The fastest way to gain muscle involves increasing the volume of training without overtraining. You want to cause serious muscle fatigue with plenty of reps, but not to the extent that the body finds it difficult to recover. It can be hard to stop training before you over train, and train enough to gain muscle mass quickly. It is important not to over-train or your body cannot build new muscle properly because it will be too busy trying to heal itself instead. You can’t necessarily just listen to your body, like some would suggest. The fact is your body is happy how it is, so putting on muscle will be disagreeable with it, no matter how hard you train. Despite what many people tell you, you can expect to feel slightly fatigued when adding muscle. What are the signals you need to learn that will tell you that you’re overdoing it?

Pushing The Limit

You have to push your body to places where it has never been to add muscle. The hardest thing about this is not the training itself, but knowing how hard is too hard, if you go too far you will simply be in a constant cycle of body fatigue. The goal then is to train on the edge. Here are some tips to help you avoid over-training and stay “on the edge”:

* You should aim to achieve a cumulative fatigue during your workouts without training to a state of failure.

When you lift to failure you will reach an over-trained state at some point, guaranteed. Many people who train on steroids will use this failure method, however, for a natural athlete it is a disastrous idea. You will find that your muscles are actually weak, and you will just have gone too far. Lifting to failure means that you have failed on the lift. Rather than building your body positively, this method will send a negative message to your nervous system that you are unable to lift that amount of weight. These negative messages will ultimately affect the signals that are given to the target muscle that you are training, making it weaker. Rule of thumb: never lift to failure and never do forced reps!

Spend 2-3 Months Aiming for Fatigue Alternated With 2-3 Months of Gaining Strength

Fatiguing your muscles means you are damaging them, although when your body repairs them they make them slightly bigger than before to compensate. But if your plan involves just training to fatigue over and over again you will never effectively gain muscle strength. The good thing about gaining strength is that it builds actual muscle tissue. This is called myofibrillar hypertrophy. Strength training can increase your overall muscle density, giving you better-looking, strong muscles, however it is not as good at building really large muscles as other methods of training. So the best approach is to alternate periods of fatigue for the fastest way to gain muscle, but throw in low rep strength training to firm up those muscles.

* Don’t increase your calories – use a Creatine supplement instead.

Since the goal is to gain fat free mass, it doesn’t make sense to increase your calories when training to gain muscle. You should be eating a diet that is at a caloric maintenance level so you won’t add body fat when you are adding muscle. If you want to give your body the nutrients it needs to build up the muscle you are working on, use creatine supplements. This way you will put on plenty of muscle and no fat, this truly is the fastest way to gain muscle.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Sports Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.