June 12th, 2008
In learning how to build muscle, people are often lead astray by unsubstantiated claims, fad workouts and diets.
You will note that the title of this article is ‘How To Build Muscle Mass Fast‘ - this is not to say you can ‘build crazy muscles in a week’ or other such nonsense. What you can do though, is maximize your potential for muscle growth naturally. This commonsense guide therefore represents the fastest way to build muscle.
In this article, I’ll summarize all the fundamental points of muscle building. It’s a good refresher for those already on the journey, and a great place to start for beginner bodybuilders (at the bottom of the article there is a definition of terms for any beginners among you).
How To Build Muscle 101
(1) Lift Weights - no doubt about it. Weight-training beats everything else for building muscle. Body-weight exercises (calisthenics), gymnastics, cardiovascular work, all may build some muscle for total beginners but only a little - then it stops. Why? Because you can’t add ever-increasing resistance with these other forms of exercise.
(2) Force Your Body To Adapt! Continuing from point one, your muscles will have no reason to grow if you don’t place them under ever-increasing demand. What this means is that the weight you can lift on any given
exercise should increase over time. No increase = no growth. This is the concept of Progressive Overload.
(3) Train For Hypertrophy & Avoid Strength Training. Hypertrophy means muscle growth. You want to specifically target this, as opposed to strength-training which has its focus primarily on strength gains with building muscle as a happy side-effect. Training for strength usually means a low rep range and compound-only workouts. While compound exercises are vital to a good workout, no-one is building bulging biceps with military presses and squats. Read on…
(4) Do Compound + Isolation Workouts - Compound exercises are crucial, they involve many muscle groups simultaneously and induce the release of growth hormone in the body. However, what if I want to shape my biceps? Work on the outer portion of my shoulders a bit more? This is where ‘compound-only strength training’ and Olympic weight-lifting is found wanting. I simply cannot train my biceps with enough intensity to produce continual growth without isolating that particular muscle.
(5) Train with A Full Range of Motion. Building muscle mass is all about feeling the muscle throughout the whole rep i.e. the concentric and eccentric part of the rep. To really mess this up, use weights that are too heavy for you, use too much momentum throughout the rep and do super-quick reps. This is another flaw of using ‘Olympic Weight-Lifting’ type exercises as your means of building muscle. Those type of exercises use a lot of momentum & fast, snap movements such as in the ‘Jerk’. This movement is not a muscle builder.
(6) Eat - Get enough calories. No matter what bodybuilding diet you are on, you need to eat enough to supply your body with what it needs to grow. Go here to see how many calories you need to build muscle.
(7) Get Enough Protein - No you don’t need astronomical amounts of protein to build muscle, but you do need more than the average guy. Use the following calculation:
Lean Mass Weight (Kg) x 2.75 = Daily Protein Requirement
(8) Train In The 8 - 12 rep range. I call this the hypertrophic rep range. Basically, you should reach failure on each set on the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th rep. When you can hit 12 or more, increase the weight used for that set.
(9) Keep Your Workouts Short. Steroid users can train for hours, natural bodybuilders can’t. Catabolic hormones are released in the body which actually break muscle down. To minimize this, try to keep all weight-training sessions to a maximum of 45 minutes.
(10) Take a Rest Between Workouts. If your priority is building muscle, what good could cardio do? I understand that you want to stay lean while you build muscle but this is best accomplished with a carb-cycling bodybuilding diet. Leave cardio until you want to prioritize fat-loss.
(11) Allow Adequate Rest Between Sets. Building muscle is all about performing at your best each and every set. Research shows that rest periods between sets of less than 1 minute reduce the amount of power muscle can produce in successive sets. Resting more than 3 minutes provides no further benefit than resting for 2 minutes. Therefore to strike the optimal balance between time-saving and maximum results, rest for around 2 minutes between sets.
(12) Drink Water. To build muscle at the maximum rate you need to drink enough water. Use this general rule:
Body weight (lbs) X 0.6 = Water Intake in ounces.
Remember strength can decrease by up to 15% with a drop in hydration levels of only 3%!
Definition of Bodybuilding Terms
- Reps - A single cycle of lifting and lowering a weight
- Sets - A number of consecutive reps without rest
- Hypertrophy - Muscle Growth
- Compound - An exercise that moves the body through more than one joint movement
- Isolation - An exercise that moves the body through a single-joint movement
- Concentric - The part of the rep where the muscle contracts and shortens
- Eccentric - The part of the rep where the muscle lengthens
- Failure - The point at which you cannot possibly perform another rep
So, with all this said, can YOU do it? Can you build the body you want? Of course you can. I was a weed with a fat belly once too. If I can do it, anyone can!
Stay Motivated!
Mark McManus
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16 Comments » | Posted in Build Muscle
So, is a high-protein diet bad for your kidneys?
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