Muscle building mechanics or how to build muscle fast including chest, biceps, triceps and all muscles of your body.
Hey, Leo here! This is my story, the story of how I stunned everyone around me by adding 5 inches to my chest muscle in just months, going from 32 to 37 inches, and from 110 to 135 pounds in this period. I was not only able to build chest muscle; I was able to have an overall healthy gain in weight .
In just nine months, my chest had gained 8 inches, growing from 32 to 40, my biceps were 5 inches bigger, moving from 10 to 15 inches and I had gained 45 pounds, moving from 110 to 165 pounds. All this without drugs or supplements, and consuming only about 2000 calories a day! I know how painful a skinny physique can be, and that’s why I want to share my knowledge with you.
When I weighed just 110 pounds, and had only 10 inch biceps, it was a nightmare. I felt terrible all the time. I had no girls and they just didn’t notice me; I had no confidence either. Other guys would laugh at me. No one took me seriously. I couldn’t just relax at the beach, at the pool, even at the doctors. It was a life full of loneliness; I was always embarrassed and unhappy. Maybe this is you too. But you can change that.
I made a decision to put on some muscle. I dreamed of just 10 pounds. And I wanted to build chest muscles and biceps the most.
I started searching the internet, reading body building books to try and learn how to build muscles in general and how to specifically build up chest and bicep muscles. Then I went to the gym. I started to do what everyone was doing – bench pressing for my pectorals, bicep curling and squatting, 4 to 5 times a week. I ended up tired all the time and had little to show for it. I gained only 4 pounds in mass during first 6 months. And I continued to wonder how to build chest muscle faster because 4 pounds translated to only half an inch in my pecs. I was obviously pounding against a brick wall.
No one seemed to know what I could do to get results. Everyone kept telling me I was too skinny and a hard gainer and it would be very difficult to gain muscle. They offered steroids and supplements. I wanted a natural gain. I trained even more, copying pro body builders’ workouts but to no avail. All I got was extreme soreness. I ate more, tucking in 5 to 6 meals a day. This led to problems with my stomach – I seemed not to be digesting. It was extremely frustrating, to say the least. I started to lose hope.
… (The first part of the story is in the post above) I then realized that if a skinny freak like me wanted to learn how to grow muscles fast, I needed to find someone in the real world who had achieved results. And I found them!
Just a cool video that I like non-related to muscle building
Male strippers, natural body builders, ripped male fitness models, Special Forces soldiers, celebrities, Olympic weight lifters, high profile athletes – all these people seemed to know what it takes to build strong, attractive and lean muscle.
They seemed to know how to build chest muscle that looked attractive; nice square plates and not man boobs. I started to read medical journals and muscle physiology books to understand the system behind this kind of muscle building. I had a burning desire to succeed. I was ready for anything. I finally found it!
The system that these successful, attractive, muscular and popular people used to get bodies that are the dream of hot girls. The information is available for free in medical journals, but hardly any personal trainer reads them. Even reading them by yourself, it is difficult to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. I was able to, with incredible results. All who saw my progress couldn’t believe it was possible.
The system I discovered comes down to 3 things:
1. You need to target all muscle components – there are more than 10 of them. Almost no one, including most personal trainers, can name all of them because they hardly target to train even just 3 of them.
2. You need to know about completing the super compensation phase for each of these musclecomponents– basically what is called enough rest.
3. You need to know about de-conditioning of a muscle– the only way to completely prevent plateau and allow you to go beyond your natural, genetic potential.
This system allows the body to gain an average of 20 to 40 pounds of lean ripped muscle within the first 6 months of implementation. Without using drugs, you will be able to build 5 inches of chest muscle and add 2 to 2.5 inches to your biceps. It’s a complex periodization with cycles.
Your muscle is a meat, myofibril, wrapped up in a liquid – sarcoplasma. Myofibril fibers are of three different types. Sarcoplasma is storage for energy substrates and systems. They are creatine/ATP, glycogen and mitochondria. You grow pectoral muscle by increasing the amount of meat and also by increasing the volume of sarcoplasma.
There are basic things to remember: to build pectoral muscles fast, you have to target all the muscle components.If you miss out on even a few, you may lose up to 70% of mass gains.
Growing each of these components involves the same steps. Let’s take a look at chest muscle and actually any muscle in mass building mechanics to understand how myofibrils work.
When you do heavy lifting, your muscles are able to cope because they are being fuelled by energy from substrates. When you are at your highest intensity (maximum energy expenditure in a fixed period of time), your muscles are getting under-fuelled as you are spending more energy than is actually available. This causes muscle fibers to break, cut and generally get damaged. The damage occurs specifically in the myosin bridges inside the muscle fiber. Thus the proverbial micro-trauma that you hear all the time, though very few people can actually explain what it is.
Your muscle fibers will then undergo 3 phases:
Compensation:cuts and breaks are healed and muscle returns to the point it was at before load.
