Build Muscle Fast
January 4th, 2007If you are looking to build muscle fast you need to concentrate on three main factors, eating, resting and training in that order. Most people assume the number one ingredient in building muscle fast is to workout hard, although significant, this is not the most important factor. Of course you will need to put serious effort into your workouts but to build muscle fast you need to spend more time in the kitchen followed by adequate amounts of rest than you will lifting weights in the gym. Without enough food ingested at regular intervals during the day you simply won’t grow fast enough and the same thing goes for sleep. It’s only when you are resting that you are actually growing.
You may not be aware of this fact but most gyms have an average of about 1 in 3 active members. The main reason behind this is because most people just don’t get any results from working out. The reason they don’t get results is due to the simple fact, they don’t know what they are doing. The majority of people walk into a gym with no plan, workout for weeks or months and see no progress at all, whether it is in gaining muscle or losing weight and then they stop, end of story. To see a noticeable difference in your body from working out with weights, especially if your goal is to build muscle, you need to start with a plan and your plan must include the three vital factors I mentioned earlier, eating right and frequently enough, long rest periods and high intensity workouts.
Let’s start with the eating. As a personal trainer I cannot stress enough how important each and every meal is if your goal is to build muscle as fast as possible. By the way, building muscle is definitely not something you can do quickly, it takes a long time to grow new muscle and it is for this reason I am writing this article. Since it takes so long to build muscle, you don’t want to be wasting your valuable time and not making any progress when you could be using the same amount of time wisely and making progress. This is why if you are looking to gain some quality muscle by working out regularly you need to start eating. Over the years I couldn’t tell you how many times someone has come to me and asked “I want to gain some serious muscle and I want to start doing it right now, what should I do?” Nine times out of ten I tell them they need to start eating more food and more often. The usual response is “I already eat a lot but I can’t gain weight”. What people who can’t gain weight don’t seem to understand is that gaining weight is purely mathematical, nothing more. If you eat more calories than you burn, you have to gain weight, it’s that simple. Many young guys who want to get into bodybuilding, I was one of them years ago, have trouble gaining weight since their metabolism is flying a million miles an hour. The only way to get the ball rolling is to eat more and in most cases a lot more.
Back in the late 1980’s when I got into serious training I had trouble gaining muscle till I met a few bodybuilders at my local gym who laughed at me when I told them I was a big eater, they quickly replied “it doesn’t look like it”. They went on to tell me I needed to start by eating double what I was currently eating and then when I can do that come back and see them. They said a great way to start would be by drinking a full liter of full cream milk in between each meal, so that was exactly what I did. At first I immediately felt sick after drinking a full liter for the first few weeks after each meal and I threw up many times but I wanted muscle so badly I didn’t care. My mother thought I was crazy but I kept it up and have a guess what happened. It worked, I was getting bigger and still being a teenager at the time with a lightening fast metabolism, I wasn’t getting fatter, I was getting more muscular. At this time I was also working out for about 2 hours per day, 6 days a week. Eventually I cut back on the milk and started eating more solid food and I continued to get even bigger as I ate more and more. Within a year I had gone from 150 to 180 pounds eating mainly beef, chicken, eggs and occasionally some fish for my protein and rice, pasta, fruit and vegetables for my carbohydrates.
Everybody is different when it comes to eating and I am not going to get into specifics within this article about how much of what foods you need to eat to gain muscle but what you do need to do is eat every 3 hours. For most people this means you should be eating 5-6 times per day, everyday to build muscle fast, no exceptions. A good mix of food for the hard gainer would be to eat approximately 40% protein, 10% fat and 50% carbohydrates. A couple of example meals would be, half pound of beef with a medium bowl of rice and some green vegetables. A half pound of chicken breast or 6 medium size chicken drumsticks with a medium plate of pasta and a piece of fruit. One pound of canned tuna in water with a quarter of a fresh pineapple. If these meals seem excessively large to you, you are obviously not eating enough, you really need to be eating meals of this size 5-6 times a day if you want to gain muscle fast.
These days I usually stay clear of milk but I do take a whey protein shake immediately after my workout and just before I go to bed at night and also eat 5-6 solid meals of food throughout the day. This is a lot of food but at my current bodyweight of about 240 pounds I need this much food to maintain the level of muscle and still keep a low bodyfat percentage. Although I am an advocate of protein shakes I still believe you are better off with solid food most of the time. The protein shake after the workout is ideal for the body to quickly absorb some essential amino acids necessary to begin the refueling and repairing of your muscles from training but remember it is only a food supplement, solid food is always the better option. Despite whatever supplement or drug companies will tell you, no amount of protein powder, creatine monohydrate, concentrated liquid amino acids or steroids can deliver what you will get from a mix of solid proteins and carbohydrates from food.
