Gaining muscle is one of the hardest things a person can do, it takes focus and dedication all day everyday. It has taken me a few years to get to put on the weight I have. I started out at 6’1” tall weighing in at 145 pounds. I had just ran off most of the body fat I had accumulated through middle and high school. I began lifting with a few friends at an LA Fitness that had opened up right near the house. At first, it was very demoralizing to see my friends who I was going with, benching upwards of 250 pounds and weighing close to 200 pounds. I was the small guy. However, after a couple months I began to pack on some eight. When I say weight, I don’t mean the bad kind (fat). Most of it was muscle. Over the span of about 3 years, my bench has grown from 135 to 300.

For never being athletic to any degree, once you know what you have to do, gaining muscle can be rather simple. There are 3 key areas to monitor. They are your training, diet, and supplements.

Training

The hardest part of and any workout routine are being consistent in your training. Sometimes you will feel pumped and excited to go to the gym, other days you will try and convince yourself not to go. This is the hardest thing to deal with in my opinion. Once you get into the swing of things it wont be so bad.

The best training routine is always a split body routine. The main requirement to build muscle is training your muscles as hard as possible and then allowing them as much rest as possible after. Now we come to the issue of how much weight should you put on whatever exercise. General rule of thumb is to put whatever weight you can do 8 times on the bar. Then as you get stronger in the coming weeks and push 10 times out of each set, you starting upping the weight so that your reps go back down to 8. This rule applies for every muscle and exercise.

Example mass gain routine:

Mon-Chest/Triceps

Tue-Legs/Biceps/Abs

Wednesday-Rest

Thursday-Deltoids/Triceps

Friday- Back/Biceps/Abs

Saturday and Sunday- Rest

Generally with each muscle you will want to do 7-9 sets. Which means for chest I would recommend doing 3 sets benching, 3 sets of incline bench, and 3 sets of chest flies. The key is to hit every angle of the muscle. It is also important to mix up your routine with different exercises because after a while your body becomes use to it and doesn’t grow as fast as it use to. You must always keep your body guessing. It is also key to be in and out of the gym in about an hour. Any more than that and you run the risk of causing your body to turn catabolic. Meaning it increases in the loss of protein. A ‘catabolic state’ usually refers to the state in which you are burning protein instead of burning other types of fuel. This will cause your body to actually eat away at your muscles instead of building them up.

Nutrition

Another key part of any mass gain routine is to make sure you are eating the right kinds of food. This means you will have to make sure you are getting enough protein throughout the day and that you are limiting fat. However, don’t eliminate fat. Saturated fat is actually a building block of testosterone, which is responsible for muscle gain. Limiting fast food is key to the success of your routine. Without proper diet you would only be putting 50% of what you could into your health. So this includes soda and processed sugars as well.

Alcohol is always a big question people have when weightlifting. Here are the downsides about alcohol:

1. Lowers testosterone and increases estrogen by about a 1/5 when binge drinking.
2. Alcohol decrease protein synthesis in the body by up 40% due to the liver being busy with processing alcohol out of the blood.
3. Light beers have little to no vitamins in them when compared to darker beers.
4. Getting drunk or binge drinking can have lasting effects on your workouts over a week after having gotten drunk by having lower than average testosterone.
5. Alcohol dehydrates the body causing a whole slew of problems.

Basically, its just bad to binge drink when on a workout routine. It will slow you down and make you feel as if you are not getting to the point that you feel you should be. If you want to still enjoy a beer or two everyone in a while that is perfectly fine. However, unless you keep your alcohol intake low and to ideally around 1 beer a week, prepare to not get the results you want.

Supplements

Supplements are a tool bodybuilders can use to help speed up the process of building muscle. One of the most widely used supplements today is creatine. It’s a white powder substance that you mix with your water and cause your muscles to retain more water. This helps you during your workout as well as helping your muscles rebuild after the workout. Of all the supplements, the best and only one I would recommend would be a complete multi-vitamin. They insure you get the nutrition you and don’t give you any false hopes. If you choose to go the route of using supplements, make sure you research the product very thoroughly.

Tags: Beginner, Bodybuilding