The Greatest Muscle Building Secrets No One Talks About
- Build 10kg of solid muscle in 27 days!
- Put 20kg on your bench press in 2 weeks!
- Get on the fast-track to size!
This post will tell you how to do NONE of these things.
That’s because they’re not possible (barring maybe the last one – depends what your definition of “fast-track” is).
Fitness marketing messages like those above are EVERYWHERE, and they give people false expectations of how long results should take.
These messages are everywhere because the people who regulate advertising have no idea that messages like these are LIES and misleading the public.
People are signing up to gyms all of the time, some with the hopes of gaining muscle. Many of them are going to be disappointed when they can’t really see much progress in 2 or 3 months.
Many will quit.
The REAL Muscle Building Secrets
This is how building muscle works:
- You need to be doing some form of resistance training – hopefully that much is a given.
- You need to be getting protein in your diet – 0.8g per kilogram of bodyweight is suggested as a minimum. I find 2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight better.
- You need to be in a calorie surplus. This means taking in more energy than what is required to maintain your weight. If your weight is going down, or staying the same, you’re NOT going to be building muscle.
- You need to progress from workout to workout. Lift slightly more than last time. This doesn’t mean putting more weight on the bar or the machine every single workout. Your steps can be as small as adding 1 more rep to each exercise.
- You need rest and recovery (don’t train too much, and get enough sleep.
If you do all of that – you’ll build muscle.There really isn’t much more to it than that – yet so many people fail to do it.
They’re usually missing something in the list above. Usually number 3 or 4.
No supplement, diet or crazy training routine can get you muscle building results if you don’t follow the five rules above.
How long do results take?
Simply put, a long time!
Most beginners usually expect results to happen about 3 times as fast as they actually do – and within the first year they think they’ve built a lot more muscle than they actually have. I know because this was me.
Generally, the first adaptations will be neural adaptations (your nervous system). Lifting weights is a skill, and you need to learn that skill. At first your arms will wobble all over the place when you try to lift free weights. Over time, your nervous system adapts and you gain stability.
Muscle gain follows if you continue to progress by increasing the weight or doing more total work (more sets and reps, volume).
You can expect it to take a year of lifting weights, following the 5 rules above to the letter, before people will recognise you as someone who lifts.
You can expect it to take more like 2-5 years to build the kind of body that turns heads.
And fitness magazine cover model bodies? 10 years (and good genetics).
I hope that motivates you more than it puts you off!
It took me 4 years to look like this!
Fat loss takes weeks or months
But building muscle takes years or decades (for significant appreciable results).
You can easily lose 10kg of fat and make a significant difference to the way you look in 10 weeks.
But building 10kg of muscle? That takes EXTREME discipline, consistency, correct training and programming (and all the other variables I mentioned). If you’re genetically gifted (you’re probably not), you do everything right, and you are just starting out, you can maybe gain 10kg (of muscle – not counting any FAT gain) in the first 12 – 18 months.
Most people will have to work for 3 years or more to reach that point.
Some people will never reach it.
But don’t worry – everyone can build enough muscle to really improve the way they look. You’re not special – it will work for you if you do it right. If you haven’t seen results yet, it’s 99.9% likely that it’s because you’re doing something wrong.
What do most people do wrong?
- They don’t train with progressive overload
- They don’t eat enough to gain any weight
- Protein intake is too low
- There in’t enough recovery
Here’s some resources to answer many questions that this post may have caused to arise:
