How to Build Muscle Faster If You Want to Transform Your Physique

1. Set Strength Goals

Rather than focusing strictly on gaining “X” pounds of muscle—which may or may not be doable in a given period of time—work on getting stronger. Increasing strength improves your body’s ability to recruit muscle fibers, particularly the ones that make the biggest difference in the way your physique looks. 

Training for strength also makes your goals more tangible and concrete. If you shoot to hit certain numbers on your lifts and then meet them, you’ll see your muscles respond along the way. Choose three exercises you want to see improvement on: one upper-body push (such as the bench press), one upper-body pull (like the chinup), and one lower-body exercise (try the deadlift), then get to work.

2. Track Your Diet

Just as you want to be specific with your training goals and monitor your progress, you also want to keep track of your nutrition. Training hard won’t translate to new muscle unless you’re eating enough calories, and a food journal gives you an objective measure of how much you’re actually eating. It also lets you make adjustments easily if you’re not making the progress you’d hoped for. Write down everything that you eat and drink, along with the time of the day. If you’re not gaining weight, try to see where you can sneak in more calories to kickstart your progress.

3. Include Compound and Isolation Exercises

Lifts that work muscle at more than one joint are known as compound exercises. These include the deadlift, squat, press, row, and pullups. Compound lifts recruit lots of muscle fibers throughout your entire body, making for efficient training and a big release of hormones such as testosterone that promote growth—making them the cornerstones of your workouts, particularly if you are new to training.

To build out the smaller muscles and add more mass, include isolation work (curls, leg extensions, calf raises, triceps pushdowns, etc.). If you are an intermediate to advanced lifter, you'll need to include more isolation work than you did as a newbie since new lifters can gain muscles using almost any program and aren't big or strong enough for compound lifts to cause much fatigue.

4. Go to Bed 30 Minutes Earlier

Recovery is imperative for muscle growth, and there’s no better way to recover than by simply sleeping more. In a perfect world, you’d get eight to nine hours of sleep per night, but that’s not always realistic. You can, however, control when you go to bed, thereby giving you the best chance of getting as much sleep as you can. Record the TV shows that would otherwise keep you up and hit the hay.

5. Have an Intra-Workout Shake

Pre- and post-workout nutrition receives a lot of attention, and rightfully so, because both are important. But if you’re looking to gain muscle, drinking a shake with protein and carbs during your workout is a great way to sneak in some extra calories without making a meal. 

Mid-workout nutrition will give you a quick shot of carbs and calories to keep your energy up and help you train harder. You just need to be conservative with the amounts you consume to not upset your stomach. Start with a modest shake of around 20g of protein and 40g of carbs.

6. Train Each Muscle Group 2 to 3 Times Per Week

Bodybuilding programs are typically split up to hit each individual body part once a week. That means you go a long time between workouts for a particular muscle group. If you can only lift weights thrice weekly, try switching to full-body workouts where you work the entire body in each session. This way, you’ll hit each muscle three times per week. 

Perform two to three sets per muscle group. If you’re training four days per week, try an upper/lower split where you hit each muscle twice a week with about five sets each. Increasing the frequency with which you work each muscle will allow you to achieve strength and muscle gains more rapidly. The key is to keep the volume low to moderate to avoid overtraining.

7. Don't Neglect Your Legs

Even if your goal is just to have a big chest and arms, you can’t forget about training legs. Firstly, muscle imbalances look bad, and secondly, heavy compound lower-body exercises like the deadlift have an enormous impact on your overall muscular development, even in your upper body. That’s because they recruit muscles everywhere—even in your shoulders and back—and they promote the release of hormones that build size and strength.

8. Eat More on "Off Days"

Just because you’re not training today doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat big. Your days off are when most of your muscle growth takes place—the recovery phase—so it makes sense to keep plenty of nutrients on hand for the body to make the most of.

It’s fine—and probably prudent—to decrease your carb intake slightly on non-training days, as you don’t need the extra energy for training, but keep your protein high and make sure your overall caloric intake doesn’t drop by more than 500 calories.

9. Eat Your Carbs

Low-carb diets are wildly popular for losing body fat, but they’re the opposite of what you need to grow muscle. To get big, you can’t be afraid to gain a little fat, and as long as you’re eating clean food and enough calories to grow—but not too many—a little fat is all you’ll gain.

As a starting point, include carbs in your pre-workout meal and post-workout meal, as well as in the shake that you consume during workouts. From there, you can add or subtract carb meals based on how you’re progressing toward your goals.

10. Weigh Yourself Regularly

Most people weigh themselves when they want to lose weight, but using a scale is also an excellent tool for tracking muscle gains. Weigh yourself every morning at the time, preferably after you’ve used the bathroom and before you’ve eaten. Track your changes week over week. If the scale isn’t moving up, you’re not gaining muscle. Plain and simple. Shoot to add about a half-pound per week to minimize fat gain, and use the mirror to make sure the weight you’re gaining is solid muscle.