By: Jimmy Smith
Copyright (c) 2008 Jimmy Smith
How to build muscle, that is the number one question that I get asked from people every day. I am going to outline my top steps to building muscle.
1) There are two things that people can do immediately to build muscle
A) People can focus on both full body training and body part splits. We've knocked training "arms" for too long but the only thing that will make us grow is training a muscle with a big amount of volume. At that same time, we can also use an upper body day to get stronger. It is the best of both worlds B) People can sleep more. 10:30 is the magic time that you should go to bed by because it will allow you enough time to recover:30 and not getting up before 6 am will go a long way in helping us build muscle.
2) Train your legs more. Growing muscle is directly related to the amount of leg training that we do. By training your legs hard you raise the anabolic signals in your body that tell you to grow. Heavy Squats and deadlifts are the beest way to build muscle. They raise your natural muscle building hormones, which cause you to grow
3) Use the correct sets and reps. We have to breakdown muscle to grow so we need to us high reps and a more volume based approach. My favorite sets and reps are 3 sets of 8 reps, and 4 sets of 10 reps. Remember, low reps can make us grow to simple because our body adapts to whatever we do for awhile so we need to change it up.
4) Use this secret trick. The first tip that I can give to everyone is that they need to be doing pull-ups or squats since these large muscle groups will help us grow everywhere. My best piece of advice is to tell everyone to do a back off set per exercise. For example, if you are training on the bench press and doing 4 sets of 8 reps then do a 5th set of 20-25 reps. This will push more blood into the muscle which will force more grow.
Building muscle is all about the quality of your workouts. Most people get caught up in the typical 3 sets of 10 reps dogma. While that will work for a certain period of time, it won't work forever. In my opinion, the best way to design your training for growth is to use 4-6 week spurts of volume phases where you train with sets of 3-4 and reps of 8-15. For the next 4-6 weeks, you should go with more sets of 4-6 and lower reps of 5-8. Both of these methods will lay you to have both muscle and strength gains.
Jimmy Smith,CSCS, is the author of the Muscle Bible and is a training advisor for Men's Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines. Jimmy just released the first step-by-step program to building muscle size fast and easy. Please visit
http://www.ineedmuscle.com/musclebiblepriority.htm
