3 Important Tips To Build Muscle Fast – Get Lean and Ripped Quickly
By: Mike Geary
Let’s face the facts – building muscle is definitely not going to be an easy thing to accomplish even if you are performing regular hard workouts and taking as many supplements as you possibly can fit in your medicine cabinet.
I struggled for years to gain any significant amount of muscle, but then as my personal training business started taking off, I begin to experiment with different techniques myself to see what worked best so I could then share this information with my clients.
Now I’d like to give you three important tips that will help you build lean muscle mass much faster and easier.
1. Make sure 95% of the exercises you are performing are multi-joint compound exercises. It doesn’t matter if your goal is to build muscle mass or lose fat, those big multi-joint exercises are going to get you the fastest results and make you appear lean, ripped, and powerful.
It’s fairly easy to follow this principle if you think about movements like these:
- upper body horizontal press (bench press, push-ups, dips)
- upper body horizontal rows (1-arm dumbbell rows, seated cable rows, bent over barbell rows)
- upper body vertical pull (lat pull-downs, pull-ups, chin-ups)
- upper body vertical press (overhead dumbbell and barbell presses, barbell or kettlebell clean & presses)
- lower body squatting movements (front squats, back squats, overhead squats, bodyweight squats, etc)
- lower body deadlifting movements (regular deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts)
- lower body single leg movements (lunges, step-ups, jump lunges, etc)
- abdominal and core exercises (these are important but still are 2nd priority since they are not considered multi-joint exercises)
After you’ve completed these exercises, then the other 5% of your program can consists of single joint movements such as bicep curls, tricep presses, calf raises, shoulder lateral raises, pec flyes, and so on. They will help bring out muscle definition but won’t get you the degree of results that the multi-joint lifts will.
2. Train hard and very intensely for 3-4 days a week for 45-60 minutes per session. It’s important that you don’t let your workouts go longer than 60 minutes because if you’re training quite a bit past this point you may trigger catabolism in your muscles (cause your muscles to break-down). Since you want your muscles to stay anabolic, aim to train hard, but keep those sessions short.
If you like you can try a super-set style of workout that will really help to maximize the results you get. Ideally I prefer to combine upper body and lower body movements together since they don’t interfere with each other like two lower body exercises paired together would.
Do not underestimate the power supersets can hold if you do them properly. It was when I started doing these that I saw the absolute best results from my workouts and I’m confident you would too if you implemented them.
These should be the ‘bread and butter’ of any workout program and then the calories can just be adjusted accordingly to match whatever your needs are at the time.
3. Eat clean, quality, whole foods and avoid any overly processed over-hyped supplement powders and bars. The quality of foods you want to be putting in your body will have the highest amount of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, thus will enable you to see the best results from your diet. This includes foods such as eggs, meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds rather than processed protein powders, chemical-laden bars, and other meal replacement products.
Forget about the heavily advertised ‘hyped up’ workouts that you see in muscle magazines. These will only work for pro bodybuilders who are often also using steroids (a tiny fact they fail to mention in the magazines) that is what really gets them their results. Instead, follow these three tips and you’ll quickly notice the difference with both how you look and feel.
If you want to get a lean chiseled body, check out these other tips on how to get ripped abs the right way.
Mike Geary is the author and owner of the top online program for getting a six pack. For more information about him and what he does, please see his website, Truth About Abs.
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