10 Proven Tips to Build Muscle Faster If You Don’t Lots of Patience
We all agree it takes time to build muscle. There are many factors that account for the long time. But what if there is a way showing how to build muscle faster whether you’re a beginner, hard gainer or even somewhat advanced but not seeing the results you desire?
If you’re getting started to build muscle it’s absolutely important to start off right. If you’ve been going to the gym but not seeing positive changes month in month out, it can be really demotivating and can cause you to quit. Working out without seeing results is a painful waste of time and energy.
Build muscle faster by working smarter rather than harder. Today I’m sharing with you 10 of the biggest and best muscle building tips for beginners and naturals and anyone who’s not seeing the desired results.
It pays who you listen to and if you’re wondering who the heck am I to be giving advice and tips on muscle building, it’s certainly a fair question. I primarily run this health and fitness blog and there’s just one category dedicated to muscle building.
While I’m not a pro yet but this is the best information on body building that I’ve been using over the last couple of months to bulk up after many trials with no results. I also used to be a hardgainer. And so I thought I should share this on my fitness blog. The tips on how to build muscle has helped me greatly and I can almost guarantee that if you follow it, it will help you too.
I prefer building muscle all naturally. If you want to learn how to build muscle using steroids there are probably way better sources out there online. However, if you want to learn how to build muscle naturally give the information in this article a serious consideration.
So today here’s 10 of the most guarded muscle building secrets for free. And they are not just some same old tips you hear everyday like eat more protein. These are unique muscle building tips. Let get into it.
How to build muscle using 10 pro tips
#1. Incorporate periodization into your workout.
When done correctly this is one of the most powerful tips you can do to improve your muscular strength and size consistently. In a nutshell it’s a periodic breakdown of your training plan over the course of time. It will include micro, meso and macro cycles.
These will essentially break down your training plan into weeks, months and years. Now instead of explaining to you every possible way that you could incorporate different cycles of periodizations, I’d rather give you a simple actionable plan.
To consistently make progress using the exact periodic strategy that helped me the absolute most, you’re going to start by finding out what maximal weight load you can lift for each of your compound exercises for roughly nine to ten reps.
This means that if you select the weight load that you could do for 11 reps, you should up that weight load. The same thing goes vice-versa. If you select the weight that’s too heavy and you can only do it for set reps then drop the weight.
You’re gonna stick to this rep range for two to three weeks straight and you’re gonna try to increase the weight that you’re using over the course of these two to three weeks. Again staying within that 9-10 rep range the whole time.
After those two to three weeks are over you’re gonna switch over to a rep range of roughly 5-7 reps. Again find the maximum weight you could do for that rep range which should obviously be higher in weight than what you were doing for the 9-10 reps.
Now you’re gonna stick to this new rep range for another two to three weeks. Once again you’re gonna be trying the whole time to up the weight whenever you can as long as you can stay within that 5-7 rep range.
Finally after you’re done with those weeks you’re gonna do a rep range of three reps for all those compound exercises again for two to three weeks before switching back to the original 9-10 rep range.
When you come back to the 9-10 rep range you’ll notice that you’re gonna be significantly stronger and you’ll be able to lift more weight. You just continuously work through these cycles.
Every time you come back to an old rep range that you did before, you want to try to increase your weight load even if it’s by 2.5 pounds. This method helped me break through some of my biggest plateaus that I’ve experienced with building muscle.
Literally do exactly that and I promise you you won’t be disappointed with your results.
#2. Increase meal frequency
Let’s move on to the second tip on how to build muscle faster: increase meal frequency. Now I know this goes against my typical advice that I give for fat loss. For fat loss, meal frequency doesn’t matter that much. But building muscle requires a lot of calories, surplus calories to be specific.
This is especially true if you’re struggling with building muscle. You’re going to need to eat a lot of food. the only way that you’re going to be able to eat enough throughout the entire day is by eating more often.
As you build more muscle the only way you’re going to be able to continue building muscle is by continuing to up the amount of clean food that you’re consuming throughout the day.
When I was at my biggest at 230 pounds I was eating eight to nine times a day. Waking up in the middle of the night to have an additional protein shake to keep my body in a constant muscle building mode.
When you first start bulking up, you don’t have to start with eight to nine meals a day. You could probably start with four or five meals a day. However, as your muscles grow your diet will have to as well.
So I need you to get used to being uncomfortable with the amount of food that you have to eat and I want you to get used to the feeling of being really full. Just like feeling hungry when you’re cutting it’s a necessary sacrifice that you have to make to hit your goals.
I know right now intermittent fasting is very popular and I’m actually a big fan of intermittent fasting but I don’t recommend intermittent fasting if you seriously want to build as much muscle as fast as possible. because it’s only gonna make it harder to eat the amount of calories required per day.
#3. Increase your carb consumption
Our next tip on how to build muscle faster is increase your carb consumption. This is a very important piece of advice that most guys are not following. Most beginners are obsessed with protein consumption which leads them to completely ignore the other essential macronutrients.
Of course protein is important but 3 to 6 ounces of a protein source per meal should be enough. Carbs, you’re gonna want to increase higher, especially if you’re a hardgainer. When I say increase your carb consumption I don’t mean eat more sweets. I’m talking about only eating low glycemic, healthy sources of carbohydrates like brown rice, sweet potatoes, yams buckwheat, barley, you get the idea.
There are two reasons why you want to increase your carb consumption. The number one reason is because carbs are very insulinogenic and when you’re trying to build muscle as opposed to burning fat, you actually want to increase your insulin levels.
Even though insulin will transfer energy into your fat cells, it is also the hormone that transfers energy and nutrients into your muscle cells. This ultimately spares muscle breakdown and it helps your muscles grow faster thereby helping you build muscle.
