A Few Quick ‘Tried And Tested’ Muscle Building Tips

There is much advice floating around both on and offline about how to build muscle fast. As a personal trainer myself here are a few little known facts and secrets that I personally consider worth your while contemplating on your quest to build muscle mass:

I often hear that you should train each muscle group just once a week. Whilst this may be provide optimal progress for extremely hardgainers it is not true for the vast majority of people. Sure, you should avoid overtraining but like most things in life you won’t get good at something by practicing it just once a week, this is true to a certain extent in weight lifting also. You need to train each muscle more than once a week, probably twice per week being suitable for most bodybuilders. Ideally you should rotate your workouts through periods when you are near overtraining and periods where you near undertraining. This provides times when there is a lot of stress for the body to handle and other times when the body has more time to recover and build momentum for another push. Hitting training plateaus can be avoided by doing this.

Ensure that your training sessions don’t exceed 45 minutes. If you deem that time limit to short then possibly your workout is not short enough or you are not staying focussed and working out intensely. 45 minutes will be plenty if you really focus on intensity and avoid distractions. If your workouts last longer then this then testosterone levels drop dramatically due to the increased production of cortisol which actually causes the body to eat muscle tissue and store fat. completely the opposite to what we are after.

You ought to cycle your training. after a while your body adapts to a routine so that it no longer stimulates growth. You should change your routine before your gains diminish completely. You need to ensure that you don’t change your training sessions to frequently either. Doing this will confuse your body too much and prevent it from getting into a nice groove and feel like you are just simply spinning your wheels.

It is unlikely that you will make significant gains if you don’t perform the correct exercises. The right exercises are exercises that allow you to perform multi-joint movements and are know as compound exercises. The number one exercises being: bench presses, rows, squats, pull ups, shoulder presses plus any exercise that moves your entire body through air ie, not just moving individual limbs. If you use these exercises, with a few of their variations and correct muscle building nutrition then you can’t help but stimulate muscle mass growth. With those guidelines in mind, go pump some iron, eat correctly and get huge.