Getting ripped involves a number of activities, most importantly, eating a muscle building diet, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and engaging in intense muscle building exercise. There are a number of exercises that are specially designed to build muscle mass fast. In this article I will introduce five of the most basic exercises to build muscle mass fast and take a look at how you can incorporate them into your workout routine.
Pushups
Pushups are one of the best ways to build muscles and get ripped and have been used for many years by body builders. Pushups are an endurance, body weight exercise that is often recommended to people who wish to gain muscle mass without the assistance of weights. This simple exercise requires you to lift and lower about 60% of your bodyweight off the floor against gravity using your arms and upper body muscles. This leads to quick development of the muscles in your chest, shoulders and triceps.
Varying the push up position or adding resistance to push ups also helps in achieving fuller, well trimmed and stronger muscles faster. For example, if you wish to focus on your pectoral muscles, placing your hands farther apart is the ideal position while if your focus is on your triceps, your hands should be place closer together in a triangle formation. If you wish to improve the muscles of your shoulders, raising your feet in an elevated position such as on a workout bench will help.
Ultimately the best thing about push ups is that, they can be done anywhere thereby eliminating the need for an expensive gym membership or free weights. If you are new to this exercise performing 3 sets of 12-15 pushups, 3 times a week is a good way to start to build muscle mass fast with pushups.
Pullups
Pullups are considered to be one of the best muscle building exercises because you support your entire bodyweight with your arms as you lift yourself up into the air. In fact aside from strengthening your arms significantly, this exercise to build muscle mass helps to develop the latissimus dorsi muscle in the back and well trimmed biceps quickly. Pullups are also an excellent endurance and muscle building exercise.
Depending on your upper body strength and your weight, a typical pull up workout routine to build muscle mass fast should last for 5 - 10 minutes in total, incorporating 3 - 4 sets, with a rest of 45 seconds - 1 minute between sets. When starting out with pullups it is a great idea to perform assisted pullups by using an object to support your bodyweight, such as a chair. This does decrease the resistance on your muscles but will allow for your muscle to strengthen and adapt to accommodate your total body weight.
Aim to perform 5-8 repetitions per set to stimulate bicep, shoulder and back muscle development. Once you have built up sufficient muscle strength increase this to 10-12 reps of pullups per set.
Bench Press
The bench press is one of the most popular exercises to build chest muscles fast. Basically, you lower a weight to chest level then push it upward until your arms straighten, repeating this a set number of time. This weight training and bodybuilding exercise is specially designed to increase the strength of your deltoids, triceps and pectorals.
However many individuals love to perform this exercise in the gym but do not achieve rapid muscle gain because they see this basic exercise as simply throwing as much weight as you can upwards above your chest. The most important thing about the bench press is your form....explosive on the positive upward phase and slow on the negative lowering phase, leads to the quickest muscle gain. With proper execution of the bench press exercise, your pectoralis major and minor muscles will develop in a very short period of time.
Shoulder Press
Performing a shoulder press is one of the most common exercises to increase shoulder strength and muscle mass quickly. Depending on your fitness level, using dumbbells of 60 - 70% of your maximum load capacity (i.e. the maximum of what you can lift without losing correct form) will drastically accelerate shoulder muscle growth.
The shoulder press is performed by holding dumbbells at a resting position at shoulder level with your palms facing forward, then simple lifting the dumbbells straight upward above your shoulders and gradually lowering them back to the resting position. It is crucial to tighten your abs and exhale when raising the weights and inhale when lowering them to maintain form and promote muscle growth.
Biceps Curls
The final exercise to build muscle mass fast is the bicep curls. These are considered to be the most effective exercise to build muscle mass quickly in your arms and helps a great deal with developing the biceps, triceps, shoulders and forearms. They can also help in strengthening the stabilizer muscles of the upper arms.
Biceps curls are performed by placing dumbbells in the palm of each hand, then curling the weights up against gravity towards your biceps while keeping your palms facing forward. The weights are then slowly lowered to the starting position. It is important not to swing your arms, shrug your shoulders or arch your back. If you find yourself doing any of these then you need to reduce the amount of weight you are trying to lift. 8-10 repetitions of bicep curls with weight of 60%-70% of your maximum load capacity is a good way to get started with bicep curls.
