3 replies to this topic

[Strateg0s]

1. Eat!
I hear it all the time, “but I already eat a ton and don’t grow!” Usually after a 3 day diet log is written down, and actual calories counted, the total isn’t nearly enough for quick muscle growth. How do you know how much is enough? Well first off you have to determine your resting metabolic rate (RMR), which is as follows:

Resting Metabolic Rate for Athletes (in calories per day) = 500 + 22 x fat free mass (in kilograms).

So for me at 176lbs and 8-9%BF that equals 80kg-7kg = 500 + 22 x 73 = 2100.

Not a lot huh? Well that’s if you stayed in bed all day. For a general office or school daily activity you have to multiply that number by 1.5. If you dig ditches all day, by 2.0. If it falls somewhere in between, you multiply by 1.7. This doesn’t include your exercise sessions. So now we have 1.5 x 2100 = 3150. Now it’s starting to add up.

Now add in your workout activity, which is determined by this formula:

Cost of Exercise Activity = Body Mass (in kg) x Duration (in hours) x MET value. And a basic MET value would be 10 for moderate cardio and 5 for a decent weight workout. So for cardio and weight days for me that would give me:

80kg x 0.5 hours x 10 = 400 calories

80kg x 1.0 hours x 5 = 400 calories

So now we get a grand total of 3550 calories, and that’s just to MAINTAIN current muscle mass. You need a surplus of 15% of calories to support muscle growth under intense training. This is about an extra 550 calorie surplus needed for growth. That leaves me with around 4100 calories a day needed to grow! What’s this tell the lifter looking for rapid growth? Figure out what you’re typically eating now, calculate the number of calories you really need to pack on muscle, which the first is usually too low, and grab a fork.

2. Protein, Protein, Protein.

Most lifters know, that protein is key to muscle growth, and many already know of the 1.0g/ lb of bodyweight recommendations. Well that’s a start, but for those training intensely the requirement should be more around 1.2g/lb of bodyweight, so for a 200lb guy that’s 240g of protein a day. Think more is better, not always, after about 1.5g/ lb of bodyweight, it becomes more difficult to just consume that much, and with adequate carb and fat intake it’s just more energy your body will spend breaking the excess down for energy, energy that shouldn’t be wasted. Always make sure you include both fast and slow proteins. The whey vs. casein battle of which is better has been beaten to death. Which is it? BOTH! Whey only is best used post-workout to promote anabolism due to its speed of digestion and getting into the bloodstream to muscle tissue needing aminos for recovery. Casein only is best before bedtime, when you want a slow digested protein that will prevent catabolism during sleep. And a mixture of the two is best for protein intake during the rest of the day for growth to fill in the gaps when regular food intake isn’t possible. Always eat lean quality protein at every meal to give the body adequate protein. Adding in quality plain yogurt with active cultures and a few bites of pineapple will help with protein digestion and breakdown, especially when on a higher calorie diet.

3. Nutrients combinations and timing, Massive Eating style.

Eating high calories all the time at first will put on size, especially if you were under eating to begin with, and these tips aren’t for bulking, the train heavy and eat everything in sight to hope to gain. They’re for quality lean muscle gain in the quickest time possible. So to avoid fat gain while still trying to eat to grow, a strategy taken from the Massive Eating Plan of not combining high amounts of carbs and fats in the same meal is used. This helps control insulin and fat storage, but keeps you on the road to growth. Those unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically eat a high amount of quality protein and either choose a healthy fat or quality carbohydrate as a fuel source, where either of the two is the dominant source of energy. Those trying to gain muscle, will primarily be eating low-fat, high quality carb meals with protein. Of the typical 6-7 meals a day needed for growth, only 2-3 will be primarily fat and protein meals. The 1-2 meals leading up to your workout, this is to control insulin, which blunts GH release if it’s in high concentrations in your bloodstream prior to resistance exercise. This can be as easy as a protein shake with a handful of almonds or flax oil mixed in. The other meal of fat-protein, should be taken before bed. Since during sleep you primarily burn fat for energy and you’re not going to be eating for 6-8 hours, you want a dense fuel source, such as fat to last that time period. It also helps slow down the digestion and emptying of the stomach, making the protein you ingest with it take longer to digest, staving off catabolism as long as possible. Also again, having a large surge of insulin from carbohydrates before bed will blunt GH release, which during REM sleep is the highest during the day.

