Training Basics: What Is The Fastest Way To Gain Muscle?
If you want to learn the fastest way to gain muscle, you need to learn how to methodically increase your overall training volume without overdoing it. You want to cause serious muscle fatigue with plenty of reps, but not to the extent that the body finds it difficult to recover. It can be hard to stop training before you over train, and train enough to gain muscle mass quickly. If you train too much you will just spin your wheels, since your body will be in a chronic state of being broken down. Some suggest that it is possible to just “listen” to your body – but that just isn’t the case. The fact is your body is happy how it is, so putting on muscle will be disagreeable with it, no matter how hard you train. You should expect and enjoy the fatigued feeling when you are trying to put on muscle mass, instead of taking it as a sign that you went too far. The question is, how far is too far?
Pushing The Limit
The fastest way to gain muscle means pushing your body hard. The hardest thing about this is not the training itself, but knowing how hard is too hard, if you go too far you will simply be in a constant cycle of body fatigue. You need to find the limit, and push it right up to it. The following will describe methods you can use to push it to the limit, without crossing over.
The Right Amount Of Cumulative Fatigue
If you push yourself too hard by lifting to failure every training session you will just end up with a failing body. This works extremely well for steroid users, but is a recipe for disaster for a natural athlete. You will find that your muscles are actually weak, and you will just have gone too far. When you lift to failure, you are “failing” on that lift. Rather than building your body positively, this method will send a negative message to your nervous system that you are unable to lift that amount of weight. Over time this leads to weaker signals to the target muscle. for this reason lifting to failure is a bad idea, and so are forced reps.
* It’s a good idea to mix things up and spend 2 or 3 months gaining strength and 2 or 3 months aiming for fatigue.
When you fatigue your muscles you are breaking them down a bit and they will eventually increase in size as you recover. This is great for getting bigger muscles, but they are not necessarily stronger muscles. The good thing about gaining strength is that it builds actual muscle tissue. Myofibrillar hypertrphy is the correct term for this. Although strength training isn’t as good as building large muscles, it increases muscle density and makes for better looking firm muscles. So the fastest way to gain muscle is to alternate between fatigue training to make them bigger and strength training to make them stronger.
* Don’t increase your calories – use a Creatine supplement instead.
Since the goal is to gain fat free mass, it doesn’t make sense to increase your calories when training to gain muscle. You should be eating a diet that is at a caloric maintenance level so you won’t add body fat when you are adding muscle. This is where Creatine comes in to help you add muscle mass without adding extra calories. This way you will put on plenty of muscle and no fat, this truly is the fastest way to gain muscle.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 3:57 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.