Muscle Building Tips
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While there are many variations on muscle building programs, there are a few basic rules to follow for everyone.
Once you use these tips on how to build muscle fast, you can begin testing and experimenting with different exercises, training splits, and training days. But the rules on how to build muscle must be followed, no matter what routine you use.
Intensity Cycling - One of the biggest problems facing most people who want to gain muscle mass is frustration and burnout (or overtraining). This causes so many people to give up on their muscle building quest and just quit, figuring they aren't genetically blessed and weight training doesn't work for them.
This is a shame and one of the best ways to avoid this is to employ muscle building tips such as intensity cycling. In a perfect world, we could go all out all the time in our training and reach our goals very quickly. However, we don't live in a perfect world and our jobs, significant others, and even our bodies, won't always cooperate.
That's where intensity cycling comes into play. The idea is to continually take two steps back to take three steps forward. You regularly vary your training intensity by making planned changes in the poundages you use and the effort level (intensity) that you put into your workouts.
The variables in these muscle building tips include training frequency, training volume (number of sets), exercise selection, use of high-intensity techniques, etc. When these muscle building tips are put together properly, you can systematically move past sticking points that you have had before in your training.
If we could train all out every workout, that would be the quickest way to make muscle building gains. While I am a big advocate of high intensity weight training, I realize that not many people can handlet this kind of training at every workout. This is where intensity cycling comes into play.
The idea behind cycling is to take planned workouts over a period of 6 to 12 weeks and work up to a top poundage that you've never used before. Once this is accomplished, you back off and then perform another training cycle, working up to a poundage that is slightly higher than your previous best.
The best example of this is powerlifters. They've been using these muscle building tips for years to increase their top poundages in the bench press, squat, and deadlift. And all things being equal, you'll have bigger chest muscles when you can bench press 250 pounds for 10 reps than you did when you could only bench 150 for 5 reps.
It is best to slightly modify what the powerlifter does, as you are going for muscle mass gains, as opposed to strictly strength gains. And one way to do this is to use slightly higher reps than the powerlifter. You don't want to peak with a 1 rep max lift. You want to increase your training poundages that you use for 6 to 20 reps.
Here's an example of a 12 week cycle using the squat. Let's say you can squat 260 pounds for six reps. Start the program with 75 percent of this amount (roughly 200 pounds) and do two sets of 10 reps each. Yes, you could most likely do more but we are building momentum.
Remember, the muscle building tips we are using are to help you avoid burnout and sort of trick your body into new territory.
Your 12 week intensity cycling routine might look like this:
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Muscle Building Tips - Intensity Cycling - Week 1
Monday - 200 x 2 x 10 Friday - 205 x 2 x 10
Week 2
Monday - 210 x 2 x 10 Friday - 215 x 2 x 10
Week 3
Monday - 220 x 2 x 10 Friday - 225 x 2 x 10
Week 4
Monday - 230 x 2 x 10 Friday - 235 x 2 x 10
Muscle building tips - the intensity is ramping up. Time to drop the second set.
Week 5
Monday - 240 x 10 Friday - 245 x 10
Muscle building tips - reduce the frequency to three workouts every two weeks
Week 6
Monday - 250 x 10 Friday - 255 x 10
Week 7
Wednesday - 260 x 10
Week 8
Monday - 265 x 9 Friday - 270 x 9
Week 9
Wednesday - 275 x 9
Week 10
Monday - 280 x 8 Friday - 285 x 8
Week 11
Wednesday - 290 x 7
Muscle building tips - reduce frequency to once per week
Week 12
Wednesday - 295 x 6
Week 13
Wednesday - 300 x 6
Week 14
Wednesday - 305 x 5
End of cycle! Great work!
At this point, you can take a week to ten days off from the gym to rest and recover and then start another muscle building tips intensity cycling. Keep in mind, there are endless variations of this idea and you may want to experiment with different one's.
There are plenty of muscle building tips, weight lifting programs, weight training information, nutrition, supplementatinon and goal setting information available to you on this site. Check out a bunch of our weight training articles Many of these articles wil explain, in more detail, the training principles mentioned above.
