How to Build Muscle Twice As Fast (ACTUALLY WORKS)

Scientifically, there's only four ways to speed up the painfully slow process of building muscle. And no, I'm not going to give you the typical gym bro advice or secret tips. Just four ways that are simple, easy to do, and proven to work. Okay, so here's the first thing you need to do. Steroids. Just kidding. Don't do that. But I will definitely speak about it later on. Now, most people think that your muscles grow in the gym, but that's not entirely true. Working out damages your muscles and gives them a reason to get bigger. But the actual growth happens when you're rested, which is why improving your recovery is one of the easiest, yet most overlooked ways to build muscle faster. And there's three main areas of recovery you should focus on. The first is your diet. Your body needs enough energy to perform well in the gym, but it also needs the resources to grow bigger and stronger afterwards. Now, you can definitely build muscle while losing weight, but if you want to maximize growth, the research is clear that eating enough to at least maintain your weight or even slowly gain about one to three pounds a month is what's ideal. Now, to get a very rough idea of how many calories you'll need to eat every day. To achieve that, you can take your current body weight in pounds and multiply it by anywhere between 16 to 18, depending on how active you are. But what you eat every day is also important. The building block of your muscles is protein, so you need to make sure you're eating enough of it. In fact, a recent meta analysis by Nunez and colleagues had subjects consume either a high protein diet or a low protein diet over the course of 12 weeks. The high protein group gained 1.5 pounds more muscle over those 12 weeks. Now, that may not sound like much, but 1.5 pounds of additional pure muscle is huge. Especially if you can get that just from eating more protein. And as for how much protein to aim for, based on the current research, I personally take my body weight in pounds and multiply it by 0.8. That number is the minimum target I aim for every day. And to easily hit that, I'll eat a protein source in every single meal, plus at least one scoop of my own brand of protein powder, which gets me a whopping 29 grams of protein alone. That said, as important as nutrition is, another crucial part of your recovery is sleep. If I had to choose between extra workouts or extra sleep for faster muscle growth, I'd pick sleep every time. One study published back in 2010 found that dieters sleeping just five hours per night lost 55% less fat and 60% more muscle compared to those getting eight hours of sleep. So instead of slimming down, their bodies were essentially cannibalizing more muscle for energy. And sleep quality seems to be just as important as well. A recent 2020 study had two groups do the same full body workout routine, and the only difference was that one of the groups also got lessons on how to sleep better. After 10 weeks, the sleep group gained muscle about 3 30% faster. So for me personally, even if this means sacrificing some of my workouts or cutting out my late night TV binges, I always prioritize getting at least seven to nine hours of quality uninterrupted sleep per night. Now, the final way to boost your recovery has to do with your stress levels. This is the one area that I personally notice has really held me back. I work a lot, and as much as I love what I do, being on YouTube is stressful and honestly a lot of pressure. So I've noticed that when I'm super stressed out, I just can't recover very well and my workouts just aren't very good. Now this is still a work in progress for me, but I have noticed a huge benefit just from every single day prioritizing time to de stress, whether it's with video games, meditation, or spending time with my loved ones. Now, while you might be recovering well, you still need to work out to provide your muscles with a reason to grow. But instead of just working out more, a much easier way to build muscle faster is to work smarter. And there's two ways of doing this. The first has to do with your training technique. There was a recent paper published with the goal of figuring out the best way to perform your reps to build muscle. They found that to maximize muscle growth in each set, you should control the weight, taking around two to eight seconds to perform each rep and use a full range of motion, but specifically during the stretch part of each exercise. So, for example, it's fine not to go all the way up during a dumbbell press, but you should go as far down as you can to fully stretch your chest. And the same applies to things like squats and bicep curls. But on top of this, you can make even faster gains by choosing the right exercises. According to a bunch of new research, exercises that challenge your muscles more in their stretch position tend to lead to more growth. So far there's been studies on the quads, hamstrings, biceps and triceps. And while we don't have the data on all the muscle groups quite yet, it does seem likely that this trend would be true for most of them. For example, to get a better stretch on my shoulders, I've been doing behind the body cable lateral raises rather than just standard dumbbell lateral raises, and my side delts have blown up. Now here's a list of all the exercises that do a great job of really working your muscle in that stretch position. And if you're unsure as to how to properly apply this to your own training, or if you're just looking for something that takes care of all the guesswork for you, then you can check out our custom workout plans over@builtwithscience.com so we've covered recovery and working smarter, but the third way to grow your muscles faster is with brute force by working harder. And there's two ways of doing this. First, you can increase volume. Highlighting the effectiveness of this Method is a 2017 meta analysis by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. He found there was about 30% faster growth when doing more than 10 weekly sets per muscle, compared to doing only five to nine weekly sets. So, for example, if you're currently only doing about 10 sets or less for your chest per week, then consider slowly working your way up to 16 sets per week to start forcing more growth. However, this only seems to work up to a certain point until it becomes counterproductive or at the very least a waste of time. For example, a later study published in 2022 found that once you start doing more than about 20 weekly sets for a given muscle, it becomes less likely that you'll be able to further speed up your gains. So what I'd recommend is start out with around 10 sets per muscle per week and see how your body responds. Then, if certain muscles aren't growing as quickly as others, you can bump up the number of sets for those muscles. My chest has always been a stubborn muscle for me, but it finally started growing once I reduced my volume for my other muscles and then bumped up my chest volume to about 16 to 20 sets per week. But aside from just doing more volume, there is one more way to force your muscles to work harder. So based on a recent meta analysis, stopping your sets around 5 reps short of failure gets you about 75% of your max maximum growth potential. But if you push past that, every additional rep you do would get you about 5% more growth. So for example, when I first met my now fiance Tani, she didn't like being in the gym for very long and doing a crazy amount of sets So I told her to train with fewer sets but take them to all out failure, or at least very close to that point to get the same results. But now you might be wondering, what if I increase both my training volume and intensity? Surely that would lead to the most growth, right? Well, theoretically yes, but it depends on how much you can recover from. I've personally tried out high volume workouts plus taken most of my sets to all out failure. But after just a few weeks of this, my body quickly broke down and I just couldn't recover from it. So experiment with both options and see what works best for you. Just don't overdo it. So what could possibly be more powerful than improving your recovery? Working out smarter and harder? Well, it's not something I'd recommend, but it is the fourth way of building muscle faster Steroids Steroids are truly the quickest and most effective way of gaining muscle. One really interesting study found that individuals taking steroids and not exercising ended up gaining more muscle than those who were exercising but didn't take any steroids. However, they do come with plenty of health risks and side effects, especially at higher doses. So in my honest opinion, the risks don't outweigh the benefits for most people. Unless you're planning to make bodybuilding and competing your professional career, building muscle naturally will be slower, but it is extremely rewarding and you can drastically speed up the process by using the three natural methods we talked about earlier. That said, remember how early on I mentioned the importance of working smarter? Well, I recently collaborated with seven industry experts to find the smartest way to build muscle. They'll cover some highly effective strategies that I just didn't get the chance to fully cover in this video. So click here to give that video a watch next. And if you're looking for an all in one sides back fitness plan to transform your body fast, just head over to builtwithscience.com and take our quiz to create the best plan for you and your body. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.