6 Simple Muscle Building Tips

Let’s make this quick and to the point. We all want more muscle, and we all want it as soon as humanly possible, so here’s six extremely simple tips to help you build more muscle which you use to either help your athletic performance or change your physique forever. Get Strong First Absolute priority number one is to get strong and start lifting heavier weights more often than not.

The people whose physiques you admire are likely stronger than you and lifting more weight across their training week. Simple as that.

Lifting heavier weight is a hugely potent stimulus for growth, and something that most beginner/intermediate lifters will really need to focus on for a good long time (we’re talking years).

This means diligently using progressive overload and doing more and more each session. Ideally this means adding weight to the bar, but it could also be adding sets or reps to your workout for a couple of weeks prior to adding load. Here’s two examples:

Week One: 3x5 @60kg Week Two: 3x5 @62.5kg Week Three: 3x5@65kg

Week 1: 3x8@60kg Week 2: 3x9@60kg Week 3: 3x10@60kg Week 4: 3x8@65kg Either way, that jump from 60kg to 65kg and beyond is going to make a huge difference. Use Predominantly Compound Lifts Focus on getting strong on compound movements. Movements that use multiple muscles and/or multiple joints. These are include:

• Squats (quads/glutes/hamstrings)

• Hinges (hamstrings/glutes/lower back)

• Presses (chest/shoulders/triceps)

• Rows (upper back/middle back/biceps)

Just by hitting those 4 “patterns” you’re going to hit the majority of muscles that you’d like to see a difference in a really efficient way. Get A Pump However, there is a time and place for isolation exercises (curls/pushdowns/extensions etc), and it’s often to get a “pump”. This means creating cellular swelling through a high rep, high time under tension set.

It’s important because there are two kinds of muscle hypertrophy, myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic.

Your heavy training is going to hit myofibrillar hypertrophy by causing growth of the contractile parts of your muscle (i.e. the muscle fibres).

Hitting a good burnout pump set at the end of your session will work on sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is an increase in the sarcoplasmic fluid in the muscle cell.

Working on both will help ensure you get maximum benefits. Why only have one if you can have both? Get Your Training Frequency Right

Next up, we need to make sure we’re training frequently enough to send the maximum signial to you body to grow, but not so much that you overtrain, under-recover and get negative progress. The optimal frequency differs person to person, but lets set some basic guidelines.

Beginners – 3x a week, full body. If you’re an absolute beginner or in your first 1-2 years of training, 3x a week full body is going to be a good bet for your best training plan. This will mean hitting a squat, hinge, push, pull and brace in each session, with at least one day of recovery in-between sessions. This will let you:

• Build skill through frequent practice

• Hit each muscle group 3x a week while you are relatively weaker

• Have 4 full days recovery while you build your training capacity

• Have 4 full days recovery when the growth actually happens

Intermediate – 4x a week split As you get stronger, you’ll likely want to move to a “split”, where you rotate between muscle groups to allow longer recovery from the heavier weights you’ll be lifting. 2 examples could be:

• Monday: Upper Body

• Tuesday: Lower Body

• Thursday: Upper Body

• Friday: Lower Body

• Monday: Push (Squats and Presses)

• Tuesday: Pull (Hinges and Pulls)

• Thursday: Push

• Friday: Pull

This allows you to hit each muscle group twice per week (which many studies suggest is the optimal frequency), train once more per week (the act of training itself is anabolic), and still have 2-3 days recovery for each muscle group for recovery and growth.

These kinds of splits will look after you for a LONG time, I’m talking 5-10 years of training, which is how long it will take to become truly advanced at the art of lifting weights. Once you’re more advanced then a higher frequency could work, but that’s a whole different article. You MUST Recover

In the previous point I alluded to the fact that growth occurs outside the gym, when you recover between sessions. If you can’t recover, you won’t grow.

So here’s some things that can help speed up or optimise that recovery cycle, meaning better training sessions and better growth.

• Don’t trash yourself every workout

• Keep sessions to 1 hour

• Getting 7-9 hours sleep

• Do so soft tissue work like stretching, massage or self-myofascial release.

• Do low intensive active recovery like walking on non-training days.

• Reading tip 6
  

You've Got To Eat Eating is the final building block of that recovery cycle, allowing for optimal growth in the process.

Without going into detail you’re going to need:

• Enough calories (energy to supply the recovery demand).

• Enough protein (to supply protein synthesis).

• Varied nutrients (macro and micro to promote health).

Calories wise, you’re likely looking at a 5-10% calorie surplus, with that excess energy being put towards growth (and a little collateral fat gain).

Protein wise, you’re looking at 1.5-2g of protein per kg of bodyweight.

Then after that carbohydrates are going to be a great fuel for your workouts, but fat is going to be great for your health, so keep them both in your diet but carbs being slightly higher.

Alongside that a decent helping of fruit and veg to give your diet the variety it needs for good health.

Because a healthy body performs well and looks great. Thanks, Ian.