5 Brutally Honest Tips About How to Build Lean Muscle Mass
One of the biggest problems people face when they want to achieve their fitness goals is that they don’t know whether what they heard, read, or found in any other way will help them to achieve great results.
If your goal is to build lean muscle mass, then there are many things that are recommended to do, and at the same time, not recommended by other people. This is because there are many ways to grow muscle mass.
However, the primary things stay the same, and there is nothing more you can say about it. If you really need to increase muscle mass, then you should remember and follow these tips for as long as you plan to grow bigger.
1. Perform Compound Exercises
Compound exercises are great when it comes to hitting multiple muscles at the same time. Moreover, because you incorporate many muscles while doing these exercises, you can perform them while using heavier weights as this is important to trigger muscle growth. If you train too easily, your body won’t think that it needs more muscle mass to survive harsh training conditions.
So, such compound exercises like deadlifts, squats, lunges, bench presses, shoulder press, and similar movements should make the biggest part of your training. Of course, you should leave some time to isolation exercises, but you shouldn’t spend too much time on them while you build muscle mass.
2. Eat More, But Not Too Much
To build lean muscle mass, you need to eat enough food to trigger muscle growth. But if you eat too much, you’ll grow not only muscle mass but a lot of body fat too.
Of course, even if you build lean muscle mass, you’ll still gain at least a little bit of body fat. But body fat gains can be decreased if you eat just enough to trigger muscle growth without encouraging your body to store too many calories coming from the food you eat as body fat.
3. Experiment
Most people want to find the greatest way to do something and then just continue doing the same thing forever. However, the greatest results are often achieved by those people who aren’t afraid of trying something new to learn the best way to achieve their success.
You should also try something new as it might help you to find new effective exercises, healthy foods, or any other things that can benefit your fitness life.
4. Grind
If you plan to build at least 15 pounds of lean muscle mass, then it can easily take longer than half a year. This is because without using steroids or anything else that could enhance muscle growth, people are able to grow two pounds of lean muscle mass per month.
If you grow muscle mass for the first time in your life or after more than six months of not building muscle mass, then you might see faster muscle mass gains. But be careful as most of it can be extra body fat. To avoid it, try measuring your body fat levels after one month of bulking.
So, stay patient and continue doing what you need to grow bigger because it’ll take months if not years.
5. Know What is Needed and What is Not
You can often find that while building lean muscle mass, you need to consume loads of protein and a tiny amount of carbs, perform cardio, use special supplements, or do something else.
But the truth is that none of these are necessary. Such things are just recommended as they might help for some people but may be useless to you. So, the best thing you can do is to do it the hard way by trying what is useful by yourself.
If you’re looking for an easy way, well, you may never find it. But if you continue doing your best, sooner or later you’ll reach your goal.
Great tips! Are these applicable to both gender or are there any specifications?
Hi Jeff,
Great question, these tips are not gender specific, and they can be used by anyone!
Thanks!