How to Build Muscle Fast
The first thing that anybody who picks up a weight for the first time wants to do is to build muscle fast. Before I tell you how to build muscle fast, I want to warn you: It takes drive, dedication, and determination! It's not easy.
Putting muscle on your frame is one of the hardest things you can do. Results come relatively slow. It's pretty easy to learn how to throw a baseball or how to ride a bike. But building muscle fast is difficult. It can be done if you know how. I'll show you how to build big muscle fast on this page.
You will need to keep the Three Pillars in mind throughout your muscle-building phase: Training, Diet, and Recovery. The short version is that you need to train right, eat right, and give your body time to recover and grow.
Think of it like this: Training is the match, eating is the fuel, and recovery is the wind in a wild fire. You can make respectable gains by training hard and eating well, but you'll never GROW fast without proper recovery. You need that Santa Ana wind to stir up the fast muscle gains. Also note that a wild fire never even starts without the spark and fuel.
Training is the spark, or the match. It is nothing more. Your muscles really couldn't care less if you did bench presses, push-ups, flyes, or dips. Your pectorals don't know the difference. However, the complex movements that involve multiple joints stimulate more growth hormone production, more central nervous system involvement, and more growth because they involve many more muscle fibers. But do too much training and you'll regress; you can actually lose muscle. Err on the side of too little volume; you can always add volume over time in increments so that you don't overtrain.
Diet is HUGE when you want to get HUGE. You have to eat big to get big. There's no way around it. In order to build muscles fast, you have to consume a lot of calories. However, this is not a pass to eat junk or empty calories. Your food sources should come from what I call “the flesh foods” (beef, dairy, eggs, fish, fowl), which are rich sources of proteins (the building blocks of muscles), complex carbohydrates like brown rice, beans, bread, pasta, and vegetables, as well as “good fats” like nuts and avocados.
Strive to consume 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per pound of body weight, double that in carbs. Don't worry about the fat intake unless you start losing sight of your six-pack (if you don't have a six-pack, try cutting your fats by 10-15 percent). At that point, you'd want to cut back on the fats you get from your flesh foods (eat only lean cuts of beef).
Eat 3 regular meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), along with 3-5 snacks between meals and before bed. Make sure you stoke the fire with a shake before and after your weight workouts.
Finally, make sure you're getting at least 8 hours of sound sleep a night. Go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. The body is super-sensitive to even the smallest changes in your sleep patterns, and varying too much day-to-day can really impede your progress.
Follow these how-to guidelines and I guarantee you will build muscle fast.
