Today, I am going to show you the best way to build muscle.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a skinny guy who wants to gain 20 or 30 pounds of muscle mass in a hurry, or you just want to put on 10 or 15 pounds of “Hollywood muscle” so that you look good on the beach or around town. This is a strategy that will work for everyone.
So, if you want the fastest way to build muscle, and what you’re doing at the moment isn’t working, pay attention.
What I have to say might be just what you need to get better, faster results.
Step #1: Think Big
The first step to building muscle has nothing to do with what you eat, the type of training you do or the supplements you take. It’s about the way that you think. You have to really believe that getting big is possible.
Forget about your body type or your genetics. Forget about those times in the past where you’ve tried but failed to gain the muscle you wanted. Set a challenging but realistic goal for yourself and work as hard as you can towards achieving it.
Step #2: Get Strong
The next step is to train very hard and concentrate on getting strong at pressing (overhead press and bench press), pulling (deadlifts, chin-ups and rows) and squatting.
That doesn’t mean that you CAN’T include other exercises such as lateral raises, flyes, incline curls and so on.
However, they should be used as a SUPPLEMENT TO rather than a REPLACEMENT FOR pulling, pressing and squatting.
Frequently I read that you should keep changing exercises every few weeks to “confuse” your muscles and make them grow. For most people, this is a mistake. There is no point in variety for the sake of variety.
Make sure to stick with your training program for a minimum of 12 weeks. The best way to make zero progress is to keep jumping around from one routine to the next. It doesn’t work.
Step #3: Stimulate Don’t Annihilate
Take a look inside most of the popular muscle magazines and they’ll tell you that the only way to make your muscles grow is to “bomb them into submission” with lots of exercises, sets and reps.
Professional bodybuilders will typically use large training volumes (e.g. lots of sets and repetitions) as well as various techniques designed to fatigue their muscles, such as forced repetitions, descending sets and so on.
The problem is that anything professional bodybuilders do has to be seen in light of the fact that the majority (with the exception of those competing in “natural” contests, and even then I have my doubts about some of them) are using vast amounts of anabolic drugs.
You can’t take a program used by a heavily drug-assisted genetically gifted champion bodybuilder and assume that someone who trains naturally will get the same results simply by following the same program. It just doesn’t happen.
While some people get good results with split routines that involve training different muscle groups 5-6 days per week, they’re in the minority. If you’ve built a decent “base” of muscle and want to improve certain muscle groups, then some kind of split routine might be the way to go.
But if you’re like most guys, you’ll respond best to either a whole-body workout done 2-3 times per week or an upper-lower body routine performed four days each week.
Blitzing your muscles just once a week with lots of sets, repetitions and high-fatigue methods is going to extend your recovery time. But it’s not necessarily going to make you grow any faster. There’s no rule that says you have to annihilate each muscle group in order to make it grow.
Step #4: Eat
What you do in the gym is only half the story when it comes to gaining muscle mass. Without enough food, most of your muscle-building efforts in the gym will go to waste.
So how many calories do you need each day if you want to build muscle without gaining large amounts of fat?
1. Firstly, calculate your lean bodyweight. For example, if you weigh 175 pounds at 20% body fat, you have 35 pounds of fat and a lean bodyweight of 140 pounds.
2. Multiply your lean bodyweight by 20. Using a lean bodyweight of 140 pounds, that gives you 2800 calories per day.
If you find that you’re not gaining any weight, increase your calorie intake by around 250 calories per day until you start gaining weight.
But whatever you do, don’t resort to one of those crazy 6,000 calorie diets.
You can’t force your body to gain muscle faster than your genetics will allow simply by stuffing yourself with food. That’s because there’s an upper limit on the amount of nutrients you can take in and turn into muscle.
If you’re currently eating below this upper limit, then you’ll build muscle faster by increasing your nutrient take.
But once you’ve “maxed out” your rate of muscle gain, simply adding more calories won’t automatically lead to a faster rate of growth.
All that’ll happen is that you get fat.
To put it another way, you have to eat more nutrients than you use each day, but you shouldn’t eat so much that you end up gaining more fat than muscle.
Step #5: Keep It Simple
Once you have a decent training and nutrition program set up, the key to building muscle as fast as your genetics will allow is to stick with it.
Ignore the latest muscle-building bandwagon that everyone else is jumping on. Forget about fancy training routines, exotic supplements or elaborate diets.
Focusing too much on complicated techniques can distract you from the things that are really important and end up slowing growth instead of helping it.
Just concentrate on lifting heavy, training hard and eating right.
To repeat, building a decent amount of muscle means that you will need to get strong. There is no such thing as big without strong. Don’t let anyone try to kid you otherwise.
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