One thing I love about bodybuilding as a hardgainer is that it teaches you so much about how to achieve real success. As hardgainers we have to work really hard and fight for every single ounce of muscle we gain. We’re not genetically gifted like the natural-born mesomorphs who can get pumped up and achieve great success just by having a few sessions and they even get away with a bad diet. We are the underdogs so to speak.
But our curse is our blessing, because it teaches us that we can’t reap real success without perseverance, real hard work, and complete dedication. When bodybuilding, we learn to embrace pain instead of run away from it. Bodybuilding hones more than our physical bodies – it shapes our character and our Spirit, too.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the basic success principles of building muscle mass. When designing your program, these principles should serve as the core foundations upon which your muscle building programs will be based on. Apply these and stick to all of them, and you will get the muscle growth you’re after.
The 3 bodybuilding components you must master are Nutrition, Weight Training and Recovery (of course, those who are heavily selling weight gain supplements will say that Supplementation is a huge part of your muscle growth process…but I digress). There are no shortcuts -to reap the maximum muscle growth you must get all these 3 factors right. Fail in one area and you seriously diminish your chances to get optimal muscle growth.
To keep this article within a “reasonable” length, I will briefly touch on Nutrition and Recovery, and discuss Weight Training in more detail.
No Pain No Gain
How to Get Muscles Pillar #1: Nutrition
It still amazes me how many people who take their weight training so seriously don’t take their diet just as seriously, or how, out of the 3 bodybuilding components, often the most neglected part is Nutrition. Do not make the same mistake.
Think of Bodybuilding like house building. The food you eat is just like the wood, bricks and rocks that will form the actual house. Not having the right bodybuilding diet is just like refusing to supply the raw materials needed to build a house. The point is that your body needs to build muscle, and without proper nutrition all the hard work you do in the gym will be for nothing.
The main points to remember about nutrition are: personalization (you must eat what works for you), eating enough (right quantity), eating the right foods (quality), eating often enough (frequency and timing), nutrient ratio, and tracking and measurement (tweaking for optimal gains).
The gist of the matter is this: you must consume more calories than you burn in order to gain weight. In a post titled “Get Big Muscles:How to Gain Weight Fast by Eating Right” I showed how to calculate your daily calorie needs.
You can find more articles about Proper Nutrition for Muscle building purposes in the Nutrition category of this site.
How to Get Muscles Pillar #2: Adequate Rest
I said earlier that there are many people who don’t get their nutrition right, but in my opinion the most common mistake trainers make in their muscle building efforts is lack of thorough understanding about the role adequate rest plays in the entire process of muscle growth.
We just can’t seem to get through in our heads that it’s during rest and recovery that our muscles grow- NOT when we are weight training – and that’s why getting adequate rest is very critical to our success!
Think of it as farming – the plants grow and develop when the farmers leave the plants alone and let nature do its wonderful work! Similarly, your body builds muscle while you are resting – while you are sleeping and while you are NOT in the gym. When you are at the gym doing your training, you are actually NOT building muscles, you are breaking down muscles. When you are recovering, that’s when your body gets the time to work on rebuilding the muscle tissue you broke down at the gym.
So if you want to build muscle, you must give the body the chance to repair, heal and adapt. Overtraining is essentially akin to continuously breaking down muscles, thus producing poor results.
How much rest is adequate? Well it varies from individual to individual. Obviously don’t train when your muscles haven’t yet fully recovered, but in the end just listen to your body and you will know what’s best for it. Below are some general guidelines though:
- Each workout should not last over an hour.
- Work muscle groups 2x a week maximum if using split training and 3x if using full body routines.
- Train 5x per week maximum.
- Take a break for a week or two after about 8-12 weeks of continuous training. Don’t train for more than 8 weeks continuously.
“One to two weeks of rest? Oh no!” – I hear you gasp. Don’t worry. When you’re out of the gym concentrate on eating well and eating right, and getting rest. Remember, this is when the real muscle building takes place!
How to Get Muscles Pillar #3: Weight Training
Warm Up!
Always warm up before your workout. Warming up gets your circulation going and increases your body temperature, thus making your muscles more pliable and thus less vulnerable to injury.
