Bulking – 9 Tips To Help You Gain Weight Faster
Bulking cycles and building muscle mass. There are a couple of reasons why most people fail in their attempt to gain more muscle mass:
A. Improper diet.
Most people are not eating enough protein and eating too many simple carbs.
They are not stressing their muscles during each workout. You don’t have to kill yourself, but you must subject your body to out of the ordinary stress each workout to grow muscle.
B. They lack consistency.
They do not stay focused throughout the entire 12-week period. If they don’t see results immediately, they get discouraged and quit. You have got to stick with your plan. No program will work for you if you are not consistent.
To get results, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes, and work as hard as necessary and you have to be consistent. Your body responds to consistency. Sometimes it may get to the point of obsession, but it has to be that way for you to reach your goal.
Here’s some basic information and things you should be doing to help you bulk up:
1. To gain weight you must eat more calories than your body burns off, so EAT MORE!!!!!! The most important thing that I cannot over stress is that you need to eat to gain weight. You need to eat like you’ve never eaten before. (but not junk food like donuts and chips or candy).
Start eating six meals per day (space them out to about once every 3 hours).
2. Increase your protein intake and reduce your simple carbohydrate intake. Without protein your body cannot build new muscle
3. Keep your workouts under one hour. Short and intense!
4. Concentrate on free weight exercises that work the large muscle groups. The best weight training exercises for building mass are the simple ones. For mass, stick with compound free weight exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, barbell rows, pull ups and bar dips.
5. Use heavy weights and low reps, rest 3 minutes between each set.
6. Do only 2-3 exercises per body part.
7. Split your workout.
Since you have a very high metabolism like me, you need to train with more intensity, but less frequently.
Monday/Day 1: Chest, shoulders and triceps
Tuesday/Day 2: Rest
Wednesday/Day 3: Back, and Bicep
Thursday/Day 4: Rest
Friday/Day 5: Legs and abs
Saturday/Day 6: Rest
Sunday/Day 7: Rest
8. Increase you water intake. A good formula for this is to multiply your bodyweight by .66 to get the required number of ounces per day.
9. Use nutritional supplements. If you can’t afford too many products, just stick with the basics; like whey protein. If you can’t afford whey protein the next best thing is egg whites.
Weight training involves the use of equipment that enables variable resistance. This resistance can come in the form of “free weights” like barbells and dumbbells, machines that use cables or pulleys to help you lift the weight and bodyweight exercises like pull-ups or dips.
Free Weights vs. Machines vs. Bodyweight Exercises
For maximum muscle gain, the focus of your workouts should consist of free weight exercises. Not machines or bodyweight exercises. This is not to say that you should not use machines or bodyweight exercises, but they should not be the focus of your training. To get an effective, muscle blasting workout, you must stimulate the most muscle fibers as possible, and machines do not do this.
The main reason for this is a lack of stabilizer and synergist muscle development. Stabilizer and synergist muscles are supporting muscles that assist the main muscle in performing a complex lift. The more stabilizers and synergists worked, the more muscle fibers stimulated. Multi-jointed free weight exercises like the bench press, require many stabilizer and synergistic muscle assistance to complete the lift. On the other hand doing a bench press using a machine will need almost no stabilizer assistance.
Machines and Free Weights
Since machines are locked into a specific range of motion and help to support the weight along that path, they fail to stimulate the muscles that surround the area you are working (stabilizers). This is a mistake. If your stabilizer muscles are weak, then the major muscle group will never grow!
Free weight exercises like the dumbbell press or squat, for example, put a very large amount of stress on supporting muscle groups. That’s why you will get fatigued faster and not be able to lift as much weight as you did on the machine. But you will gain more muscle, become stronger very quickly and have a true gauge of your strength.
If you use machines in your program, they should be used to work isolated areas and only after all multi-jointed exercises have been completed.
Beginners should begin with a limited combination of machine exercises, bodyweight exercises and mult-jointed free weight exercises. Before increasing the weight levels, they should work on becoming familiar with the proper form and execution of each. Soon, bodyweight exercises will become insufficient to stimulate growth and they will need to focus on more free weight exercises.
Multi-Jointed Exercises
The exercises that work the large muscle groups are called compound (or multi-joint) movements that involve the simultaneous stimuation of many muscle groups. These compound exercises should be the foundation of any weight training program because they stimulate the most amount of muscle in the least amount of time.
Here are the basic movements:
* Bench Presses (works the chest, shoulders, tricep)
* Overhead Presses (shoulders, tricep)
* Pull-ups/Barbell Rows (back, bicep)
* Squats (legs, lower back)
* Deadlifts (legs, back, shoulders)
* Bar Dips (shoulders, chest, arms)
I cannot overemphasize the importance of these exercises. Do not start an advanced weight training program without them!
They will overload your entire skeletal and muscular system like no machine could ever do, giving you and effective workout in a very short period of time. If you can only do a few exercises, then do these. They have been proven (and not just by me) to encourage muscle and strength gain unlike any other exercises.
Lift Heavy Weights
To build mass, you must weight train with heavy weights. By heavy, I mean a weight that is challenging for you — not me, or anyone else. To consider a weight heavy, you should only be able to do a maximum of 8-12 reps before your muscles temporarily fail. A weight is considered “light” if you can do more than 15 reps before muscle fatigue sets in.
Heavy weights stimulate more muscle fibers than lighter weights. It’s that simple. More muscle stimulation means more muscle growth.
Don’t Over train
Heavy weight training puts a huge strain on your body, so adequate rest and recuperation after your workouts is essential. If you are prone to train too often, several things happen:
You don’t give your muscles enough time to recuperate between workouts. If your muscles have not repaired themselves, you will not be at maximum strength for your next workout. Rest is essential. Other than eating, this should be your main focus.
You are setting yourself up for burnout or an injury. I know you are motivated and excited about working out, but don’t be careless. You must pace yourself, you want to be able to keep this up for a long time, not burnout before you reach your goals. I only weight train 3 times per week, that’s all. Anymore than that and I would not give my body enough time to repair and build new muscle. And contrary to popular belief, you do not grow while working out, you only grow when you are resting.