It’s good that you want to know how to build lean muscle. Building lean muscles is an important component of good health and physical fitness. Building lean muscles is a catalyst to speeding up the metabolism, making the body more efficient at burning up calories and storing less fat. Lean muscle also gives you the ability to perform even more exercises to make you healthier. To build lean muscle fast, however, requires discipline in both your exercise regimen and your diet.
The Diet
If you’re trying to build lean muscle fast, diet is critical. Some make the mistake of cutting down on food intake to lose fat. This is not a good idea. You’re body needs the food to provide the energy needed to perform those muscle building exercises. If you cut back on the nutrition that your body is receiving, your body will make up for the reduction by consuming your body’s current lean muscle, which is just the opposite of what you are striving for.
To ensure that you are building lean muscle mass efficiently, you should follow some specific guidelines when designing your diet. You will actually be increasing your caloric intake over time, but the progressive intake should be done slowly. You will need at least two hundred extra calories each day just to provide the energy that will be burned performing your muscle building exercises. If you currently eat 1500 calories each day, you’ll be increasing your intake to about 2000 calories.
The foods that you eat for building lean muscle mass should be those that are known to efficiently build muscle. In a nutshell, this means you should emphasize lean protein that is low in fat. Fish, chicken, and turkey are excellent food sources for muscle building. Don’t succumb to the lure of protein bars and protein shakes. You should try to get all of your protein needs from the foods that you eat.
Foods with simple sugars are self-defeating with empty calories. Include no more than 70% of carbohydrates in your diet. Whatever carbohydrates that you do eat should be complex carbs such as whole wheat foods, vegetables, and other foods that have high fiber content.
Oils are important to your diet in small quantities, but they should be limited to the healthy oils like olive oil and omega 3 fatty acids. Even these healthy fats should constitute no more than 15% of your diet. Good dietary habits are crucial to maintaining health and building lean muscles.
The Exercise
While proper diet is crucial to how to build lean muscles, no muscle will be added without performing the proper exercises. Weight lifting is the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of muscle building, but this is not necessarily the best way to build those muscles. Your training should also include a good aerobic exercise routine to improve your heart function.
A mistake made by many beginners is to focus on only a few of the “most seen” muscles like the pectorals and the biceps. It’s important not to isolate your development to one or two areas. You need to exercise all muscle groups by using chin ups, squats, and bench presses and other such exercises that work with multiple muscle groups.
Set limits for yourself, and exercise within those limits. It’s self defeating to push yourself beyond these limits. You could injure yourself with your enthusiasm. Shoot for no more than twenty repetitions of each exercise routine at two sessions each week. This will give your body time to heal from the favorable stresses induced by the exercising. This healing is crucial to building lean muscle mass.
Progressive increasing the weight used and the speed at which you perform your reps can help to build muscle. Muscles will get lazy about growth if no additional demands are made above the demands that they are used to. The muscle will grow only until it can handle the resistance. Increase the resistance and you’ll increase muscle mass.
One final bit of advice for those seeking how to build lean muscle. All body builders think about the benefits of supplements in their muscle building programs. If you wish to take supplements to aid muscle growth, look for those that will boost your metabolism, not those that increase protein intake. Get your protein from your foods.
