It’s important to go about building muscle correctly. Here are some additional building muscle tips that all serious strength trainers who want to build muscle fast need to know:

Consistency is key to having an effective strength training program. Your level of commitment will determine whether or not you’ll be successful in your muscle building endeavors. One general rule of thumb is that it takes 2 – 3 weeks to develop a ‘habit’. Your habit will be working out. Stick with an every-other-day regimen for a couple of weeks and it will get to the point where you feel the ‘need’ to work out and will look forward to it.

Training between 3 – 4 times a week is an ideal set-up for the appropriate hypertrophic, or muscle building, environment. Growing muscle tissue needs a steady state of increasing stimuation. An every-other-day schedule also factors in the time required to let your muscles rest. Only through rest does the actual post-workout healing and actual muscle growth occur. Make sure you give your muscles the time they need to heal.

Don’t let your weight lifting workouts go too long, and never let them exceed an hour. A thorough strengthening workout routine can be accomplished easily in 30 minutes or less, particularly if you only pause for less than a minute between sets, which is desirable. If you feel any sharp pains, stop your workout immediately and try to find out what the source of the discomfort is coming from. Further exercising can make a bad situation even worse, so listen to your body for warning signals.

From purely a workout perspective, muscle growth occurs when you perform a high volume of ‘work’ at a medium, increasing intensity. ‘Volume’ here means the number of reps and sets you perform, and the ‘intensity’ variable is how much weight you’ll lift. All beginning strength trainers should begin their workout regimens using a ‘high volume, medium intensity’ approach. Over time, as your muscle mass begins to build, gradually keep increasing the intensity factor a little to keep sustaining your progress.

You can effectively combine strength training and a cardio workout for a great fitness program, but it has to be in the proper moderation. Since the biochemical and physiological processes for either type of exercise works against each other (weight training is anabolic in nature, and cardio is catabolic in nature), you won’t see maximum effects unless you concentrate on only one or the other approach. Since they do tend to offset each other, find the balance that suits your overall fitness goals.

Drink plenty of fluids, and not just when you’re working out. Dehydrated muscle tissue takes longer to repair itself. Also, proteins create metabolic waste products during strength training exercises that need to be flushed from your system. Since your kidneys may not be able to handle the process by themselves, extra water intake helps out significantly.

Feed your body about 1 – 2 hours prior to your workout and immediately afterwards. You have to give your body a chance to digest its pre-workout fuel and convert it into usable energy for your workout. Once you’ve burned through that fuel during your strength training, however, your body is now glycogen-deficient. Unless you replace that glycogen quickly (within the next 30 minutes), your body will start becoming catabolic (it will start breaking down muscle tissue looking for fuel). Simply eating some fruit or drinking a high-carbohydrate drink immediately following a workout will keep that from happening.

As difficult as it is these days to maintain a balanced diet – and particularly for strength trainers – you may want to consider filling in some of those nutritional gaps with antioxidants and high quality vitamin supplements. So-called free radicals are molecules that tend to destabilize other molecules, and taking antioxidants such as Vitamins E, C, and A can prevent further damage to muscle tissue that’s just been through a hard workout. Glutamine and selenium are also very beneficial.

These simple tips, if followed consistently, will help you build muscle fast!

Author Rocco Polagamo was a skinny, pencil-neck dweeb until he tried to build muscle how the experts do! Read his and others’ articles on how anyone can build muscle fat loss with great tips from the pros!

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