Ask any personal trainer how to build muscle mass fast and he or she will have an answer for you in a split second. Many of them will be custom-tailored based on the trainer’s personal experience, and in cases where they have shaped their own fitness programs you can bet that they will believe that theirs is the best.
Of course, most of their workout routines will be nearly identical. Personal trainers’ homegrown workout routines to build muscle usually all stem from the same basic things that the personal trainers learned in school and sometimes through post-graduate research, and the information given to all of them was pretty much the same.
They recommend the same weight training plans to every customer, though sometimes they change them drastically between men and women, and occasionally depending on the specific customer’s body sculpting goals. But there is something most of them don’t give enough attention to: stretching.
If you are serious about wanting to build muscle mass fast, you should be stretching before and after your workouts. To build muscle up is a complex process, requiring a lot of things from you. Strength-training exercise, a high protein diet, and self-discipline are all prerequisites to succeed in body sculpting. And so is stretching.
Stretching before using your muscles gives them more flexibility, making them easier to move in a full range of motion (which is very important for High Intensity Training and creating useful strength). It prepares them in the same way that stretching a rubber band prepares it for further stretching. You can even feel a similar heat given off by a stretched rubber like the heat given off by warming up your muscles through stretching, which is why they call it “warming up”.
That pre-workout stretching helps your muscles stretch and expand farther in all directions during weight lifting, and it decreases your chances of injury by preparing them for the workout. Exercise without preparation is an accident waiting to happen, so if you value safety you should definitely stretch before working out.
Stretching after exercise is important as well, because it keeps your muscles from contracting and reducing your range of motion. It helps to keep you flexible for the next workout and for real life, so that the muscle mass you gain will be worth more than just looking good.
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