You can warm up by or doing 5 to 10 minutes of cardio, lifting lighter weights (about 50% to 60% of your normal load) for 1 to 2 sets prior to your actual weight training program, and then giving each muscle group a good stretch. I also recommend to stretch after your workout and also while resting in between sets. My experience proved that warming up and stretching reduces muscle soreness, helping you recover much faster and allow you to get back into the gym much sooner.
Proper Technique
Contrary to popular practice, heavier doesn’t ncessarily mean better. To build muscle mass, what’s important is that the weight you are using is providing the required stimulation to the muscles being trained.
A common scenario I witness at the gym are men with massive egos trying to lift more than they could- and with a technique so bad I always couldn’t help but cringe. Lifting too much weight often leads to poor form because in order to lift a weight too heavy for your muscles, you have to resort to momentum. This then takes the stress off the target muscles. In other words, momentum moves the weight from A to B yes – but the target muscles aren’t being worked. You might as well just go home. As Tom Venuto said, Bodybuilding is accomplished best with strict form, controlled tempo, optimal tension, and total concentration.
Dan Millman, author of Way of the Peaceful Warrior, said: “The hardest path produces the strongest warriors. Don’t pray for a lighter load, pray for stronger shoulders.” And therein lies the lesson: the only way to have stronger shoulders is having a heavier load. In other words, choose the path of maximum resistance if muscle growth is your goal. Exercise harder, not easier. In order to grow and develop into the strongest warrrior, the path you must choose every moment is the path of most resistance, effort and pain.
It's not about the Weight, It's about Form
So what does proper form look like? Basically you need to eliminate extra body movement and momentum. This is cheating, and is responsible for a lot of weight lifting-related injuries. It also fails to provide the necessary stimulus for muscle growth. When you execute your moves, be still and let the target muscles do all the work. Avoid extra body movement. Let the muscle move the weight – not momentum, swinging or bouncing. Don’t let the muscle relax or rest during the set – keep it stimulated by squeezing, contracting, breathing right – don’t pause or hold for the sake of “resting” in between reps.
Don’t be like the average person, who are only interested in the latest miracle drug, the newest “breakthrough” technologies, or the “best” supplements. They want to take the shortcut. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all out for reaching goals with less effort and in less time. In fact I take this path when it comes to my business endeavours – I even outsource as much work as I can and concentrate only on doing strategic stuff. My point is that you have to make differentiations. Bodybuilding is not a situation where you can succeed by taking shortcuts. It’s not like you can outsource your workouts, can you? When it comes to bodybuilding, taking the easiest way is a faulty way of thinking and you will never achieve the body you want with this approach.
Best Exercises for Each Muscle Group
When designing workout routines to build muscle, focus on compound exercises. Compound exercises are whole body exercises, and they are more beneficial compared to isolated exercises because they stimulate the most muscle fibers in the least amount of time. In other words, they give you the best output with the least input. Performed correctly and at challenging resistance, compound exercises will give you the best results – and fast.
Vince DelMonte outlined the top weight training exercises for Skinny guys (per muscle group) in this article here.
Here’s a video of Vince DelMonte demonstrating seven of the best muscle producing weight lifting exercises. Other compound exercises worth mentioning are military press, calf raises, crunches, and bicep curls.
Sets and Reps
The appropriate Rep range you should be doing vary depending on your primary goal. But first let me explain the concept of Repetition Maximum (RM). Repetition Maximum is the number of maximum reps you can do for a given weight. For example, 8 RM means you need to find a weight so heavy that you can only manage to lift it for 8 reps and 8 reps only. Obviously your RM will change as you get stronger and your body starts to adapt.
Rep ranges affect the muscles in different ways. As a general guideline:
- 1 to 7 RM is for strength (really heavy load)
- 8 to 12 RM is for bodybuilding (muscle growth)
- Lifting higher than 13 reps is for endurance purposes (toning /sculpting)
To get maximum muscle growth, your weight training routine should focus on lifting 8-12 RM. But don’t use this rep range exclusively for every body part, because some of your muscle fibers respond best to higher RMs, like the abs and the calves.
