1 Strategy To Grow Muscle Fast
By Sean Nalewanyj
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Sean Nalewanyj is a natural bodybuilding expert and best-selling fitness author committed to providing effective, research-based advice for building muscle, burning fat and gaining strength. Sean is the creator of the "No Fail System" bodybuilding program and president of EliteImpact Labs.
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After a hard set of barbell squats, Bobby re-racks the weight. His heart is racing, his legs are shaking and he feels light headed as he takes a big gulp from his water bottle. He sets his watch for a 2 minute backward countdown and hits the “start” button.
Bobby read somewhere that if you give your body 2 minutes to rest between sets, you’re good, so he’s planning on timing the count perfectly. The moment the watch beeps after 2 minutes, he’ll be back in the squat rack, doing another set.
He paces around, desperate to catch his breath before his next round with the weights.
“Beep Beep”.
2 minutes have gone by. He doesn’t feel 100% yet—his legs are shaking, his heart pounding—but the alarm went off so his time is up and he needs to get to the next set. He will not wait to perform his next set, no matter what his body is saying.
He unracks the bar and squats. It would have been better, he thinks, to have had more time to get ready because his legs still burn something fierce. This set is performed mediocre effort; he puts the bar back and reaches for that timer to give himself another 2 minutes of rest.
Bobby’s really making a huge mistake, just like many aspiring bodybuilders do.
Bobby is really limiting his ability to grow muscle fast because he has a set rest interval between sets that forces his body to work at an effort level much below what he can actually do.
Your muscles grow and get bigger as an adaptive response to stress. If you lift X weight for Y reps, your body will adjust to that stress level. You have to constantly push X and Y to higher levels to grow muscle fast.
Basically, if you want to grow muscle fast, you have to progress in both weight and reps. You need to lift the maximum weight for the greatest amount of reps within a given rep range and push yourself to continually improve from there.
You need to use your maximum strength potential for every single set of every single workout you do. If you cut back on the amount of weight you can lift, you limit your ability to grow muscle fast. If you do not give your body enough rest between sets, you are letting that happen.
If you want to grow muscle fast, stop counting the seconds between sets.
Perform your next only when you can do it with 100% of your strength potential, and not before. A timer won’t do this for you—you need to listen to your body and your instincts.
One more thing, the “set rest period” theory is flawed because it forgets that certain exercises are much more taxing on the body than others.
Could you even try to say a dead lift and a tricep press down are in the same boat? Once a heavy set of dead lifts to concentric muscle failure is complete, it’s not unusual for me to rest for at least 5 minutes, if not more than that. But tricep press downs are obviously not as taxing, so I might only need a rest period of 2.5 minutes to feel fully recovered.
From now on, listen to your body to figure out when you can perform you next set with 100% of your strength. Adding this one training technique will have a major effect on your ability to grow muscle fast.
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