Super compensation:it builds up more meat so that in the event that it experiences such a load again, it’s not stressed and damaged.
De-compensation:New muscles, without repeat stimulus, get back to where they were initially. They cannot take on load without stress or damage.
Here is the biggest secret of real-world fast chest muscle building:
Muscles grow during the super compensation phase, while you are resting. The only way to grow muscle fast is to always allow this phase to go to completion. This is what is called enough rest.
The 3 things you learn from this are:
If you train your muscle before super compensation is begun you get overtraining.
If you train muscles before super compensation is completed you gain less than you can.
If you train your muscle at the beginning of super compensation phase you gain nothing.
To build pectoral muscles, you need to understand how plateaus can affect your training efforts. When building chest musclesand working to add mass faster, you need to train all muscle size components. Creatine storage may increase, for example, 2 inches to your arms. Glycogen will also add 1 to 2 inches to your arms. Mitochondria constitutes up to 20% of muscle volume. This is powerful stuff.
Only, there are 2 problems here:
Each muscle component needs different training.To increase creatine capacity, you need -5 repetitions with heavy weights and TUT (time under tension) generally under 20 seconds with long rest periods between sets (5 min). Glycogen build up needs 10-15 repetitions with TUT 45-60 seconds and short rest periods between sets (1-2 min), while mitochondria needs TUT more than 1 minute with very short periods between sets.
Each muscle size component also has different super compensation timing.Creatine is the quickest – it needs 20 minutes to several hours. Glycogen needs 2 to 3 days. Myofibril needs 7 to 10 days if they were properly broken (the same amount of time a cut or a blister would take to heal. Former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yats observed his blisters to learn this).
There is a third problem:
Each of these components of your pectoral muscles and all other muscles adapt to load and become desensitized to it. This is the reason you may hit a plateau – a flat phase where nothing is happening. The way to prevent this is to lower the load backwards in little steps. This will allow you big leaps forward as your muscle, after a short period of low load, becomes susceptible to high load again. Remember, this applies to all muscle components.
For example, if the energy potential of your muscles becomes too high, its going to be very difficult to break myofibrils because failure of the nervous system would have to precede failure from lack of energy substrates.
Periodization allows you to train and build each muscle size component by manipulating specific variables:
Time Under Tension
Weight used each set
Rest period between sets
Total density of work per workout
Frequency of workouts
It also circulates the load in such a way that while some of your muscle components grow, others are deconditioned a little. Those that were being deconditioned then undergo a heavy phase of growth and those that you were growing undergo a low load phase. This completely eliminates plateau and allows your chest muscle and all other muscles to grow continuously!
All this may sound complicated, but you don’t need to get into specifics. All I want you to do is to believe that there is an answer, something real that works. In reality, this system translates to 20 to 40 pounds of lean muscle in the first 6 months. And you can imagine how this would impact your pectorals.
I bet you would like to build chest muscle that looks totally masculine. You want to get yourself some hard, dense square plates.
Don’t be so serious, my friend! Smile
There are a few things you need to understand first; compound movement will add mass to your pecs. Isolated movements will shape them.Your exercise regime should include both because you want to have not just pecs but dense, well shaped pecs.
The best mass builder for your chest muscles is compound exercises like the commonly known flat barbell or dumbbell bench presses. To be effective, you have to keep your elbows wide in order to shift the emphasis off the shoulders and the triceps – you’re aiming for your pecs. The thing with flat bench presses is that they develop the lower chest faster than the upper – again taking the emphasis off from building square pecs and gives them a rounded look instead.
If you want to widen your chest you need to use barbell flat or incline bench presses with wide grip – these strain the outer part of it.
If you’re after a line down your inner chest right in the middle of your pectoral muscles (for shape definition), focus on dumbbell flyes, close grip incline barbell presses with flared elbows. You can also use elevated diamond push-ups with flared elbows for the same effect.
To shape the edge of the lower region of your pecs, near the nipple area, you need to do pull-overs.
And here’s how to work out your lower chest: use a flat barbell or dumbell bench press, a decline bench press and do chest dips. These are great mass builders, especially to the lower part of your chest.
Here are some specific chest building workouts that will show you how to develop the proper routines in order to build chest muscles:
You want to add mass? Do exercise in the 6-12 rep range till the point where you can’t go on. This will cause both sarcoplasmic and myofibril muscle growth.
Want to increase strength without adding mass? Do workouts in a 1-5 rep range with heavy weights and keep going until you are 1 or 2 reps short of failure.
If you have a stubborn upper chest, its likely that you will find it pretty difficult to add mass to it using mass building compound exercises. If this is the case, the best way to go is to increase the muscle-to-mind link by doing light weights with a very high rep range like 20-30 repetitions per set, 4-5 sets with the weight 50% of your maximum weight that you can lift for only 1 repetition until you feel it start to burn. This dramatically boosts the engagement of muscle fibers from the stubborn parts and accelerates the effects of mass building exercises.
