Gain muscles fast with the basics

People have been asking me short cuts to gain muscles fast and I always smiled before saying anything. It is hard to convince people that there are no short cuts. We have been taught that one has to do right things consistently for a long period of time to see great results. In spite of all the facts and figures about consistency and regularity, I believe there are some short cuts to gain muscles and I am going to try bringing them to your notice.

How does muscle grow?

Before understanding anything future you have to understand how muscles grow. Our body has a unique way to strengthen itself. When you keep using your hand to do rough things like lifting heavy things and working with bricks and stones, you find your hands hurt for a while and later starts getting stronger.
You never eat anything special to make those hands rock hard. Nobody does takes BCAAs or Glutamine or Protein shake to make hands stronger, it happens automatically. The layer of skin starts getting thick on that particular place and you feel no pain in that portion, it gets strong and body makes it stronger because that area was used regularly for rough and tough works.

When you train muscles the same thing starts happening to them. You keep training them and the nutrition you eat moves to that particular area to build it stronger than before. Because one has to develop all the body parts in gym, the demand of nutrition increases. Thus the requirement of protein and other nutrients is higher in people who are going gym than those who are using few number of muscle groups for their day to day lifestyle.
Apart from nutrition, recovery takes place when adequate rest is given to the used muscles. If a man works all day in a factory lifting heavy loads and sleeps at night after his meal for 8 hours, he gets good recovery but this recovery increases with time, every passing day he is stronger than before and his body needs minimal effort to make him recover. He does the same type of work, using the same type of muscles, he eats same type of meals and sleep for the same hours, and eventually he gets stronger. He might not be eating supplements or lot of protein through chicken/eggs/fish, but he is getting stronger.

Bodybuilding or getting bigger muscles needs same type of logic but in a different order. When you are weak, you need more time to recover; you need more nutrition to recover. Gradually as you improve you need lesser. People who are interested in losing fat should actually eat more initially and gain some muscle mass before they plan shredding fat, but people start shredding fat on the very first day and they never get in shape. They eat less work more and expect recovery which is absolutely impossible. Later they feel, “I am eating little and still I am gaining weight and my trainer is asking me to eat 6 times a day, I would explode if I followed him”. This is the reason many people get frustrated and leave the gym for ever and compromise with their condition.

So now we know that to gain muscles you need the following

 Regular effort/exercises
 Nutrition
 Rest/sleep

Regular effort

 Workout for 4-5 days a week
 Workout for reps between 8-12
 Workout for 2 muscles and not more than 20 sets in a session
 Finish your workout in 45-60 minutes which includes warm-up
Nutrition
 Feed as soon as you wakeup
 Keep the breakfast large and dinner smallest, shape of inverted pyramid denote the quantity of food that you should consume throughout the day. Where the widest is breakfast and the sharpest is the smallest, dinner.
 Keep the nutrition before workout good and rich in protein
 Eat 90 minutes before work-out
 Feed body as soon as you finish the workout
 Sleep anabolic, consume slow digesting protein sources like cottage cheese.
 Drink water 3 to 5 liters
 Drink green tea 4 times a day

Rest/Sleep

 Workout for not more than 5 times a week
 Sleep for 8 hours every night
 Take a nap when you can
 Don’t waste energy in anything useless
 Stay stress free, adopt a puppy, it helps reducing stress
 Enjoy body massage

Conclusion

You might not be able to see any short cut mentioned here, but believe me, if you can follow what has been mentioned you will see results in weeks rather than months. Give it a try to see how effective it is. This might appear a long workout and something else might appear like a short cut, actually both are vice versa.
People have been following short cuts and they appear same or even worse after 2 years, whereas people following basics appear better every passing year.