How to Build Muscle Faster, More Efficiently, and Safer

With limited time and resources, your muscle building plan needs to be as efficient as possible. The only thing worse than to spend months training and see little to no progress is to spend months muscle building successfully, and then have an injury set you back. As an aging lifter, I have come to appreciate and use a timeless method to increase my workout efficiency and aid in injury prevention.

There is an old adage in weight lifting, "a long muscle is a strong muscle". This is absolutely true. The term long is NOT meant that smaller framed people can't be strong. Long in this context refers to flexibility. The greater your ability to get your muscles to stretch as close to their maximum as possible, the stronger you can be. There is a definite connection between "range of motion" and how much power you can generate. And obviously there is a connection between how much power you generate and how much muscle you can build.

So everybody knows that stretching is good. Even novice lifters know to "warm up" and then "cool down". But does this type of stretching ACTUALLY lengthen your muscles, which would in turn increase your range of motion allowing you to build even more muscle? Well, it can, if done properly. The problem is almost no one does it properly, relative to truly "lengthening the muscle". Most people stretch until things feel "loose" and then they begin their workout. This DOES help in injury prevention, and I strongly recommend it, but NOT for increasing your ability to build more muscle faster. What kind of "stretching" does this?

Yoga.

That's right, I said yoga. Yoga is to stretching as weight lifting is to muscle building. You can build muscle doing only body weight exercises (of which by the way, yoga does for you), but you can turbo charge muscle building by adding "weight" to your workouts. Yoga takes stretching to another level, and prolonged, continuous use, will actually increase your range of motion, and lengthen your muscles to the point where you can become stronger than you could have without it.

I spend roughly 9 hours a week weight lifting. I "warm up" and "cool down" for maybe a half hour of this time. I took an hour away from lifting , added a once a week yoga class in it's place, and after 3 months was able to blast through plateaus on the bench, military and leg press, that I had been struggling with for months. Not to mention the increased flexibility reduced some low back pain I had been experiencing and gave all my joints a greater freedom of movement.

I have plenty of gym rat buddies who scoff at my use of yoga and massage as a means of helping me build muscle. All I know is I can lift more today at 51 years of age than I could at any age of my life (I have been lifting for most of my life) and I get stronger every month, something most of my gym rat buddies can't say.

I challenge anyone who thinks an hour of proper yoga is "not a workout" to try it once and see.

Steve R. Robbins has been a life long fitness enthusiast. Has the distinction of being able to run a marathon and bench press twice his weight in the same day. All at the age of 50. Editor and regular contributor to MuscleandHealth.org MuscleandHealth.org