Important Steps That Help You Build Muscle Fast
It’s important to go about building muscle correctly. Here are some additional building muscle tips that all serious strength trainers who want to build muscle fast need to know:
Just like anything else, consistency is a key element in being successful, and your workout will be no exception. A full commitment is required to give yourself the best odds of success. You need to develop a consistent workout habit. A general rule-of-thumb is that it takes about two weeks to develop a habit – good or bad! If you can regularly hit the weights on an every-other-day regimen, you’ll be well on your way to establishing the consistency you’ll need to be successful.
If you can train at least 3 times per week, that should provide you with enough muscle-building stimuli to start and maintain the hypertrophic (muscle-building) process. It also gives your muscles a day in between workouts to recover. Remember, muscle growth doesn’t occur during exercise; rather, it occurs during the post-workout healing and rest process. Don’t shortchange yourself there.
If you’re following an effective weight training program, you should be able to complete a thorough workout in about 30 minutes. You only have to pause briefly between sets before continuing. If your workouts tend to approach more than an hour in length, you may want to scale that back a bit, because tired muscles are more prone to pulls and tears. If you feel any pain during your workout, stop at once and find out what’s causing the problem. Continuing further can only make a bad situation worse.
From purely a workout perspective, muscle growth occurs when you perform a high volume of ‘work’ at a medium, increasing intensity. ‘Volume’ here means the number of reps and sets you perform, and the ‘intensity’ variable is how much weight you’ll lift. All beginning strength trainers should begin their workout regimens using a ‘high volume, medium intensity’ approach. Over time, as your muscle mass begins to build, gradually keep increasing the intensity factor a little to keep sustaining your progress.
The physiologies behind hypertrophy (muscle growth) and cardio exercises (for weight loss) are contradictory and need to be well understood by the strength trainer to build muscle effectively. Weight lifting is an anabolic process, which means that hormonal and physical processes combine to facilitate the increase in protein-based muscle. However, cardio exercises tend to be catabolic in nature, meaning they have a tendency to break down protein-based muscle mass as fuel to burn calories. You’ll need to strike the right balance (for you) between the two.
Drinking an adequate amount of fluids may seem like a no-brainer, but it is key to your workout’s ability to help you build muscle. Increase your fluids intake before, during, and after all workouts. Remember that dehydrated muscle tissue takes longer to repair itself, slowing muscle growth. Also, waste products from the metabolic processes that are occurring during exercise are excreted and need to be flushed out of your system. Drinking plenty of fluids help get the job done.
Your diet – both pre-workout and post-workout – is critical to your being able to maximize the effects of your training program. It takes the human body, on average, about one and a half hours to digest a meal. Since your body needs calories as fuel for your workout, you have to give your body a chance to convert that meal into usable energy before your start exercising. Once you’ve burned through those calories, though, your body is now deficient in glycogen (carbohydrates). If you don’t replace that glycogen quickly (say, within the next half hour), your body will start breaking down muscle tissue as another energy source. Make it a habit to consume a high-carbohydrate nutrition drink, or eat some fruit, immediately after your workout to keep that from occurring.
As difficult as it is these days to maintain a balanced diet – and particularly for strength trainers – you may want to consider filling in some of those nutritional gaps with antioxidants and high quality vitamin supplements. So-called free radicals are molecules that tend to destabilize other molecules, and taking antioxidants such as Vitamins E, C, and A can prevent further damage to muscle tissue that’s just been through a hard workout. Glutamine and selenium are also very beneficial.
If you follow these basic muscle building tips, you’ll enjoy a safer and more effective workout!
The author Rocco Polagamo was a skinny, pencil-necked dweeb until he figured out how to build muscle how the real strength trainers do! Read his and others’ articles on how anyone can build muscle fat loss with great tips from the pros!
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