4. Cycle in a Low-Carb Day

A second strategy to promote primary muscle gain over bulking is to cycle in a low-carb day into the mix. Low carb is for dieting right? At first the surplus in calories will promote growth, but after about the 10-14 day mark, your body tends to adapt and where at first it was mostly muscle gain, it will become more a 50/50 muscle/fat gain. Just like in dieting for fat-loss where you have a cheat day or re-feed to prevent leptin drops and a slow down in fat-loss. The opposite can be true, by having a constant high intake of calories and carbohydrates, your muscles can become insensitive to the constant surges in insulin and your fed-state from leptin will become less sensitive, making it harder to be hungry enough to keep eating to grow. So cycling in a low-carb day, where the bulk of your carbs will only be consumed post-workout, can be used. Even better, is scheduling this day on your rest day, and just eating carbohydrates for breakfast for energy for the day. What this does, is give your body a break from high insulin, start to deplete your glycogen stores and if any excess carbs are starting to be converted and stored as body fat, that process is halted. You’ll also be more primed to your hunger signals with Leptin manipulation. This doesn’t mean to cut your calories for the day. Though it will be a lower calorie day with your carbs going from 400g down to less then 200g for the typical lifter, they will be made up with healthy, calorie dense fats and protein can be boosted to 1.5-2.0g per lb of bodyweight for the day. This primes your muscles to soak up the next day of high calorie and carbs, and starting the anabolic environment again. The low-carb and lower calorie day, gives you a day to also do some light cardio and burn a little extra fat that you may have gained so far, since insulin is low for the whole day. How often should this happen??? Well it depends on how easy you tend to put on fat, so the slower metabolisms, this can be done about every 4 days, or 1-2 times a week, which usually will fall into the off/rest days of most mass building workouts. For the leaner hard-gainer, once a week or 1-2 low-carb days every 12 days to finish out an eating to grow 2 week period.

5. The More Often, the Better.

In order to grow, you have to train the body as often as possible. This goes against most bodybuilding theories, that you need lots of rest to grow, which is true. Especially when training to failure all the time, which causing a great deal of trauma to muscle, requiring a lot of rest to recover. This may incur growth, but it also hinders how often you can train. By not going to failure and training to give enough stimulus for growth, but not so intense that you have to wait a week for recovery, you can squeeze in extra workouts and more opportunities to stimulate muscle growth. By not training to extreme failure, you also keep the nervous system from becoming overstressed, hindering recovery and the frequency that you can train (i.e. overtraining). Training everything twice a week is the goal. This can be obtained with a two-day split, an upper-body day and a lower body day, done back to back with a day of rest in between the series. If you’re sore too much, that’s more from not eating enough carbs and protein, then from training too often.

6. Make Each Rep Count

To adequately stimulate a muscle, you need to flex your muscles from the beginning of the rep to the end of it. This creates a maximum hypertrophy stimulus throughout the entire range of motion of the exercise. When doing isolation exercises, a peak contraction technique can be used, which is holding the peak contraction for a total of 2-3 seconds on every rep of the set. This type of contraction increases the intra-muscular tension during the set, allowing more force to be generated during regular, sub-maximal sets. These techniques will help ensure all reps performed are of high quality. Try and do endless reps using these techniques, you won’t last long, which leads us to the next tip.

7. Hit All Your Fibers

Maximum growth in the shortest amount o time can only be done if you every fiber type. Since every muscle is composed of both fast and slow-twitch muscle fibers you have to train both types to incur maximum growth. This can be easily accomplished by using a heavy day/ light day training style, with set and rep totals remaining constant. Meaning with a set/rep scheme total of around 30, you either choose a 5x5 for heavy days and 3x10 or 2x15 for light days. What’s this mean? You can either train heavy or long, but you can’t train heavy AND long (i.e. overtraining). So high volume/low reps, or low volume/high reps. With the 2 day split of upper-body lower body as an example, the following can be used to hit all fiber types:

