10 Tricks to Build Muscle

Many guys are discouraged to find out that building muscle involves far more than picking things up and putting them down until their body is too tired to move. Even if you're packing on the protein post-workout to aid in your muscles' recovery, you're still not likely to get the results you want as quickly as you want them if you're not making the right moves. For the best results, it's crucial that you engage your muscles with intensity to encourage muscle hypertrophy. (Or, in technical speak, that's the process that causes an increase in the size of muscular tissue fibers in both length and diameter.) To do this, you'll need to continually expose your muscles to an overload of resistance training that increases in difficulty over time. But, building bigger muscles isn't as simple as that. RELATED: How to Lose Weight by Walking Obviously, the work you put in at the gym is integral to the results that you see. However, there are plenty of actions you can take when you're not working out that will enhance your body's ability to build big muscles as well. Plus, by fueling your muscles properly outside of the gym, you’ll be able to push them harder inside the gym, resulting in optimal muscle breakdown and, eventually, muscle hypertrophy. See how it all comes full-circle? It can be a little confusing to bring all the elements together, we know. Fortunately, we're about to clue you into a treasure trove of lesser-known tricks you can use to build muscle, both in and out of the gym. They'll get you pumped up properly by accelerating your progress and maximizing the benefits of the time you spend training. First, let’s jump into what you can do to get your muscles prepped before you even pick up those weights. Outside the Gym Increase Your Calorie Intake First and foremost, if you want to build muscle, you need to properly fuel your body with not just protein, but a variety of other nutrients, too. But if you find that you’re not able to put on weight no matter what you do, you’re probably not taking in enough calories. You may feel like you’re eating more than enough, but it’s a numbers game and you’ll need to give ‘em a boost in some sneaky ways. Try snacking more throughout the day, and making higher-calorie additions to the things you already eat. For example, add some grated cheese to your salad, and some peanut butter to your fruit slices. Both will give you an added boost of protein, plus extra fat and calories to help your body bulk up. If you’re particularly lean, you could probably benefit from an increase in complex carbohydrates, too, including whole grain breads and pastas, and a myriad of other muscle-building foods that go far beyond just protein. You can use this tool at Bodybuilding.com to easily calculate just how many calories you should be consuming for muscle gains based on your age, height, weight, and activity level. Then, use an app like MyFitnessPal to help you keep track of your food intake until you have a good idea of which foods (and how much of them) roughly add up to the calories you need each day. Drink Up Nearly 80 percent of your muscles’ composition is water, so you better believe you need to stay properly hydrated in order for them to grow. Without enough water in your system, your muscles will not be able to perform at their peak — nor will you, physically or mentally. Instead, keep dehydration at bay by topping up your reusable water bottle with about 16 cups of water per day, though that number can be scaled up or down a bit based on weight and how much you sweat. Also, remember that you can obtain healthy hydration from food, too, as well as other beverages. During a sweat session, in particular, you may even opt for a sports drink with added carbohydrates to help you restore electrolytes, essential for stimulating muscle contractions. Don’t Skimp on Sleep You may be tempted to cut corners around your sleep schedule to fit in some extra training time, but it could be doing you more harm than good. Your body needs an adequate amount of restful sleep — between seven and nine hours per night — to achieve an optimal anabolic hormone profile that facilitates muscle recovery and growth. Therefore, when you’re well rested, you can train harder, recover faster, and ultimately make better progress than you would if you hit the weight rack on fewer hours of sleep (which would also be pretty dangerous). Enjoy a Mid-Night Snack You can also maximize your muscular benefits overnight by consuming a healthy combo of carbs and protein about a half-hour before you hit the sheets. While we sleep, our muscles are actively repairing themselves thanks to elevated levels of growth hormone. Slow-absorbing casein protein, found in milk and its byproducts, is especially beneficial to your body overnight because it can keep your muscles fed with essential amino acids for a longer period of time.  Try eating some cereal with milk or cottage cheese with fruit before bed to best fuel the processes that will boost muscle growth and reduce protein breakdown while decreasing fat. Fuel for the Right Time You can maximize your muscle recovery post-workout by feeding your body the right, easily digestible nutrients right before your workout. Sounds a little counterintuitive, we know, but hear us out. You’re probably used to downing a shake with a healthy amount of protein and carbs immediately after your workout. This combo of macronutrients will enhance your muscles’ ability to replenish their energy stores and boost the process of protein synthesis that leads to bigger muscles. However, even though the body can digest these liquid nutrients relatively rapidly, it still takes time for them to be absorbed and to efficiently put those essential amino acids into action within your muscles. So the trick here is to consume a drink with 10 to 20 grams of protein before or during your training session to get the ball rolling sooner, resulting in not only a faster recovery process, but an added boost to get you to the end of your workout, too. After your workout, however, feel free to go all in on a meal with about 30 grams of carbohydrates to increase your insulin levels while your blood is pumping at its best. Something along