One more very important ingredient in a muscle building diet is water. Your entire body is approximately 70% water and that means that most of your muscle is actually made up of water. Although it seems like a lot, most people should be drinking between 12-20 glasses of water per day depending on your body weight. If you are in doubt, drink more, a lot more. Most people don’t drink even 50% of what they should be each day. If you are looking to build muscle fast, a good start would be to increase your water intake to 50% more than you are currently drinking. Yes you will be going to the toilet more often but you will also start seeing results a lot quicker.
When it comes to resting, this is almost as important as eating. While you are working out in the gym you are stimulating your muscles but it is only when resting that your muscles get a chance to recover. The growth actually happens while your body is at rest or asleep. The person looking for serious muscle growth should be sleeping for about 8 hours per night and if you could have an afternoon nap each day or on your days off, go for it, it can only help you recover quicker from your workouts and allow your muscles to work harder the next time you train. Resting your mind is also an important factor in recovery since the mind is inherently linked to the body. If you are under stress mentally it is difficult for the body to rest physically, so keep this in mind. A calm and low stress lifestyle is conducive to building muscle fast.
A lot has changed since the Arnold Schwarzenegger days and also my own early days of training back in the 80’s. These days the biggest bodybuilders on earth are training less and less. I remember seeing a former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates in seminar a few years back and he said he only trained for 45 minutes 4 times per week and I believe at his biggest he sometimes wouldn’t even train that much. So you can forget about these 2 hour marathon workouts I used to do 6 days a week, those days are gone and I’m certainly happy about that. After almost 20 years of heavy workouts I must say as much as I love training I would rather get my workout over and done with in an hour rather than two. When Dorian Yates says he works out for 45 minutes he means he works out almost non stop for that period. Most people will rest for about a minute or so in between sets and that’s ok but if you are resting anymore than a minute you need to get serious and get moving if you want serious results.
Ideally, if you are a beginner or intermediate, you should be covering your upper body in 2 workouts and your legs in 1 workout per week, that’s only 3 in total, no more. Too many people over complicate their workout routine unnecessarily, if you want to build muscle fast, less is more and stick to the basics. I am not going to get into complex training techniques as I don’t do that myself, I just hit the gym hard with basic movements and lift around 8-10 reps till failure on almost every set after I am sufficiently warmed up.
The perfect routine for most people interested in gaining muscle would be to train about 9 sets of chest, 6 sets of shoulders and 6 sets of triceps on Monday. Take a day rest, and then do 9 sets of quadriceps and 6 sets of hamstrings on Wednesday. Another day rest, then finish with 12 sets of back/trapezius and 6 sets of biceps on Friday. Take the weekends off and then start again on Monday repeating the cycle and continually keep changing the exercises you perform for each muscle regularly since your body responds well to change. If you keep doing the same exercises week after week without change your progress will lag. Keep the rest time to a maximum of 1 minute between sets and make sure you can complete a full rep for a minimum of 8 reps every set but cannot do more than 10 complete reps without failing. It is up to you to find the correct weight that allows you 8 reps but no more than 10, this way of training is imperative in building muscle fast. If you can follow this routine this is all you need to do in the gym, perhaps a few sets of abdominals at the end of each workout wouldn’t hurt either. This may not seem like much but if you are not totally exhausted by the end of this workout you are not training hard enough. Whether you are a beginner or advanced bodybuilder you will know instinctively by the end of your work out if you have trained hard enough and if you want the best results it’s up to you to turn up the volume on your workout but there is no need to ever be in the gym for anymore than 1 hour per workout. I feel 3 workouts per week in enough for most people, however, as you start to see a noticeable gain in muscle size you could go for 4 workouts per week but certainly no more.
One more thing I want to mention is if you are still feeling sore in the muscles you are about to train on a scheduled workout day it’s better to take an extra day off than to train an already sore muscle. I must say that I had a lot of difficulty accepting what I have told you in this article about training less, since I initially started bodybuilding by training for hours a day and almost everyday. I always thought the more the better but now I know from many years of experience and a number of injuries that less training time and more intensity during my workouts is the ultimate key to growth. Now at 36 my body is as muscular and as lean at 240 pounds as it’s ever been and I know that if I wanted to gain even more muscle I would not so much have to adjust my workouts as I would have to increase my food intake. If you stick to the basic guidelines I have mentioned here and up your food to the necessary level, get enough sleep and don’t miss your workouts for any other reason than sickness or unless you feel you have not fully recovered from your last workout on that body part you will build muscle fast. All this writing has made me hungry, I think it’s T-bone time.
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January 11th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I think you make a lot of good points here. Resting, eating and trainig are the three pillars of building muscle and if any one of them is out of whack then your gains will not be optimal. Great article!
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