4 reasons why you're bad at building muscle mass
If you're lean and weak, this article will either hurt your feelings or help you become more muscular and stronger.
The 4 reasons you can't build mass
Why can't you build muscle mass? Well, probably because you're bad at eating and exercising. Here's what you can do to change that and finally build some muscle.
1 - You suck at eating right
Meal frequency is important. You need to use different strategies to eat more calories. In addition to this, you need to stop this intermittent fasting bullshit.
Guys who are weak and skinny all think they're eating a lot, but they're actually very bad at eating right. Oh, you once ate two large pizzas in one sitting? Okay, did you do that six times a day? No? You only ate one more meal? And for the rest of the week you ate like an anorexic model? Scrawny guys have the same misguided perception when it comes to food as fat guys have when it comes to how muscular they are. Neither has anything to do with reality. The fat guy always thinks he only needs to lose 15 pounds to be hard and defined, when in reality it's more like 50 pounds. And the skinny guy thinks he's eating a lot, even though in reality he's eating way too little.
For a while, Intermittent Fasting (IF) was all the hype. Why? I have no idea. If you're trying to build as much muscle mass as possible, how are extended periods without food intake going to help in any way? Spare me the "fasting increases growth hormone production" bullshit. Fasting won't increase growth hormone production enough to make a difference. I've seen a lot of guys who followed IF diets. They were all really lean. And they all weighed no more than 70 kilos. Nobody cares about your abs, if you weigh 70 kilos then this is not the kind of diet you are looking for.
Admittedly, there are a lot of studies that say that meal frequency has no effect on fat loss or weight gain. Well, I've been in this sport for 26 years and every muscular and massive person I've ever met has eaten a lot of food at every meal, in addition to eating a lot of meals per day. If you eat four meals a day, what do you think happens with the fifth meal? You will of course consume more calories. A sixth meal? More calories. Seventh meal?
I know you're having trouble understanding the destruction of the tactical nuclear knowledge bomb I just detonated, but I swear to you it's that simple. This seems like really basic knowledge, but you'd be surprised by how many guys cling to a study that says meal frequency doesn't matter and then ignore every muscular and massive guy who eats a lot of meals a day. At what point does 30 years during which high meal frequency has produced legions of muscular strength athletes outweigh a couple studies?
"But I have trouble eating a lot." To be honest, I have the same problem. And I'm not asking you to wake up on a Monday morning and start stuffing 10,000 kcal into you if you've only been used to eating 2,000 kcal a day. It's no different to training goals. You don't set yourself the goal of lifting 400 kilos if your personal best is currently 250 kilos. You will try to reach 260 kilos, then 270 kilos, and so on.
An easy way to help your body get used to eating more food:
Drink a shake after every meal or between all meals. Even if you only eat three meals a day, an extra shake after each meal is an easy way to increase your calorie intake. If you add a tablespoon of olive oil to each shake, that's another 119 kcal per shake. If you drink 3 shakes a day, that's an extra 357 kcal just from the olive oil.
If you use two scoops of protein powder, this equates to around 220 kcal. Together with the 119 kcal from the olive oil, that's a total of 339 kcal per shake. With three shakes a day, that's over 1000 extra kcal per day. If you find it difficult to drink a shake after every meal, then drink your shakes between meals. However you do it, that's an extra 1000 kcal and drinking calories is easier than eating them.
Mix one large shake a day. We used to make all our shakes with a blender. The protein powder available at the time made this necessary, but it also made it easy to add a lot of different ingredients to create a delicious shake. Try it out. Buy a blender, add protein powder, egg whites, peanut butter, bananas, milk, etc. until the blender cup is almost overflowing. Drink this shake in sips throughout the day. Set yourself the goal of having drunk every last drop of the shake by the end of the day. If you're being really pedantic and controlling your macronutrients, then add up what you put in the shake.
