1-Provide your body with a surplus of calories by ensuring that your caloric intake exceeds your caloric expenditure
This is first and foremost on the list.
Beyond planning a proper workout schedule with all of the right exercises, sets, reps and rest periods lies this one simple rule of muscle growth…
In order to build muscle, you must consume more calories than you burn! This is a basic biological law of muscle growth, and if you fail to consume an adequate number of calories per day you will NOT build muscle, plain and simple.
The work that you perform in the gym is simply the “spark” that sets the muscle growth process into motion. However, the REAL magic takes place when you are out of the gym, resting and eating. This is when your body will use the nutrients that you consume to begin repairing your damaged muscles and increasing their size and strength in preparation for your next workout.
If you don’t provide your body with the raw materials needed to facilitate growth, this process simply cannot take place.
In order to provide your body with the calories necessary to fuel muscle growth and to keep your body in an anabolic, muscle-building state at all times, you should be consuming anywhere from 17-20x your bodyweight in calories every single day. So if you weigh 150 pounds…
150 x 17 = 2550
150 x 20 = 3000
Then you should be consuming anywhere from 2550-3000 daily in order to build muscle.
You should adjust this number based on…
a) Your Metabolic Rate – Are you naturally thin and have a hard time gaining weight? Or do you seem to put on body fat just by looking at food? Depending on your overall body type you can adjust the number higher or lower.
b) Your Activity Level – Do you play sports or work a physically strenuous job?
If so, you’ll need to consume more calories in order to compensate. If you’re fairly sedentary and aren’t very physically active (besides your weight workouts of course), then you probably won’t need as many calories as someone who is more active.
c) Your Goals – Are you aiming to bulk up and build as much overall body mass as you possibly can? If so, you’ll obviously want to consume as many calories as you reasonably can. Are you simply trying to build a little bit of extra muscle and look better overall? If so, then a slight caloric increase is all you’ll need. Based on these 3 factors above you can decide where to place yourself on the caloric range.
Do NOT overlook this aspect of the muscle growth process!
Most trainees are so concerned with their workouts that they highly underestimate the importance of proper nutrition. If anything, nutrition is even MORE important than what you accomplish in the gym.
If you fail to eat properly by not providing your body with an adequate number of calories each day, building muscle will be physically impossible
2-Consume the right types of calories from the proper food sources.
We’ve just established that in order to build muscle, you’ll need to always ensure that your caloric intake exceeds your caloric expenditure. That’s all fine and dandy, but it really only tells us half of the story.
Sit down and feast on big macs, ice cream cones and potato chips and your caloric intake would easily exceed your caloric expenditure… but do you think this would be an intelligent approach to building muscle?
Of course not. You need to realize this…
All calories are NOT created equally!
The raw number of calories that you consume determines whether you’ll lose weight, maintain your weight or gain weight… but it is the type of calories that will determine what kind of bodyweight is lost or gained (lean muscle mass, fat, water etc.)
Your obvious goal is to build lean muscle mass while keeping body fat gains at a minimum, and therefore you’ll need to focus on consuming the right types of calories from the proper food sources.
The 3 main food groups that you should be concerned with are…
1) High Quality Protein – Protein builds and repairs muscle tissue and is the most important nutrient for those trying to increase their lean mass. Stick to high quality, easily absorbed sources such as lean red meat, poultry, fish, eggs, skim milk, cottage cheese, peanuts/natural peanut butter and whey.
2) High Fiber, Low Glycemic Carbohydrates – Carbohydrates aid in the absorption of protein, provide your muscles and brain with energy throughout the day and also help to maintain an optimal hormonal environment within the body.
Stick to slow-release, low-glycemic sources that will provide you with a steady stream of sugars throughout the day such as oatmeal, yams, certain fruits, brown rice and whole wheat products.
3) Healthy, Unsaturated Fats – Not all fats will make you fat, and essential fatty acids fit that profile. EFA’s are highly beneficial to the muscle growth process by increasing testosterone levels, improving the metabolism and volumizing the muscle cells. Some good sources of EFA’s include fatty fish, nuts, seeds, avocados and liquids like flaxseed and olive oil. These 3 food groups should make up the bulk of your diet, and should be spread out over the course of about 5-7 small meals daily. It may seem like a lot of work at first, but over time you’ll get used to it.
