How To Build Muscle Fast
This article is going to focus on bulking up, building muscle, and gaining weight. If you have a spare tire you’d like to get rid of first, read my How To Lose Weight Fast guide first.
The Essentials
Bulking up quickly requires two basic things. Eating more calories than you burn and weight training.
People who fail to get results in building muscle are almost always forgetting one of those two basics, and it’s usually the consuming more calories part of the equation so let’s focus on that first.
More Calories
If you’re trying to build muscle fast, you’re going to want a 1,000-2,000 calorie surplus each day. That means consuming at least 1,000 more calories than your body can burn. To build muscle, your body needs fuel and while it’d be nice if it would take it from your fat cells, that’s unfortunately not how it works.
Now the important thing to remember here is that this isn’t a license to eat Big Macs or Whoppers everyday because you need to consume extra calories.
The extra food you eat needs to be healthy.
One easy food to start adding in is peanut butter. It’s high in calories and is still good for you. Another good food is almonds. You’ll probably also want to get a quality protein powder.
For your meals, make sure you get protein at all of them. However, and this is important, you still need fruits and vegetables. Eat more, but eat healthy.
Weight Training
Now let’s talk about the weight training portion of building muscle and bulking up fast.
Just going in and doing 45 minutes of cardio isn’t going to help you bulk up. In fact, that’s for people who generally want to lose weight and want to get in better shape.
However, if you were to look at competitive body builders, you’d find they don’t do much cardio at all.
My favorite program written on the subject of weight training is called Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. It’s written by a competitive body builder – someone who knows a little something about “bulking up.”
Focus On Your Big Muscles
You’re not going to bulk up fast if you spend most of your workout doing isolation exercises (i.e. bicep curls or anything else that only works one muscle at a time).
You need to focus on working big muscle groups. Your back, chest, legs, and shoulders.
Here are a few exercises that will give you one hell of a workout:
• Bench press
• Military press
• Squats
• Rows
• Deadlifts
• Chin-ups
• Lat pull downs
Caution: Many of these exercises require excellent form to avoid injury. For your first week, do these exercises with very light weights and talk to a personal trainer at your gym to make sure you’ve got your form right or you can seriously injury yourself (and it’s tough to build muscle if you’re stuck on the couch, hurt).
Few, Heavy Reps
If you’re really focusing on power, you want to lift heavy weights for a few reps. An ideal set is about 5-7 reps. If you can do more than 7 reps, your weight isn’t heavy enough.
Do 5-7 reps of your exercise and 4-6 sets of them.
Rest Days
Here is a very important key. Muscle isn’t built on your weight training days. Muscle fibers are actually torn and ripped apart when you’re weight training. The reason you get stronger is because your body spends the next day repairing all the damage you did to make your muscles stronger so it can do more the next time.
However, if you hit the gym the very next day after a tough training day, your body won’t have had a chance to fix the damage you did the day before. Always take at least a day off from training a muscle group. (As you get stronger, you’ll actually find each muscle group requires more time to recover, not less.)
Muscle is built on your rest days. When you’re first getting into your weight training regimen – do three 3 days of weight training a week – max!
Accelerate Your Results
Let’s talk about some ways you can accelerate your muscle building.
First of all, having a detailed plan of what exercises to do, what you should eat, and when to do it all can be extremely. That’s why I recommend that anyone who is serious about building muscle read Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. It’s really one of the best resources on bulking up and getting stronger (without steroids) available.
Protein
Muscle is built from protein. In order to build muscle fast, you need to increase your consumption of high quality protein without going overboard on the fat. That’s why protein powders are used by just about everyone looking to bulk up. I recommend getting a high quality whey protein like this one (I think the chocolate fudge flavor is their best tasting) for those looking to get results fast.
Creatine
There aren’t a whole lot of supplements I really recommend when it comes to bulking up. Most of them are a complete waste of money. However, if there’s a shortcut to getting faster results, that shortcut is creatine.
Creatine is found naturally in small amounts in meat, but taking it in a supplement form is really a great way to boost your results.
Here’s one of my favorites (it’s a quality product and actually tastes good).
Energy
I’ve talked about this in a few different places on this website, but I’m going to mention it again here because it’s really important. To get the most out of your workout and your training days, you need to go in and push yourself as hard as you can.
If you plan on going in and doing a half assed workout, then there’s no point in going in at all. Fast results require you to go in and make that workout a hard one when you’ve pushed yourself.
I certainly know the feeling of wanting to go in but just not having the energy to get all you can out of your workout. Sometimes you need a boost.
So here’s the energy drink I use when I need to get going.
This stuff is really pretty damn good. Lance Armstrong uses this stuff and so do the Golden State Warriors. If it’s good enough for Lance, it’s good enough for me. It’s called FRS Energy.
While this stuff isn’t available in stores, you can get a FREE TRIAL of the stuff here. They’ll send you a two week supply for the price of shipping and handling (I don’t recall what it is, but it’s no big deal – like $5 or something .)
It’s great a giving you a big energy boost, but without the crash you get with most of the energy drinks you get from the store.
Home Gym
To be honest, I think you’ll get the best results if you get a gym membership, but I know that’s not practical for everyone and not everyone has time to drive to the gym. If you’re in need of home gym equipment, then you’re going to be best served by getting a Bowflex.
You can get your entire workout in quickly without any travel time so it’s a good investment if you’re short on time but still want to bulk up and get in shape.