Sure, change takes time. But if you’re trying to find the fastest way to grow muscle and aren’t seeing obvious size increases from month to month, it’s a sign your approach is off. Plus, even if you are seeing progress, there’s no reason you can’t strive to see more muscular gains. How do you rev up your results? Here are nine tips that will teach you how to build muscle. Training volume – your number of reps multiplied by your number of sets – is a primary determiner of hypertrophy (muscle volume growth). And to increase volume, you may actually need to go lower in weight than you might guess. Related: Prime Boosts Supplement How Many Sets Should You Do Per Week to Maximize Muscle Growth? “Compared to training for strength, intensity is going to drop during the hypertrophy phase of a program, with intensity sitting between 50 and 75 percent of the person’s 1RM, the maximum weight he or she can lift for one rep,” says Ava Fitzgerald, C.S.C.S., C.P.T., a sports performance coach with the Professional Athletic Performance Center in New York.

To get the volume your muscles need, she recommends performing each of your lifts for three to six sets of 10 to 20 reps. When lifting any weight, you will have a concentric (agonist muscle contracting) and eccentric (agonist muscle lengthening) phase. For instance, as you lower into a squat, you’re performing an eccentric action. When you return to standing, that’s concentric. And, according to research published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, eccentric work is far better at triggering hypertrophy. To increase the amount of eccentric effort in your workout, you can do two things: either slow down the eccentric phase of each exercise you perform or integrate eccentric-only variations into your routine. Take the squat, for example. To make it eccentric-only, you would lower to the floor, and end the exercise there. Note: If you’re trying eccentric-only exercises, you’ll need to substantially increase the weight that you use. Physiologically, muscles are far stronger moving eccentrically than they are concentrically.

If you touch your phone between exercise sets, it better be to set its timer to 30 to 90 seconds. When lifting for hypertrophy, rest periods of 30 to 90 seconds encourage a quick release in muscle-building hormones (including testosterone and human growth hormone) while also making sure that you really, truly fatigue your muscles, according to Fitzgerald. Research published in the Journal of Applied Physiology last year suggests that, irrespective of rep and set scheme, fatiguing your muscles is a prerequisite for hypertrophy. Don’t be afraid to feel the burn. Strength training breaks down your muscles, and protein builds them back up. The more difficult your lifting workouts are, the more important muscle-building foods become when weighing protein intake to solidify recovery, Fitzgerald explains. According to research from the University of Stirling, for optimal muscle growth, weight lifters need to eat 0.25 to 0.30 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per meal. For a 175-pound person, that works out to 20 to 24 grams of protein at every meal.

You’ll get that in three to four eggs, a cup of Greek yogurt, or one scoop of protein powder. This can be a hard one to get used to, especially for those who are used to counting calories in the hopes of shredding fat. But when it comes to how to gain muscle mass fast (that means weight gained, not lost), you need to consume more calories than you burn each day. That’s because, when your body senses that it’s in a calorie deficit – meaning you’re consuming fewer calories than you’re burning each day – it downshifts your body’s tendency to build new muscle. After all, if your body thinks food is in short supply, Prime Boosts Supplement getting swole isn’t going to be its main priority. Aim to eat roughly 250 to 500 extra calories per day. To make sure that any weight gained is from muscle, Fitzgerald recommends that the bulk of those calories come from protein.