3-Increase your water intake.
Water is an absolutely critical component to the muscle-building process and to overall body health in general. Failing to keep yourself properly hydrated throughout the day will have a negative impact on literally every single process within your entire body!
Most people know that they should be drinking "plenty" of water every day, but how many actually do?
If you really paid close attention to your water intake you'd probably be surprised at how little you actually consume.
What makes proper water intake so amazingly important?
Well for starters, it’s the most abundant element in your body. It is ranked only
2nd to oxygen as being essential to life.Your body can survive for weeks without food, but without water you'd be dead in just a few days.
Roughly 80% of your body is made up of water; the brain is 85% water and lean muscle tissue is 70% water.
Research has shown that being even slightly dehydrated can decrease strength and physical performance significantly. In fact, merely a 3-4% drop in your body's water levels will lead to a 10-20% decrease in muscle contractions.
Not only will water increase your strength, but it also plays a large role in preventing injuries in the gym. Highly intensive training over a long period of time can put unwanted stress on your joints and connective tissue, and water helps to fight against this stress by lubricating the joints and forming a protective "cushion" around them.
So, just how much water is enough?
To find out how many ounces of water you should be consuming every day, multiply your bodyweight by 0.6. So if you weigh 150 pounds, you should be consuming around 90 ounces of water every day.
150 x 0.6 = 90
I know it sounds like a lot, but if you plan your day out properly it shouldn't be a problem. Keep a water bottle with you at all times and sip from it periodically. Keep water in the places where you spend most of your time: in your car, at work, on your nightstand etc.
Another good method to ensure that you drink enough water is to pre-fill a few 16 ounce bottles at the beginning of the day. This way you can have a visual representation of where your water consumption is at any point in the day.
For the first few days you'll probably find yourself running to the bathroom quite frequently, but your body will soon adapt to the increased water volume and this will no longer be a problem
4-Keep a detailed record of every workout that you perform.
This muscle-building technique should form the underlying basis for your entire workout plan. When it comes to structuring a proper approach in the gym, this is the most important overall factor, bar none.
Everyone is so obsessed with all of the specific principles in the gym (such as exercise selection, rep ranges, which days to spend in the gym, how many sets to perform etc.) that they fail to see the big picture.
Regardless of what type of approach you are taking in the gym, the underlying factor for success is progression.
Our bodies build muscle because of an adaptive response to the environment. When you go to the gym, you break down your muscle fibers by training with weights. Your body senses this as a potential threat to its survival and will react accordingly by rebuilding the damaged fibers larger and stronger in order to protect against any possible future threat.
Therefore, in order to make continual gains in muscle size and strength, you must focus on progressing in the gym from week to week in order to consistently increase the stress level.
Progression can take 2 main forms:
a) Increasing the amount of weight lifted on a specific exercise.
b) Increasing the number of reps performed with a given weight on a given exercise.
If you’re able to improve on at least one of the above factors each week in the gym, your body will be given continual incentive to grow larger and stronger.
If you neglect these factors and enter the gym without a concrete plan in mind, you’ll be ignoring the very foundation of the entire muscle growth process, and your
gains will surely stagnate.
Your goal is to always be getting better from week to week!
In order to keep track of your progress and to make sure that you’re seeing continued improvement, I’d highly suggest making use of a workout logbook.
You should write down the date, the muscles you’re training, all of the exercises that you performed, the weight that you lifted and the number of reps you were able to execute.
The next time you enter the gym, sit down for a minute before your workout and review those numbers. Your goal is to now improve upon all of those figures by either using slightly more weight or performing an additional rep or two.
5-Be prepared to train HARD!
If you think that building muscle is going to be a walk in the park and that you can simply enter the gym, “go through the motions” and then go home, you are sadly mistaken.
The reality is that if you want to experience any appreciable gains in muscle size and strength, you’re going to have to be prepared to train hard. This is one of the key factors separating those who make modest gains from those who make outstanding gains.
Most people just plain don’t train hard enough!
As soon as the exercise starts to get difficult their spotter jumps in and begins needlessly assisting them, or they simply put the weight down altogether.
BIG mistake!