When I was 17, I used the following recipe to go from about 80 kilos to 95 kilos in the course of a summer. Of course, I ate almost to the point of vomiting at every meal (and every two hours), but I still managed to have the following shake every day:
- 2 cups of milk
- 3 raw eggs
- 2 scoops protein powder
- 1 tablespoon of peanut butter
- Hershey's chocolate syrup
- 1 banana
- 2 tablespoons Karo syrup
If your reaction to this shake is that it looks like you're practically begging for type 2 diabetes, then you're probably one of those really skinny guys who can't gain weight and whose muscles disappear when they put on a T-shirt. If you weigh 65 kilos and have a negative body fat percentage, then you most likely won't have to worry about getting diabetes because of your sugar intake. You should be more worried about the fact that girls half your size are moving heavier weights than you in gyms all over the world.
Eat sandwiches with peanut butter and jam. Make yourself three and eat one between meals. You can take them with you wherever you go. And if you don't like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then you're probably a sociopath or you have freedom - most likely both.
2 - Your workout intensity is crappy
Put on your gym face. Add intensity techniques to your training program I can't tell you how many times someone has told me something like, "I saw you working out at my gym yesterday. I actually wanted to say hi to you, but you looked kind of pissed off." I'm not pissed off, I'm working out. I'm at the gym to work out - not to chat. And my training requires a lot of concentration. Your "gym face" should reflect your attitude towards your workout. You don't put on your "gym face" at the disco and you don't put on your "disco face" at the gym. However, in between my sentences, I do pay attention to what's going on around me...sometimes. And I see a lot of people at the gym wearing their "disco face", chatting with other people and having a great time. And if that's what you're here for, then that's totally fine, As long as you don't get in the way of me working out, I don't care. Not everyone wants to build as much muscle mass as possible or maximum strength.
However, if you want to achieve the latter, then you need to train accordingly and take your time in the gym or weights room seriously. People often lose focus because they do very mindless training programs that they don't really need to focus on. In other words, there's no reason to focus or put on your "gym face" because the program doesn't require it. Or you suck at training really hard.
Once upon a time, high repetition training was one of the mainstays of leg training. Squat sets with 20 reps and leg presses with 50 reps. You know, tough shit. These guys were using techniques to extend their sets like descending sets, rest/pause, and all other kinds of techniques that stretch the set out as much as possible to generate a tremendous amount of metabolic stress. They didn't even know what metabolic stress was. All they knew was that if they trained really hard, they built muscle.
Today, I see sayings all over the web like "anything over three reps is cardio." Folks, even the hardest max set of three reps is not comparable to a set of squats with many reps to absolute muscle failure. It's not that three reps isn't hard, but those two things just aren't comparable. At some point in your training career, you're going to have to come to the realization that if you want to make real progress, you're going to have to work your ass off.
The fact is, almost all of us get into a rut of complacency or lose the desire to train really hard. A great way to break this rut is to incorporate a few intensity techniques into your training that force you to set personal goals with each training session. My two favorite techniques are the following:
50% sets
The working set of this intensity technique gives you something of a "built-in goal." After warming up, perform a set to complete muscle failure. Pause for 60 seconds and perform a second set, trying to do at least half the repetitions of the first set. So if you performed 10 to 12 repetitions with 150 kilos in the first set, you must try to perform at least 5 to 6 repetitions with the same weight in your second set. This technique works well with push and pull exercises.
Goal-oriented rest/pause sets
The goal each week is to exceed the total reps of your last training session with rest/pause sets. If you don't know what rest/pause training is, here's a quick summary: you perform a set, pause for about 30 seconds, perform a second set, pause for 30 seconds and then perform a final set. If you did 15 repetitions on your first set, 9 repetitions on your second set and 5 repetitions on your final set, that's a total of 29 repetitions. The goal for the following week is to exceed these 29 repetitions. I prefer these two intensity techniques to all others (descending sets, supersets, megasets etc.) as they encompass one goal. You can perform a conventional descending set without pushing yourself hard, but if there is a number you need to reach or exceed, this will greatly increase your focus and intensity.
At some point, the weight on the bar needs to be increased or more reps need to be performed with the same weight. This does not mean that you should sacrifice the form of the exercise to the weight on the bar. It simply means that progressive overload should be the cornerstone of your training ideology - and this is especially true for the lean and weak.
