EUGENIZATION.

The question I hear most frequently from guys in the Spike TV demographic (18-34) is:

“I’m lifting weights pretty regularly, but I’m not getting any bigger. Why not?”

First off, it’s interesting to see what most guys do in the weight room (*cough curls chest flyes and bench *cough). Knowing that most people lift with the intensity level of a beached whale just adds insult to injury.

Folks, to gain muscle, three things have to happen:

1. You must perform progressive strength training for the entire body.
2. You must strength train with a sufficient level of effort.
3. You must allow sufficient time for recovery.

(A more in-depth discussion of these three points can be found here.)

Now, onto the meat of our post. You may be surprised to learn that, assuming you’re doing everything correctly in the weight room, your size problem is more accurately an eating problem.

In short, you’re not gaining muscle because you’re not eating enough.

Take a friend of yours out to the middle of a field. Now, turn to said friend, hand him a hammer, and say, “My dear friend, please build me a house.” In all likelihood, your friend will say, “A house? With what?”

Exactly.

How do you expect your body to build muscle without the raw material it needs to build it with? Many guys are worried about “getting too fat”, so they focus on eating in a manner befitting a fat loss program. If your body requires an excess of calories (and a fair amount of protein) to build muscle, and you supply it with barely enough calories to keep “all systems running”, how do you expect to build any appreciable muscle?

That’s right; you can’t. And this is precisely what happens.

So does that mean you should do your best imitation of a Dyson vacuum and indiscriminately suck up every last morsel of food in site? Certainly not. Here’s a more systematic way to go about things that isn’t overly complicated:

• Estimate your daily caloric expenditure by multiplying your bodyweight (in pounds) by 13 (if you’re female, multiply by 11 instead).
• Add roughly 500 to that total. Now, make sure you get that number of calories in every day, no excuses (not sure how much you’re eating in a day? Keep a food journal. In fact, keep one anyway, even if you think you know how much you’re eating. You may be surprised at how wrong you are).
• If you fail to gain muscular weight each week (doesn’t have to be much - it could be as little as a half pound), then eat more - add a couple hundred calories to the mix.

This procedure assumes that you’re working out regularly with weights, and that you’re looking to gain muscular weight, of course.

As is the case with most things in exercise and fitness, the concept is simple, but the execution of that concept is far from easy. However, consistency can do wonders (do you know how Michael Thurmond packed 18 pounds of muscle onto this guy’s frame in only 6 weeks? Weight training and serious eating).