There’s a difference between wanting to simply build mass and wanting to build muscle. To many people, mass simply means to gain more weight, muscle weight or not. But when you want to build pure additional muscle, you have to go about it in a completely different way. We’ll focus here on how to gain muscle mass, which is indeed added weight, but not weight that also contains bulky gains of excess fat.

1. Consume More Protein

Protein, whether its animal based protein, such as lean white meat, fish, eggs, and low fat dairy, or whether its plant based protein, such as nuts, seeds, legumes and tofu, all contain the necessary building blocks of muscle fiber. These substances are known as amino acids. There are both essential and nonessential amino acids that the body needs to quickly bulk up with additional muscle.

You can obtain these protein sources either from food or from protein supplements that come in powders, such as whey protein, or in so called protein bars, which are usually loaded with cabs in the form of sugar. The average adult man require 50-60 grams of protein a day for normal growth and nutritional needs. To bulk up with muscle mass, a bodybuilder will have to consume much more than that daily.

2. Heavier Weights

Adding muscle mass faster can easily be accomplished by working out with the heaviest weights you can without straining yourself or getting injured. The heavier the resistance you lift, the faster your muscles grow. Using heavy weights, you’ll quickly begin to see much more bulging muscles.

3. Lift Your Own Body Exercises

This is similar to the lifting very heavy weight principle described above. To gain massive muscle mass rapidly, you need to perform many sets of low rep exercises such as leg squats, parallel bar dips, bench presses, and chin ups. Aim for six to eight reps in each set of eight to twelve sets per exercise and body region.

4. Extend Duration of Weight Workouts

When you follow the lifting of heavier weights concept, you can add even greater muscle mass and bulk by lengthening your workouts. Increase by ten percent in time during each subsequent week. This will force your muscles to have to grow even faster due due to substantially increased resistance that comes when more time is put into workout sessions.

5. Don’t Burn Excessive Calories

Even though you should be doing regular cardio to effectively cross train, you don’t want to be running marathons every day and burn off all the muscle calories you just packed onto your body the day before in the gym. Only do enough cardio to keep the fat off and have you looking ripped. Too much and you’ll quickly diminish the muscle mass you’ve been working so hard for.

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