Intensity
Ever noticed how the people who spend more time staring at themselves in the mirror or more time chatting to their mates look pretty much the same month after month, year after year? Those are the sort of people who aren’t training with intensity. You don’t want to be one of them.
Now let me share with you The Tao of Bodybuilding according to Clément Yeung:
Training with intensity is one of the biggest lessons about life and success that bodybuilding can teach you. Bodybuilding is a virtuous cycle of destruction, “death” and resurrection. Think about it. In the gym you deliberately subject your body to challenges, pressures and stresses that are just beyond than what it could currently handle (destruction). If you did a good enough job, your muscles break down (death). You then go away to rest and recover, and when you return your body had healed and adapted, ready for another beating (resurrection). Such is the path we have chosen, and just as we get stronger physically, we also grow Spiritually.
When bodybuilding, we learn to accept that we need to break down in order to build ourselves right back up, and I hope you also learn to apply this in other areas of your life.
So understand that there is NO way for you to get bigger or build muscle if you’re not pushing your muscles to its limits. You need to destroy yourself to force your body to grow bigger and stronger. You can only do this by working at a maximum intensity. Have complete focus and be in the moment. Be completely present at every lift and pull and push and exertion and stretch. Embrace the pain and the intensity of your work out will show in the quality of the results you attain.
As your body adapts it’s natural for you to hit a plateau and your gains will diminish. Learn to take this as a sign of progress. It means you’ve reached a higher level of development, and to break from this you just simply need to crank up the intensity of your weight training program.
Speed
The speed at which you execute your moves plays an essential role on your results, too. To build muscle, pay attention to the releasing phase of your exercises and always “fight the negative” – don’t just let it go and use momentum; using momentum is cheating. This portion of an exercise creates the most “damage” in the muscle fibers which in turn have to be repaired by your body. As the muscles get damaged, your body adapts as it is forced to rebuild itself, and each time it does, it gets stronger so that it can withstand the challenges you are continuously placing on them.
Remember this equation: proper execution = more muscle damage = more repairs = bigger, stronger muscles!
Progression
Progression is the best way to get over plateaus. Ever heard of people complaining that they haven’t changed even after all the work they did at the gym? Chances are they weren’t pushing themselves over the edge. They aren’t progressing their workouts. Progression simply means that you try to continuously increase the demands on your muscles. Your next workout should always be harder. You can do this by increasing the amount of weight or increasing the number of reps or sets or both.
Doing the same old thing will only condition your body to maintain itself – not good if what you want is change, particularly growth. So to get muscle growth you have to progressively increase the stimulation your muscles receive.
Variation
Another way to prevent your body from adapting is variation. So every now and then change your routines, your exercises, your rep range emphasis, etc. I’d say change your weight training program every 4 to 6, weeks or whenever you notice that your progress is starting to slow down again. The trick is to prevent your body from getting used to to anything. This will keep you on your toes and ensure your progress is continuous.
If the muscles becomes familiar and comfortable with your bodybuilding workouts, regardless of how challenging they may be, your body will not see any reason to change because it has already been conditioned to handle the same workout. Your muscles react best to unusual stress so keep subjecting them to new and harder challenges.
Conclusion
In order to get big muscles, you need to master your diet, weight training and get adequate rest. You must eat, sleep, think, train and breathe bodybuilding. Muscle building is not for the faint hearted. It requires determination, commitment, perseverance, and a lot of consistent hard work, so all the more reason to get the basics covered and execute your program correctly. Don’t let your hard work go to waste.
Bodybuilding is a continuous process of self-improvement that, if done properly, can show you to grow not just physically but also emotionally, mentally, and Spiritually. So take it seriously and endeavor to cover the basics and practice the core principles.
If you’re really serious about getting bigger muscles, the best resource I’ve found for skinny guys (and gals) is Vince DelMonte’s No Nonsense Muscle Building Program. To read my No Nonsense Muscle Building Review, click here.
If you’re trying to “cut” and get ripped, the best fat loss and muscle building program I’ve found is Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle program. Read my Burn the Fat review here.
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[...] In this article we’ll discuss just the Nutrition aspect of gaining muscle weight. If you’re more interested in the Training part, read “How to Get Muscles: The Basics of Building Muscle Mass”. [...]