Fitness Hacks to Build Muscle Fast!
Need to build strong, lean and toned muscle? Unlock your potential with these essential fitness and nutrition hacks designed to help you build muscle quickly and effectively!
1. Use a Protein Powder Supplement
Using a protein powder supplement is the fastest way to deliver protein to your muscles and all the structural tissues of your body. When you want to build muscle, taking a protein powder supplement before and after workouts can accelerate the muscle building process.
During a workout, muscle aren’t necessarily building. They’re being microscopically being torn down through the intense muscle contraction of exercise. When you take a protein powder supplement before workouts, muscles can use the protein to immediately repair muscle damage, greatly reducing the total damage of your muscles during exercise. The recommendation for the timing of consuming a protein powder supplement pre-workout is about 1 hour to 45 minutes before exercising.
Taking a protein powder after workouts is also crucial for building muscle and may be even more important than taking it pre-workout. After exercise. your muscle are broken down, exhausted and seeking for immediate recovery. When you consume a protein powder supplement after workouts, the protein gets delivered immediately to the muscles where the protein rebuilds the damaged muscle tissue. This leads to a greater potential to build new, lean muscle tissue and can significantly reduce soreness after workouts. Exercise science has shown consuming a protein powder supplement within 30 minutes post-exercise yields the best results.
2. Use Free Weights and Compound Exercises Over Machines
Don’t fix what isn’t broken! Free weights and compound exercises have been the KING method of building muscle, strength and power. Olympic athletes, bodybuilders and strong men athletes continue to use free weights and compound exercises to this day because the potential of building strong, lean muscle is just too great.
When you use free weights like barbells and dumbbells, it fires more nerves throughout your body. The more nerves that can be stimulated, the more muscle contraction you can create thus leading to more muscle mass growth. When you use free weights, it improves your balance and coordination and uses more core muscles and other assisting muscles at every rep.
Compound exercises are exercises that use multiple, big muscle groups to lift weights. Some examples are squats, deadlifts, lunges, cleans, bench press, shoulder presses, pull-ups, rows, shoulder raises and so on. Each of these exercises use more than one muscle group to execute a successful lift making the potential to build more muscle at one time greater than just using machines. Each of these exercises can also be performed using barbells and dumbbells, making them the most trust worthy exercises to build muscle since the dawn of weightlifting.
3. Sleep HARD
When we are talking about building muscle FAST, sleep is the magical factor that puts the icing on the cake. When you begin to exercise regularly, your body is either in a state of breaking down or building up. When you sleep, most of your bodily functions are turned down to an idle state for the sole purpose to heal and recover your body at an accelerated rate.
Not only is the amount of sleep important (about 6-8 hours) but studies have shown that even sleep QUALITY is even more important. When you sleep deeply, your body can heal, repair and regenerate at a faster rate. You can reduce soreness after workouts and shorten recovery time between workouts by focusing on deeper sleep. This is definitely easier said than done, especially when you exceed your 30’s because getting better sleep is related to how well you manage stress. The more stress you have, the harder it is to sleep.
Using recovery supplements like ZMA (Zinc-Magnesium) can help naturally relax muscles promoting better sleep quality. Journaling at night and creating a to-do list for the next day are great ways to dump repetitive thoughts out fo your heads to ease your mind to sleep well. When in doubt of getting better sleep, workout and exercise hard enough that your body will naturally shut down for the exhaustion!
Conclusion: Muscle greatly raises your metabolism but the amount you have naturally declines with age. How to build muscle in the most simplest way, is to contract muscles hard, overfeed them protein and sleep deeply to build it all up! Do this for the rest of your life and you can live. a life of continuous muscle building!