Gain Muscle Fast

How To Gain Muscle Fast

January 3, 2012

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3- Pre-Stimulate

To increase growth of a target muscle, pre-stimulation with an isolation movement is one of the smartest things you can do. While I don’t normally like too many isolation exercises, everything has its place.

This is very different from something like pre-exhaustion, where the goal is to fatigue the targeted muscles in an attempt to shift the emphasis later. Again, it all comes down to activation. With pre-stimulation, the idea is to establish recruitment patterns early in the workout with an isolation exercise that will have carryover to the more productive compound movements you’ll use later on.

Perform a fast and light set of flys before you hit the bench press and your pecs will be activated and actually perform more work; whereas had you not done this, your triceps and shoulders may have done the brunt of the work.

You don’t need to do this before every set, just the first 2 to 3 in your workout. The pre-activation effect will not only have impact on the immediacy in the workout, but will also teach your body new recruitment patterns overall.

Also, try a set of straight-arm pull-downs before pull-ups, and you’ll notice you feel your lats firing more effectively. For those of you looking to develop a larger quad “sweep,” lateral lunges before sets of squats can help your recruit your Vastus lateralis more efficiently.

4- The Magic Touch

This is absolutely one of my favorite sneaky tricks to gain muscle fast. During your set, lightly touch the muscle you are working. This will boost mind-muscle connection via a method called tactile stimulation to send signals to both brain and body to increase activation of that muscle.

Early in my training career, I had less connection to my back than I did to any other muscle. No matter what I did, I’d pretty much just leave my back out of it. Anytime I did pull-ups, I was basically just using my arms.

Then I started touching myself. (Well, I did.)

I switched all of my back exercises to unilateral movements, and with my non-working arm, I would reach across my body and touch the lat of the working side. By doing this, I was able to feel when I wasn’t working, and tried to actively engage my muscles during the exercise.

Over time, I was able to develop intense mind-muscle connection, allowing me to activate my lats not only during the unilateral sets, but, eventually during all back exercises. The result? My back went from being one of my visually weakest body parts to the most impressively well-developed. I use this with my clients now, and we’re able to see significant progress over a short time.

This works incredibly well with back and calves. Most people also have an issue with glute activation, so resting a hand on your tuckus while you’re doing lying hip raises can definitely help get your glutes to fire and improve development and strength.

5- More Work, Less Time

Another fun (and challenging) way to bring up a lagging body part is to try to complete your given workout in less time. Decreasing training time without cutting workout volume increases training density. The targeted muscle will experience more stimulation without recovering, forcing your body to compensate with an increase in work capacity, power output, muscular density (hardness), and size.

Outside of being great for jump-starting development in a given muscle, increasing training density is incredible as a fat-loss technique, and performing density training for a single muscle while on a fat-loss plan can certainly help you bring up that body part while losing a little fat.

Density training is one of the featured training styles in my badass e-book, Final Phase Fat Loss. There you have it, short and sweet.

Five simple but instantly effective ways to jump-start growth and development in any muscle that you can put into action as early as tomorrow.

If you’re interested in constructing an entire specialization program dedicated to building just one muscle group, you can learn how by checking out my blog post about specialization training here.

Click here to check out John Romaniello's official website.