The second reason why you want to have more carbs in your diet is because you’ll constantly be refilling the glycogen stores in your muscles, allowing you to lift more weight and have more intense workouts at the gym. Carbs will help give you that push that you need to consistently make progress with your total training volume.
As easy as it might sound, to simply eat more carbs when you’re having the types of carbs that I just laid out for you multiple times a day, you’ll find that it’s definitely not easy. However, it’s worth it because those carbs will allow you to have more intense workouts. This brings us right into our next tip on how to build muscle faster.
#4. Increase Intensity Over Time
If you’re a natural trying to build more muscle it’s critical for you to focus on increasing intensity over time. The best way to increase intensity is by progressively lifting heavier and heavier weights. You have to focus on incrementally increasing the amount of weight that you put on the bar or on dumbbells.
This is why the first tip that I started with was periodization. What to do to consistently increase your strength and your muscle size. But even if you don’t follow that exact method you have to prioritize increasing the intensity by increasing the weight load use over time for every one of your workouts. When you make lifting heavier and heavier weights over time a priority, you’re setting up one of the best situations to build more muscle as a natural.
#5. Increase Training Frequency
The next tip is to increase training frequency. This means that you want to increase the amount of days per week that you’re actually hitting the same muscle group or groups. Of course you want at least 48 hours of rest before hitting the same muscle group again and some people need even more time for full recovery.
However you’ll be able to double your volume by working your chest for example twice a week instead of just once a week. An easier way to understand this is if you’re normally doing chest days and you’re getting in twelve sets by doing it twice a week, you’re gonna be able to do 24 sets a week instead of just the twelve sets you would get by just doing it once a week.
More overall work or volume throughout the week will lead to more overall results for naturals helping you build muscle naturally. Try hitting each of your muscle groups at least twice a week. To accomplish this you would want to do this in a split training style and this is actually my next tip.
#6. Split Training Styles
For muscle building purposes to strictly gain size, you’re going to be better off with a split training routine rather than a full body routine. Great split training routines include combining chest shoulders and triceps. Then on a separate day you could do back and biceps. Then on a separate day you would do legs.
Also you can do opposing muscle groups like you could split it up where you would do chest and back one day. Then you do legs the next day and then arms, which would include shoulders, biceps and triceps on a separate day. Then if you’re trying to do this twice a week you would just repeat going back to that very first day.
Split training is going to work better because you have more of an opportunity to focus in on one muscle group or on the muscle groups that you’re trying to break down and completely break them down. This is exactly why you’re gonna want to follow this next tip which is to go right to the borderline of failure with every single set.
#7. Get to the borderline of failure.
Ideally if you’re working out very often, you don’t want to fail on every one of your exercises. But on key compound lifts the lifts that you’re trying to get your strength up in, you want to spend at least a couple sets hitting failure.
Failure is not the point where it’s getting too difficult and starting to burn so you just rack the bar. That is not failure.
Failure is right before you literally can’t lift the bar up anymore and the bar is one rep away from coming down and crashing down on you. Obviously do this safely especially if you go to full-out actual failure you will want a spot it.
#8. Incorporate Training Styles
Moving on we have our eighth tip on how to build muscle fast which is to incorporate training styles. Training styles like super sets and drop sets. A superset is when you do two exercises back to back with no break and for muscle building purposes you’ll typically want to focus on the same muscle group for both of the exercises that you select.
For example if you’re super setting for chest, you might do a bench press and then immediately follow that up with a chest fly on the cable cross machine. With drop sets you start with your heaviest weight and after being right at the point of failure you wrap the weight drop a little bit of weight off the bar and continue four more reps.
You could repeat this process of bringing yourself to failure and dropping the weight down multiple times to fully exhaust the muscles that you’re working on.
#9. Stick to Compound Exercises
Our penultimate tip on how to build muscle faster is to stick to mostly compound exercises involving free weights or if you must use a machine that has a free range of motion. You don’t want the majority of your workout to be made up of the selectorizer equipment because all those machines are locked into a range of motion.
You won’t get the kind of results you can get from using barbells, dumbbells and just free range equipment if you’re using selectorizer machinery. Of course you can throw in a little bit of selectorizer equipment but mostly just as a finisher towards the end of your workout after you’ve already broken down your muscles quite a bit.
Let me repeat that. If you want the best results in terms of building muscle, then spend the majority of your strength and energy focusing on compound heavy lifts with barbells and dumbbells.
#10. Muscle building supplementation
To build muscle fast, are supplements needed? Here’s what I know from personal experience and from working with many men and women muscle builders. You will not need most of the supplements that are advertised for gaining muscle.
The only muscle building supplements that you’re really gonna want are going to be a protein powder to take after your workouts. A good pre-workout meal made up of natural ingredients and creatine supplement.
Those are the only supplements that you’ll really need as part of your muscle building workouts. You can also get dextrose which is just a pure form of sugar and you could use it along with your protein shake after your workouts in order to spike your insulin levels to get more nutrients, amino acids and glycogen into your muscles.
Since you’re looking to put on muscle and you’re gonna be eating in a calorie surplus you don’t need things like BCAAs and L-glutamine. You’ll just need things like protein, creatine and pre-workout meal. Definitely stay away from all those weight gain bulking powders.
You can make your own by starting with whey protein and then adding coconut oil, oats, whole milk or almond milk and dextrose.
Conclusion
Understand that muscle building is not easy. Every guy who has attempted it for real knows this. However, you can build muscle faster following these secrets I have laid out for you. This is how to build muscle faster and they are the steps I have followed to bulk up.
Consistency in following a well laid out plan is what will get you to increase muscle size, strength and mass naturally. If you’re a pro muscle builder or have an experience to share with those who want to know how to build muscle fast, you’re welcome to share them in the comments section below.