How to Build Muscle Fast

The road to building muscle is a long and arduous one, but luckily some shortcuts have been discovered by the emerging science of sports physiology. These shortcuts can help you build muscle at a significantly faster rate than normal.

The first secret is that you don’t have to work each muscle for hours every day. In the (very) old school of bodybuilding, there was no way to build muscle fast. You hit the gym for three to four hours every day and worked your entire body every day.  At night you rested, and one day per week you stayed away from the gym.

In those early days, athletes in other sports were told to stay away from weight training because it would make them “muscle-bound” and inflexible.

But for whatever reason, more and more athletes began to ignore that advice and discovered that weight training actually made them stronger and actually more flexible.

This didn’t go past the notice of sports trainers who started to evaluate weight training for muscle building. Their affirmation of the advantages induced lots of sports trainers to add weight training to their fitness routines, and soon, football, baseball and basketball players, even track and field athletes, began to pump iron.

Sports physiology became a science and weight training began to receive a more scientific approach as applied to muscle building for athletes in all sports.

Bodybuilders took note and began to workout smarter, looking for ways to build muscle fast. They still spent long hours in the gym, but now it was about half the time they used to spend. Why were they able to do this?

Exercises and routines were evaluated for the best approach to building muscle faster, and bigger. Researchers found that it was important to rest muscles after they were worked strenuously; otherwise they become exhausted and cannot develop any further.

These days bodybuilders are advised to work each muscle group to total exhaustion only one day a week. Sure they get some exercise when you focus on other muscle groups, but that’s unavoidable. It is only on their “focus day” that they are exhausted. Using this strategy fast tracks your muscle growth and makes your body stronger overall.

You don’t need to put up with constant all-over muscle soreness every day of the week either, since muscle groups are allowed to rest, recover and rebuild themselves.

Another leap forward in bodybuilding was the discovery that working the muscle to total exhaustion for each exercise was sufficient to tear it down. The protein ingested by the bodybuilder would be mainly used to rebuild the tissue, rather than developing it even further.

The other side of the building-muscle-fast equation is good nutrition. It has been claimed that bodybuilding is 80% diet, and while this might not be entirely accurate, it certainly accounts for more than half.

To build muscle and build it fast, a bodybuilder’s diet must have at least 25% of its calories coming from both animal and vegetable protein. You should only eat of complex carbohydrates, particularly those vegetables that contain protein as well. Fats and fibers should also constitute about 25% of your diet. Avoid refined sugars, refined starches and minimal caffeine and alcohol. The diet should be supplemented with protein powders mixed with raw milk or water, protein boosters like desiccated liver, kelp tablets and eggs. A soluble oil like wheat germ oil helps the body metabolize protein and it will provide added endurance.

In sum, the path to fast muscle growth is about exercising each muscle group smarter, not harder. Rest is just as important as strength training, and eating a careful diet is most important of all.