Building Muscle - The Basics

Building muscle isn’t difficult.  It is just about consuming more calories than your body expends.  You work out, stress the muscle, and essentially break down the muscle fibers.  The calories you’ve eaten provide fuel for your workout and nutrients to supply your muscles to recover.  The muscle fibers heal and get thicker and bigger, or new muscle fibers are built.  That’s the process of building muscle in a nutshell.  Conversely, burning more calories than you consume; at best, you can only retain the muscle mass you currently contain.  Don’t expect any strength or muscle gains at a caloric deficit.  Building muscle only occurs at a caloric surplus.  It sounds simple, and the process is easy to understand. 

But why the heck does it take so long?  Building muscle takes longer than burning fat.  I have been lifting weights for about 10 years.  And only the past year, I’ve been doing it right.  I used to eat haphazardly, train insane, and recover when I needed it.  Gains were incredibly slow and minimal from year to year.  Now, most importantly, I focus on the nutrition.  Training and recovery are dependent on nutrition.  You cannot train with absolute intensity and recover efficiently without proper fuel.  You cannot just simply stack on 30 lbs. of mass in a month and pray that it’s all muscle (unless you’re on the needle, but I can only speak for natural bodybuilding).  Your body just doesn’t work that way.  More than likely, that’s mostly fat.  Building muscle is a slow process.  If you can gain 1-2 lbs. of lean muscle mass per month, that’s really something to be proud of.

Let’s talk about training.  Am I training intensely enough?  Could I have completed another rep?  Another partial rep even?  Did I maintain proper form?  These are some of the questions that run through my head during my workouts.  I like to train with a mixed variety of adopted strategies from different lifting styles.  I like the intensity from Dorian Yates’ H.I.T. program because it’s about lifting as heavy as you can with progressive overload.  An increase in strength is an indicator of muscle growth.  I like drop sets, super sets, giant sets and partial sets because it brings me to absolute muscle failure.  It keeps my endurance up with the extra volume and increased tempo of my workout.  High volume workouts have been notarized by many bodybuilders, such as Arnold Schwarzeneggar.  High frequency training is another training strategy that I’ve grown to love.  Strength and performance are indicators of muscle growth.  So long as you can lift heavier at the same amount of reps or perform more reps with the same amount of weight compared to last time, your muscles are growing. 

Honestly, I believe every training style works.  Like nutrition and diet strategies, I believe they all work—intermittent fasting, IIYFM, or the good ol’ small-and-frequent-meals-in-a-day.  But what works best is based solely on the individual and that individual’s likeness, belief, and enjoyment of that training style or strategy.  You give someone a job that they love, then they excel and have fun while doing it.  You give someone a job they despise, then they half-ass it and might not complete the job to its entirety.  At the end of the day, all that matters is whether you have trained intensely enough.  Are you attempting to lift heavier than last time for the same amount of reps?  Are you attempting to perform more reps with the same amount of weights as last time?

Challenge your body and it will adapt.  Your body is far more capable than what you think it can handle.