How to Gain Muscle Fast

There’s no escaping it, for most guys, transformation of body physique is generally a long process, and it’s not normally a straightforward pathway in the sense that progress generally is fairly inconsistent. Muscle growth on the whole does tend to occur in ‘bursts’, and thus, the question about how to gain muscle fast becomes a little tricky to answer conclusively.

Nevertheless, the bursts are interspersed with what is termed as ‘plateaus’.

Often you’ll hear guys complain that they can’t get any bigger in spite of their very best efforts and they wonder about how to gain muscle fast. And in this case, you can put it down to a full body ‘plateau’. But what that often comes down to is the diet more than the training. Those guys are simply not consuming enough.

On the other hand, unlike full body ‘plateaus’, single body-part plateaus are typically the result of training issues. That’s not because of a lack of training. It’s more because of a lack of muscle activation, which in turn leads to lacking in development.

So, let’s focus on five tips with respect to jump-starting muscle growth.

1.   Lifting Fast!

Don’t worry about tempo, unless you are intent on doing a program which is dedicated to lifting at lower speed, such as lactic acid training. In other words, what you need to be doing is trying to lift explosively! That said, increase the bar speed. What this does is to amplify fast-twitch muscle, and that in turn will provide for relatively profound effects.

2.   Unilateral Exercises

Movements using heavy weights carried out as single-limb movement have the ability to put pressure on High Threshold Motor Units, or HTMU’s. This in turn escalates fiber recruitment as well as neurological efficiency. And that leads to muscle stimulation and more growth. It’s wise policy in this case to start your workout session with big bilateral movements. Progress on from there with some sets of single-limb exercises, and then finish with a few explosive bilateral stuff. Here’s an example: go from squats onto heavy single-leg squats, and then progress to jump squats.

3.   Pre-Stimulation

One of the smartest things you can possibly do in order to increase the growth of a target muscle is pre-stimulation with an isolation movement. Pre-stimulation will establish muscle recruitment patterns early on within the workout – providing you do an isolation exercise. This in effect will have a carry-over later on when you perform more productive compound movements. Essentially, the pre-activation effect should have an impact on the immediacy of the workout, and will teach your body a variety of recruitment patterns.

4.   Less Time But More Work

Here we endeavor to complete any given workout in less time. I am not talking about decreasing workout volume – this decrease in time will then increase training density. The targeted muscle will be stimulated more and will not fully recover. That forces your body to compensate in terms of power output, work capacity, muscular density – or hardness, as well as size. This technique is also great for fat-loss.