Muscle Gain - Build A Muscle Fast

The desire for muscle gain is justified, both medically as well as socially. Being healthy and physically fit gives you a better quality of life. It also makes you feel more confident and energetic. ‘A sound mind in a sound body' as we always hear is not very far from the truth. You're ability to process information and make sound decisions depends on your opinion of yourself as an individual and as a decision maker. If your self-esteem is high, you more likely to make better, more concrete decisions as compared to when your self-esteem and self-image is a low one.

So how do you become a hard gainer, or if you already are, how do you improve your output? Here are some ground rules that are critical to successful weight training. These rules are not only efficient and result oriented, they are safe and healthy.

1. Eat More: when you weight train, your body needs extra energy to grow and build strength. This extra energy comes from your food. But if you're on a weight loss diet, you'll actually undergo malnutrition. Weight training requires that your body be supplied with a healthy, consistent and abundant energy source. This comes from foods that are high on high quality calories. Your daily diet should be giving you more calories than you're likely to burn in a single day.

2. 6 meals a Day: the extra calories that you get from your diet can' come from 3 meals spaced 5-6 hours apart. This will not help you build muscle; rather you will build up fat. If the body is deprived of food for longer than 3-4- hours, it assumes it's starving; it slows down the metabolism and begins storing energy as fat. Instead of building muscle, you risk loosing muscle mass as the body begins to break down muscle tissue to gain energy. Sounds scary right? A lot of experts are now of the view that eating 6 meals a day keeps your metabolism elevated and gives your body a constant source of energy that it can use to ‘build' muscle mass.

3. Protein Shakes: take a protein shake right after your workout. This will give your body a ready and plentiful supply of protein to help heal and build the muscles.

4. Workout Reps: your workout reps should never be more than 10. Beyond 10 reps, the workout starts to emphasize the slow-twitching muscle fibers and these have the lowest potential for growth. So wasting energy and effort on them won't be of any help in building strength.

5. Workout Weight: never workout with light weights. Switch to a heavier weight with every single set and exercise. Remember never to do more than 10 reps when working heavy weights.

6. Strength Increases: aim for 5%-6% strength increases every two weeks. This means you should be lifting 5% more weight after two weeks than you are now. For the bigger muscle like the legs and the back muscles, you may try for larger target increase and for the smaller ones 5% or even a bit less will work.

7. Short Workouts: make your workout time at the gym shorter as you increase weights. This will give you more recovery and muscle building time.

• John Palsson
• 28/01/2009, 8:59 AM
• 0 Comments