vitamin D from the sun which has been shown to be highly beneficial for growth hormone production. On top of that though, running outside allows you to take advantage of uneven surfaces which means your muscles need to work harder to stabilise you and help you balance. This again means more muscle targeted and more growth hormone as a result.
Try HGH Supplements
Over and above, you can also try natural HGH supplements that stimulate growth hormone production in your body without any harmful or adverse side effects. Such supplements are quite a hit with bodybuilders since they can help speed up muscle growth.
One of the best HGH supplements is Somatropinne HGH from HGH.com. It has been developed with input from IFBB pros. Not just this, it’s also recommended and endorsed by professional bodybuilders.
