How to Build Muscle
Building muscle is straight forward concept, the human body must adapt to a tension that is above and beyond what has been previously experienced. The process by which we do this is known as progressive overload, in simple terms, to continuously build muscle you must get stronger. Although the concept is pretty straight forward, the challenging part is to consistently get stronger. In order to consistently get stronger, we must reach optimal conditions which are as follows.
1. Getting Stronger on Compound Movements
2. Training with the Correct Frequency
3. Recovering properly
4. Consistency and Patience
Getting Stronger on Compound Movements
The stronger you are, the more muscle mass you will have. Usually if you aren’t adding weight to the bar, you are not adding muscle to your frame. With this in mind there are 5 compound lifts that you should be focusing on, Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Press, Overhead Press and Bent over Row. With these exercises you will get the most muscle growth as you continuously progress on them because of the numerous amounts of muscles they utilize. You can and should do other movements, but these 5 exercises will develop the foundation, and these should be your main focus when starting out. With this in mind, form is of the upmost importance and performing these exercises correctly will allow you to progress without injuries. Your main focus isn’t to get a pump or become sore, but instead to continuously add weight.
Training with the Correct Frequency
Ideally speaking each compound lift should be trained twice a week, there can be variances to this where you perform the movement three times a week, where one of those days is to simply focus on progressing on mastering the movement and not adding weight. However, to keep it simple, focus on performing each compound lift twice a week. Twice a week is optimal because it takes 48-72 hours for a muscle to recover, hence once a muscle is recovered, we should train it again to promote growth. In addition to this, practicing the movement twice a week allows it to remain fresher in our minds when compared to performing the movement every seven days. Thus, your technique improves at a much quicker rate, which will equate to lifting heavier and heavier weights.
Recovering Properly
Once the workout is finished, your body will go about rebuilding the damaged muscle and building on it in order to adapt to the heavier weight. Hence, you must allow your muscles to recover from your workouts in order for them to grow. To put your muscles in the best conditions to recover you must; be in a slight caloric surplus, sleep an adequate amount 7-10 hours a night, and avoid putting additional stimulus on the muscle.
The notion of overeating in order to build muscle is in fact needed to put on muscle once the individual has progressed out of the novice/beginner state of training. As a novice/beginner weight training is a new stimulus and regardless of whether or not you in a caloric surplus there is room for your body to put on muscle. However, once past this stage it becomes more difficult to put on muscle without a caloric surplus. Now the question is how much of a caloric surplus is needed, as a general rule of thumb around 150-250 caloric surplus will allow you to put on muscle and minimize fat gains.
However, this can be different for everyone and as such you have to find the best spot, hence starting out around 150-250 calories is a good spot and from there you can bump the calories up slowly if needed. Breaking down the macro aspect of these calories, you have a lot more calories to work with than if you were cutting or maintaining, hence you can split up your macros more to your preference. Ideally though, they should be around the same as your macronutrient split as if you were cutting, simply more carbs to give you more energy to build muscle and workout harder. Fats can range anywhere from 20-30% of your calories, the grams of protein you are intaking should be around your bodyweight and carbohydrates should make up the rest. However, since you are in a caloric surplus and your body has excess amounts of energy, the macronutrient split can be much more flexible, make it enjoyable for yourself. If you desire more fat than increase it to 35%, if you like more carbs, you can drop fat to 15%-20%, there are numerous combinations, find what works for you and take that route.
Moving on to the sleeping part of the equation, getting adequate sleep is vital to allow your muscles to recover, however, just like the caloric surplus everyone is different, hence, you might need 9 hours of sleep or even 10 to create an optimal environment for your muscles to recover, while someone else might only need 6, the average person will need about 8 hours of sleep. Find how long you need to sleep each night and aim to get that many hours of sleep consistently.
The last and most critical aspect of recovery is actually letting your muscles recover, don’t hit the same body part on back-to-back days, your muscles need 48-72 hours to recover. If you train them every day without allowing the muscle to recover, your body is unable to rebuild the damaged muscle and without even rebuilding the muscle, there is no way new muscle can be built. Therefore, any stimulus that can highly fatigue the muscle should be avoid, meaning, once the muscle is trained, don’t train it again the next day.
Be Consistent and Patient
Regardless of all other factors, if you are not consistent, you will not gain any muscle. The whole premise of building is to consistently and continuously overload your muscles to promote growth. Thus, if you don’t train consistently, your results will come at a much slower rate and in some cases, there will be no new muscle growth. Patience and consistency are vital to building muscle and as much as you want results right away, take it slow, and focus on performing each and every exercise correctly, you will thank yourself in the future. Not only this but, be realistic and set realistic goals, you will not gain 10lbs of pure muscle in a month of training, it’s more likely that you will gain that amount your first year, as a beginner you can expect to gain at most with top tier genetics around .5lbs of muscle a week, which is around 24lbs in your first year of training, and from then on, usually muscle growth will slow down exponentially as your years of training increases. Realistically you can expect to gain an average of 5lbs-15lbs of muscle your first year. If your genetics are on the better side for muscle growth, with good training, good nutrition and good sleep, it will on average be towards the latter half. Telling you all this isn’t to discourage you, but instead to show you realistic expectations as you progress, which will allow you to set attainable goals that you can and will hit. If your main focus is to look good, after your first few years of training, you will have a good foundation of muscle, and if you are a lean individual, you will see the difference, however, if you are not lean, you will have to lose the fat in order to see all the muscle you’ve built and you can see how to do that here.