The gym is a war zone, and if you want to be victorious, you must be willing to endure the battle.
Intense weightlifting is perceived as a threat to your survival, and the body responds to this by increasing the size and strength of the muscles to battle against the threat. Therefore, in order to see the most dramatic response in size and strength, you must push your body as hard as you safely can.
This can be achieved by performing all sets in the gym to the point of concentric muscular failure…
Some argue that training to failure is not necessary in order for muscle growth to occur, and the truth is that they are absolutely correct.
You could never train to failure and over time you would still see gains in muscle mass and strength. The only true requirement for muscle growth to occur is progression.
However, (and that’s a big however) if you’re like 99% of the population, then you want to experience those gains as quickly and efficiently as you possibly can. While training to failure isn’t necessary for growth to occur, it IS necessary if you want maximum growth to occur in the shortest period of time possible.
Concentric Muscular Failure: The point at which no further positive repetitions can be performed using proper form despite your greatest efforts.
This is very challenging and will require a lot of mental toughness on your part. I’m not going to sit here and feed you a pack of lies by saying that training for muscle size is an easy task. It’s not!
6-Avoid overtraining by limiting your overall workout volume and by providing your body with sufficient recovery time in between
workouts.
This is one of the most common and most deadly mistakes that almost all beginners run into. They naturally assume that the more overall work they perform in the gym, the greater their results will be.
Heck, when I was a beginner myself I thought the same thing.
Who can blame us for thinking that?
In almost all aspects of life this basic logic holds true. If you want to perform well on a school test, you need to maximize your studying time. If you want to improve your skills in a specific sport, you need to practice as much as possible.
When it comes to training for muscular size and strength, you can take this basic logic and toss it right out the window, down the street and around the corner!
The key thing to realize is that your muscles will NOT grow larger and stronger if they are stressed beyond the point of recovery. Remember, training with weights is merely an activity that sets the wheels in motion; it “sparks” the muscle growth process and “tells” your body to start building new muscle tissue… But the actual growth process takes place away from the gym while you’re eating and resting.
If you disturb the recovery process, your muscles cannot rebuild themselves.
Overtraining is your number one enemy! Your goal in the gym is to perform the minimum amount of work necessary in order to yield an adaptive response from the body, and not a THING more.
You can avoid overtraining in the following ways…
1) Limit the number of sets that you perform during each workout – You should perform a total of 5-7 sets for large muscle groups (chest, back and thighs) and 2-4 total sets for small muscle groups (shoulders, biceps, triceps, calves and abs). And remember, this is total sets per WORKOUT, not per exercise.
2) Limit the amount of time spent in the gym – Each workout should not last for any more than 1 hour. This time frame comes into play beginning with your first muscle-building set and ends with your final muscle-building set.
3) Limit your training frequency for each muscle group – Each specific muscle group should only be directly stimulated once per week in order to allow for full recovery time. If you’ve been following the “more is better” mentality then you may find it hard to let go of, but believe me, as long as you train hard, you do NOT need to train often or with very many sets and exercises.
In fact, performing too much work in the gym may actually cause your muscles to become smaller and weaker.
7-Understand that application and consistency is EVERYTHING!
You can have the most effective workout schedule possible, the most intelligent diet approach available and the most intimate understanding of muscle growth from every possible angle, but without the inner drive and motivation to succeed you will get nowhere, and very fast.
Just as the famous saying goes…
“Knowing is NOT enough. You must APPLY!”
Those who make the greatest gains in muscular size and strength are the ones who are able to continually and systematically implement the proper techniques on a consistent basis.
Building muscle is a result of the cumulative effect of small steps. Sure, performing 1 extra rep on your bench press will not make a huge difference to your overall results, and neither will consuming a single meal. However, over the long haul, all of those extra reps you perform and all of those single meals you consume will decide your overall success.
If you work hard and complete all of your muscle-building tasks in a consistent fashion, all of those individual steps will equate to massive gains in overall size and strength.
It is those who are willing to persevere that will succeed.
It is those who are willing to rise above laziness that will end up with the most impressive results.
I mean let's face it, everyone wants to be strong and muscular. If this is the case, why isn't everyone strong and muscular? It's because only certain people have the proper drive and motivation that it takes to get there.