DAY 1 – Upper Body (Heavy) - 5x5

DAY 2 – Lower Body (Light) - 2x15

DAY 3 – Off

DAY 4 – Upper Body (Light) – 2x15

DAY 5 – Lower Body (Heavy) – 5x5

You also have to structure your workout to hit the deep reserve fibers, to fully stimulate the muscle tissue. To accomplish this, a stretch movement should be included in your workout. By doing this, the nervous system will activate more motor units. Thus more muscle fibers will be recruited and research has shown this to be a muscle hypertrophy and even hyperplasia (cell splitting) stimulus. Stretch exercises, where the muscle is in a stretched position at the beginning of the exercise are best used after compound movements to further recruit motor units after most have been recruited in the large compound movement.

8. Focus on the Pump

Arnold said it was better then sex, well the jury is still out on that one, but the pump is still a major signal of growth. It’s not the end all be all of muscle growth, but for fast gains, you want as much blood pumping nutrients into your muscle fibers. This is the basis of all the NO2 products on the market. Beyond Arginine-AKG, exercise is still the best pump promoter. This can be accomplished by either doing agonist/antagonist muscle group supersets, or by doing triple sets as a finisher on the last set of a specific body part. This is done in two ways. Either by doing an extended set of 5 reps in good form, resting 10-15 seconds, doing 5 more, rest and 5 more, or by dropping the weight with no rest in between each of the 5 rep portions of the set.

9. The Power of H2O and Supplements

Yes, everyone knows you’re supposed to drink more water. It’s even more important when trying to gain maximum muscle size, since it’s needed for every chemical reaction in the body, including growth. Also, with the high amount of protein, which has a mild diuretic effect, extra water is needed to maintain hydration, and keep catabolism at bay as much as possible. Other non-androgen supplements that can boost muscle growth are R-ALA taken before high carb meals other then post-workout to shuttle nutrients into muscle tissue. CLA is also beneficial to gain muscle. That’s a fat burner you say? Well actually it’s a nutrient partitioner that shuttles nutrients to muscle and away from fat. So CLA has more of a benefit taken during a high calorie diet, to prevent excess fat gain from the extra calories, dosing of 3-6g a day is best. Of course there’s the king of all mass building supplements, creatine. A 2-5g daily dose of creatine monohydrate is enough. Buffered Kre-Alkyln and creatine malate allow for greater creatine absorption. BCAA’s pre and post workout help promote anabolism, since they are directly metabolized in the muscle tissue. HMB a metabolite of is a beneficial mass builder for the new lifter that has less then 6 months of training.

10. The Post Workout Window

The one hour period following an intense workout is a critical period. Muscles are in a high catabolic breakdown, but are also primed to be very anabolic if key factors are involved. No other period is more important then the 60 minutes following a workout and up to 3 hours after. During the first 60 minutes easy to digest protein and key aminos combined with high glycemic carbs are essential. High glycemic carbs such as dextrose and maltodextrin are best used to replenish glycogen stores over fructose or high-fructose corn syrup. This will stimulate a large insulin response causing an anabolic state storing carbs as muscle glycogen and driving protein and key aminos into muscle tissue for repair and growth. Whey isolate and hydrosylates are best used post workout for their easy assimilation and quick entry into the blood stream. A formula for a post-workout drink is a 2:1 or up to 3:1 carbohydrate: protein ratio of the drink that will harness the power of insulin and drive nutrient delivery. The following 2-3 hours after a workout are a high growth period and if the carb and fat rules are to be relaxed, this is the time. The key focus is quality calories and protein, up to a full third of your total day’s calories and protein should be consumed within this 3 hour period. This will saturate the body with nutrients for a large anabolic surge. So the time to go to the all you can eat buffet is during this time, but try to watch the fat, carb combos if you can.


Well there are 10 key strategies to promote the fastest growth of muscle possible and minimizing fat gain. In the end, consistency is truly the key and sticking to well planned diet and workout plan will be the difference of reaching your physique goals.

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all credit to Clayton Blanchette

[lamb88ert]

awesome post bro, i got a buddy who cant put on weight and have been tryin to explain how important nutrition is for lifting especially those with real high metabolic rates like himself. Now instead of tryin to get this through his head 30 times a day ill print this out

thanks bro
lamb88ert