the lines of a peanut butter and banana sandwich on whole grain bread would do the trick. This will, in turn, help you rebuild muscle faster on your off days. Inside the Gym Get Super-Powered With Supersets If your muscle gains seem to have plateaued, you can increase the intensity of your workouts with supersets, or paired sets. There are many different ways to utilize them, but in this case, we’re focusing on supersets consisting of two back-to-back exercises (with no rest in between) that work out the same muscle groups in different ways. One example would be reps of deadlifts followed by reps of discontinuous broad jumps. This superset engages your glutes, hamstrings, and quads in two ways: first with a high-load, low-velocity (heavier resistance and slower speed) activity, then with a low-load, high-velocity activity. This is beneficial for growth because the first exercise increases the neural drive to your muscles so that you’re more likely to activate more of your muscle fibers as you work through the second exercise.  It’s best to space out your use of these types of supersets to every other week or longer, however, to avoid overtraining. Also keep in mind that while supersets are meant to build muscle, they are not meant to increase strength, and you may need to use lighter weights or less resistance to compensate for the higher intensity. That said, some studies show that antagonist paired sets are a particularly beneficial type of superset in that they train two muscle groups without maxing out fatigue in either one. By definition, an antagonist muscle is one that performs the opposite duty of another. Thus, the best example of this would be bicep exercises (such as barbell curls) which flex the elbow, followed by tricep exercises (such as a tricep press) which extend the elbow. Tap Into Your Eccentric Phase Think about your last bench press. It was way easier to bring the bar down than it was to push it away from your chest, right? This is because muscles are stronger eccentrically (that is, through the negative portion of the lift) than than they are concentrically (through the positive portion of the lift). Simply put, this means that you’re really only as strong as the weight or resistance you can handle concentrically. To push your muscles past that barrier, you’ll need to amp up your strength by slowing down the eccentric (or negative) phase of your exercises with heavy negatives. This involves engaging with a weight higher than your concentric one-rep maximum in order to best stimulate your muscles’ eccentric movement. Then, you slow down the lowering (or eccentric) phase of your lift to amp up its intensity and its impact on your muscles. The goal of this movement of a heavier weight with better control is to create increased muscle tear which then leads to increased muscle repair. Heavy negatives can be utilized in a wide range of exercises from chin-ups to squats, and it’s most often done as a wrap-up at the end of your main exercise as you don’t want to max out your muscles too early in your workout. Try using negatives every other workout to avoid injury. Conditioning, But Make It Moderate Body conditioning, such as high-intensity interval training (a.k.a. HIIT), can help you increase endurance, enhance flexibility, and help your muscles gain strength, speed, and power. Unfortunately, however, you absolutely can have too much of a good thing. Because conditioning targets your entire body (and your body can only handle so much stress at once), too much of it can cause your cortisol levels to rise. This, in turn, can counterproductively result in muscle weakening. Furthermore, excessive conditioning can cause you to burn off too many calories, which will make it increasingly more difficult to add mass to your muscle.  Taking both the advantages and disadvantages into consideration, try to limit conditioning to just one day a week to maximize your muscle gains. Spend Some Time Under Tension TUT — or “time under tension” — training focuses on completing timed sets, as opposed to completing a designated number of reps. With your focus off of counting, you can concentrate instead on proper form and the intensity of your set for a truly explosive workout. The key is maintaining a steady tempo and slowing down during the eccentric portion of your lift to really maximize the benefits of this method. Ultimately, TUT training brings results because it engages your muscles for the amount of time necessary to stimulate hypertrophy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a 40-second set is optimal for gaining muscle mass, and you’ll know when you’ve reached that point if your muscles are fatigued when time is up. (If they’re not, you may need to increase your intensity or the weight that you’re lifting.)  However, just as we discussed with too much conditioning, leaning on timed sets too heavily can really tax your nervous system, so use them sparingly. No more than once a week per muscle group would be ideal. Incorporate Multiple Joints Sure, it’s easy to get into a rhythm with exercises like dumbbell curls and chest flies. They're great for strengthening and ultimately necessary in your regimen. The problem, however, is that these movements only engage one joint at a time, so they’re not ideal for building muscle. Instead of focusing solely on single-joint movements, you'll want to diversify your training by adding in compound exercises as well. After all, engaging multiple joints as you move around is more akin to how you use your muscles in your everyday life outside of the gym, so it only makes sense that you work on building them all when you’re in the gym. That said, the majority of your workout regimen should aim to challenge multiple joints (and therefore multiple muscles) at once within the same exercise. Think lunges, chin-ups, bench presses, deadlifts, squats, and dumbbell rows. These moves will activate more muscle mass per repetition than their single-joint counterparts, and ultimately increase the production of anabolic hormones essential for building bigger muscles. You Might Also Dig: Best Chest Workout Routines Which Exercise Burns the Most Calories 8 Most Common At-Home Workout Mistakes, According to the Pros