With the plethora of muscle building information online and in offline magazines, you’d think there would be enough advice for anyone to experience muscle gain problems. However, that is not the case. People experiencing mediocre progress are ubiquitous, in gyms and online chat rooms, banging their heads against the wall in frustration at muscle gains so miniscule they’re hardly worth the time and effort of going to the gym and do the moves. It’s a mini-tragedy when you consider that it doesn’t have to be that way; results can be commensurate with efforts: natural muscle gains can come steadily and without plateaus. This should be of interest to anyone who not only dislikes not achieving what they have set out to achieve, but losing precious time in the process.
Let’s go over five ‘natural truths for muscle gain’ that are often the root of the problem and you probably won’t hear from many other sources. These are truths to gaining muscle that are unique to natural bodybuilding, things that I have discovered through years of trial and error. A couple of them were discovered out of a simple willingness to abandon status quo theories and go where most trainers don’t. Others are commonly repeated muscle-building dogmas that simply need the addition of an important caveat. So let’s go inside.
You need enough food to build muscle… but…
…Eating too much food can actually slow down your progress. Your body has a finite amount of daily energy. It uses energy to digest and process food. You need energy to recover the worked muscles. These are requirements in addition to the energy expended to perform your daily activities. Stuffing daily mega calories in the 3,000 to 5,000 range is NOT anabolic, but rather… energy draining. And it doesn’t force torn muscle tissue to heal faster.
If you’re a skinny guy or girl, you’re likely to hear many self-proclaimed experts tell you to “eat more; you’re not eating enough.” But many will still say this, even if you are eating enough and your slow muscle gain is due to something else. It’s easy to confuse the body’s lack of tendency to store body fat with difficulty gaining muscle. However, if a “fast metabolism” is the cause of your muscle frustration, why isn’t the fat person with a slow metabolism having a better time?
The truth about how to gain muscle is this: Eat a protein-rich meal with some nutritious, energy-sustaining carbohydrates every three to three and a half hours while eating four to six meals per day. But don’t eat mega calories unless your goal is to get fat.
Training intensity is important… but…
… Too much intensity is detrimental to progress. If you’re doing workouts that incorporate escalation techniques like forced reps, drop sets, pre-exhaustion, supersets…etc, you’re practically asking to hit a plateau of progress.
I came to bodybuilding with a background of hard military training. I had a predilection for taking my body and my muscles to the maximum. It took me years of frustrating setbacks to finally understand that building muscle is not effective through the application of a simple equation of “the harder you work, the better your results.”
The truth about how to gain muscle is this: A certain amount of measured intensity is necessary for the stimulation of muscle growth. Anything beyond this could build character, but not much body.
Recovery between workouts is key… but…
… Recovery varies with many factors. To think that your muscle-building efforts will succeed because some guru told you that you only need exactly six days off after doing the ‘X workout’ on Monday is ridiculous. YOU may need seven or eight days for your tissue to recover from that training. And if you’re fifty-five instead of twenty-five, you may need nine or ten days for that tissue to recover from the same training.
Where did the notion originate that muscle tissue needs 72-144 hours to recover and anything beyond that is atrophying? Have you ever wondered that? Did you ever see the hard evidence to prove it? I’ve never seen a damn thing. However, I have observed for over twenty-five years that countless people who adhere to this notion are going nowhere with their natural “muscle gains.”
Also, for a long time now I’ve been poking fun at this bit of “bodybuilding lore” and reaping the rewards of doing so. How long does it take between the work of each part of the body? Not to surprise you, let’s say it could be counted in weeks instead of days. Do I already have your attention?
Here is the truth about muscle gain: The recovery time requirement between workouts varies between people. It varies greatly with individual response to a given amount of training intensity. It varies with age, gender, genetically determined hormone levels, daily stress levels, and a host of other tiny factors. It even varies with the respective muscular development; the more muscle you have, the more tissue you have to recover so you can build more muscle. The only way to know how many rest days is optimal for a particular workout is through testing and listening to feedback.
You want to “gain weight”… but…
… You really don’t want to get fat. “Bulking up” or gaining body fat with the idea that it will make you stronger does not help you gain more muscle. Trust me, if I did, I could be first in line at the Cheesecake Factory to buy a week’s worth of “bulking foods.”
You have to make the distinction in your mind between “gaining weight” and “gaining muscle.” Of course, muscle has weight. But that doesn’t mean the prescription for fat weight gain is the same as the prescription for muscle weight gain. To gain weight you simply need a daily caloric intake that exceeds your caloric expenditure. To gain muscle, you need a higher protein intake for tissue repair along with some additional carbs for workouts and tissue recovery energy expenditure. It doesn’t take much; you don’t need megadoses of calories.
Here’s a corollary: don’t use the bathroom scale to constantly monitor your muscle gains. Muscle doesn’t build up in the body fast enough for the scale to be a good short-term measurement device for success. Body weight gains seen over days and weeks are usually water and fat from excess sodium, water, and calories.
Instead, use your strength in the gym as a measuring stick for progress. Steady, uninterrupted strength gains (especially in the context of volume within time constraints) will eventually translate into solid lean muscle mass weight gains.
So here’s the lowdown on muscle gain: “Gaining weight” is too general a description to convey the distinctive knowledge needed to gain natural muscle. It has the connotation of simply gorging on extra calories and shedding heavy weights as the recipe for a more muscular body. Has no sense. Bottom line: If you’re eating enough protein and carbs to build muscle and maintain energy, but still aren’t gaining muscle, try increasing your rest days between workouts.
Filling in excess calories when tissue just needs more time to recover is a recipe for weight gain. But it will be “dead weight”; the kind that hangs uselessly from your body.
Bodybuilding supplements are often a waste of money… but…
… Selective use of supplements in a way that is merely “supplemental” to good eating habits and good training practices can accelerate progress. The key is selectivity and getting everything else optimized before shelling out your hard-earned money on ‘extra’ aid.
It is fashionable these days among bodybuilding experts online to criticize supplement companies and label them as pure scam operations. I remain wary of such broad accusations and state as in so many contexts: “there are good and bad companies, with effective supplements among the purely bottled crap.”
Case in point: Creatine is a wonderful training performance enhancer. However, its ability to push your workouts to higher performance levels might require more recovery days between workouts to build muscle taking advantage of its performance-enhancing capabilities.
Here is the truth about muscle gain: Bodybuilding supplements should be used selectively and only on a “supplemental” basis for an optimized training and recovery program.
Soak in these natural muscle gaining truths that few will tell you. They can put you on a trajectory to get a body that will make your most envious family members every time they see it.