Welcome! Our site offers information on the fastest way to build muscle. The first question you want to ask yourself is why you want to build muscle fast? The answer to this question will lead you to a workout and nutrition plan that will help you achieve your goals.
If you want more definition for a specific event, like a beach vacation with that special someone three weeks from now, your plan will be different than someone who needs to build muscle for an upcoming mixed martial arts event or the upcoming spring football training season.
So ask yourself, do you want to build muscle for an event that has a specific date in the near future or are you looking to build it and keep it on, maintaining it through consistent lifting down the road? If you fall into the first category, our recommendations are below; if you fall into the second category, please check out our page on the best way to build muscle.
I want to look more muscular a few weeks from now
If your main goal is to look good for an upcoming beach vacation or something similar, you need to hit the gym (the right way) and increase your protein intake big time. Long term muscle building strategies generally focus on establishing overall strength, versus isolating individual muscle groups for maximum definition, but we don’t have time for that. If you want to build muscle fast and really improve your physique, focusing on building overall strength is going to take too long.
With that said, you need to decide which parts of your body you want to focus on. For most men we’d imagine you’ll be focusing on arms, chest, and abs, while women will probably want to focus on abs, thighs and calves. We could be wrong here, but our recommendations will still be the same.
We need to start this off with a warning though. Do NOT kill yourself if you’re not used to lifting weights. You need to hit the gym if you want to build muscle fast, but going in and doing 4 sets of the heaviest weight your body can handle will leave you sore for days; sore to the point that you can’t lift a pencil let alone weights. This is not good. I know it’s tempting, and we all do it our first time back to the gym, but try your hardest not to let it happen. You are much better off lifting what you think is too little weight, and then increasing it the next day, versus being so sore you can’t go to the gym at all.
Fastest Way to Build Muscle – Strategies
Now that we’ve given you our little warning, let’s talk about strategies. Forget about body building magazines and forget about how much you can ‘max.’ What you need to build muscle fast (and increase definition) is muscle burn, and muscle burn is not achieved by lifting the heaviest weight possible.
There are two types of muscle building strategies: doing a small number of reps with super heavy weight to increase strength and mass, and doing a large number of reps with less weight to increase definition and endurance. We want you somewhere right in the middle, but with an added bonus: doing one set with a high number of reps and a relatively small amount of weight, to the point that it burns. That burning feeling is what helps you build muscle and increase definition in the shortest amount of time. Lifting the heaviest weights you possibly can, on the other hand, is not going help your physique in three weeks, and will leave you sore to the point of not being able to lift any weights at all.
With that said, we’ll still take a few pointers from the ‘my bicep is as big as your thigh’ guys. The first being: skip the machines and focus on free weights. Machines provide assistance, period. Just because you can curl 60 pounds on the bicep machine does not mean you can curl 60 pounds of free weight.
There are a couple reasons for this, mainly the fact that machines do not allow for natural range of motion; they force you to lift in a pre-determined range of motion. Machines also remove the need for you to balance. When lifting weights, you need to balance the weights you’re lifting against your body’s natural weight (meaning you need to keep yourself upright and use your core to resist gravity).
The second pointer we’ll take from the genetically and chemically enhanced is to consume the right foods and supplements. Now don’t get all turned off because I said supplements. The only supplement we recommend is protein, because it can be difficult to eat a sufficient amount of protein without adding in red meat and nuts high in fatty oils. We’ll skip all the ‘get ripped’ pills for now; most are bogus anyways. We’ll get more in-depth regarding food intake on our food and supplements page, so let’s just say you should expect to drink a protein shake or two every day if you really want to increase your definition and build muscle fast.
The Fastest Way to Gain Muscle Involves Rest
With that said, lifting weights is only 40-50% of the process here. Eating right and getting enough protein is also a large part of the process. The one thing most people forget, however, is rest. That’s right, building muscle requires rest; sleep in particular.
For those of you who don’t know, building muscle involves making micro-tears in your muscle fiber (which ‘hurts’ them). They don’t die though, they just come back and rebuild themselves stronger. This is why lifting super heavy weights your first time back at the gym is not good (as a matter of fact, if you really want to build muscle fast you won’t be doing heavy lifting at all). Pushing yourself after your first few days is ok, but you have to respect your muscle fiber. If the micro-tears become too big from lifting too much, you will experience pain and soreness, which is counter-productive.
Attempting to lift weights when you’re sore could actually end up doing damage to the muscle tissue and result in net muscle loss (it will also feel like torture). This is why it is crucial that you do not push yourself too hard. If you don’t have that much time to build muscle you need to set yourself up for maximum muscle growth, which means allowing enough time (rest) for the muscles to regenerate before lifting and causing more micro-tears.
Anyways, back to my point about rest. When you sleep, growth hormones (the natural kind, not the Barry Bonds kind) are released by your body. These hormones aid in the regenerative process of helping your muscles recover from the micro-tears, allowing them to regenerate bigger than they were before. It is imperative that you understand this. With that said, even with the right amount of lifting, protein and rest, you have to remember not to compare yourself to others in your quest to become more muscular.
How to Grow Muscle Fast
While everyone on this planet can build more muscle by doing resistance training and increasing their protein intake, there are factors out of your control that have an impact on how much and how quickly you can build muscle. Your genetic makeup and your age also have a lot to do with how your body reacts to resistance training.
In general younger men experience muscle hypertrophy at a faster rate than any other segment of the population. This typically occurs during puberty though, so the majority of you can ignore this part. If you are in puberty, however, you will be able to build muscle much faster than at any other point in your life, so enjoy it.
The second factor that impacts muscle building is your genetic makeup. Bodybuilders are not extremely muscular just because they lift a lot of weights; they are also genetically inclined to have large muscles and 99% of the time would have muscular bodies even if they didn’t do extensive resistance training. There is nothing you can do about this, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger after four weeks in the gym; it just isn’t going to happen.
That’s it for our discussion of the fastest ways to build muscle. In our next post we will be talking about the best way to build muscle. In this post we will breakdown the exact type of routine you can use to build muscle and get a healthy amount of muscle burn while not killing yourself. From there, we will touch on the best supplements for muscle growth & protein shakes for women and conclude with how much rest you need to get after your workouts. Our last post will outline ways to alternate various muscle groups so you can work out 5-6 days/week without negatively affecting muscle tissues that are still rebuilding. And if you found this article helpful make sure to ‘Like’ or ‘+1′ us below. Thanks!