The biggest tool you have in your muscle building arsenal is knowledge and experience. Sadly most trainers just learn by trial and error. But you can speed up your progress by educating yourself too. So here are 5 top tips on how to gain muscle fast:

1. Stick to heavy compound lifts if you're a beginner you have no business doing bicep curls, tricep kickbacks or any other isolation exercises. As for all trainers the most benefit is gained from lifts where the heaviest weight is moved using as many muscle groups as possible. This means exercises such as bench presses, chin ups, rows, squats and deadlifts are what your program should be made up of.

2. Train your damn legs! For one you're a jackass if you just go to the gym to train you 'gunz' and have legs like a 12 year old girl. But more importantly heavy squat and deadlift variations create the greatest anabolic effect on your whole body. You use more muscles and more weight doing these exercises than any others and therefore your body releases tons of growth hormone and testosterone which benefit your whole body and will cause your upper body to grow considerably more.

3. Keep a training journal. Very few trainers do this but it’s a vital tool to keep you focused on constantly improving and to track your progress. It’s so valuable being able to look back 6 months and remind yourself of that routine you were doing that made you add 20lbs to your bench press in a few weeks. You should be writing down all the date and length of your workouts, all the exercises you performed along with the number of sets and reps and at what weight. You should also make a few notes about how you felt in that workout and how the routine felt so that you can get an idea of how you were performing at the time. You may not realize it at the time but perhaps you are chronically over-trained or maybe your being a pussy and need to make your workouts harder.

4. Don’t neglect peri-workout nutrition. Peri means the stuff you drink/take before during and after a workout. It’s important to use a fast absorbing protein like whey/casein hydrolysate and a blend of fast and slow absorbing carbohydrates. This will give you a huge insulin spike as well as sustained energy allowing you to train a lot harder and recover quicker. This is by far the most important supplement you can take.

5. Eat your damn protein. The latest research says that a strength-training athlete needs 1.6-1.8 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight to gain muscle optimally. Just going to the gym isn’t enough if you want to get massive!