3 - You suck at the exercises you hate
The best way to progress is to do exercises you don't like. This is especially true for someone who has gotten into a rut with their training. Let's face it - in the gyms of the world, an infinitely greater amount of curls are performed compared to squats. The reason is quite simple - squats are strenuous, culs less so. But aside from that, one reason people don't grow and improve is because they do all the things they love while avoiding everything they hate. If your goal is to get muscular and strong, then you need to sit down and make a list of all the exercises you hate that can build muscle mass. Why do you really hate these exercises? Because they are exhausting and hard. Why are they exhausting and hard? Because the muscles involved in performing these exercises are small and weak.
4 - You're not progressing because you're not training enough
Overtraining is rare. The truth is that most people don't train often enough. If you can't move a lot of weight, then it's completely impossible for you to get into the realm of overtraining. In reality, it's hard for even an advanced strength athlete to get into overtraining territory if diet and sleep are right. One of the most popular training splits of the old days was the 3 training days followed by a non-training day split. Lee Haney popularized this training split in the eighties and nineties and because he won the Mr. Olympia title eight times, people believed there was something to this split. It has been shown time and time again that training frequency is the most important factor in terms of hypertrophy. So why are you only training your chicken breast once a week with a maximum weight of 85 kilos on the bench press when you should be training it at least twice a week?
The "not sh...eid" training program
For the first three days of this program, there is one rule you must follow: only choose exercises that you hate. If you suck at an exercise, then you have to do it.
Day 1 - Chest/shoulders/triceps
A) Chest press exercise using the 50% method
B) Chest isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
C) Shoulder press exercise using the 50% method
D) Shoulder isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
E) Triceps exercise (multi-joint exercise) using the 50% method
F) Triceps exercise (isolation exercise) using the rest/pause method
Note: Examples of triceps multi-joint exercises include dips and close bench presses, while triceps isolation exercises include exercises such as kickbacks and cable triceps presses.
Day 2 - Back/Biceps
A) Vertical pull exercise using the 50% method
B) Another vertical pull exercise using the rest/pause method
C) Horizontal pull exercise using the 50% method
D) Another horizontal pull exercise using the rest/pause method
E) 2 biceps exercises (pretty much all variations of curls), one using the 50% method, one using the rest/pause method
Day 3 - Quadriceps/leg curls/calves
A) Quadriceps isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
B) Quadriceps multi-joint exercise using the 50% method
C) Leg flexor isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
D) Leg flexor multi-joint exercise using the 50% method
E) 2 calf exercises with 2 sets of 20 repetitions per exercise. Straight sets without intensity techniques.
Day 4 - Training free
Use the same program for the next three days, but use exercises that you want. Only use exercises that you really like, but use intensity techniques on these exercises too.
Day 5 - Chest/shoulders/triceps
A) Chest press exercise using the 50% method
B) Chest isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
C) Shoulder press exercise using the 50% method
D) Shoulder isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
E) Triceps exercise (multi-joint exercise) using the 50% method
F) Triceps exercise (isolation exercise) using the rest/pause method
Day 6 - Back/biceps
A) Vertical pull exercise using the 50% method
B) Another vertical pull exercise using the rest/pause method
C) Horizontal pull exercise using the 50% method
D) Another horizontal pull exercise using the rest/pause method
E) 2 biceps exercises (pretty much all variations of curls), one using the 50% method, one using the rest/pause method
Day 7 - Quadriceps/leg curls/calves
A) Quadriceps isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
B) Quadriceps multi-joint exercise using the 50% method
C) Leg flexor isolation exercise using the rest/pause method
D) Leg flexor multi-joint exercise using the 50% method
E) 2 calf exercises with 2 sets of 20 repetitions per exercise. Straight sets without intensity techniques.
Day 8 - No training
Day 9 - Start again at day 1
Why are isolation exercises performed before multi-joint exercises?
This is mainly done to improve muscle activation in these areas. A lot of exercisers perform multi-joint exercises for quadriceps and hamstrings so poorly that their development in one or both of these areas is inadequate. However, if you start your leg training by activating these areas through isolation exercises, then it is more likely that these areas will be more active in subsequent multi-joint exercises. Built-in focus
You may have noticed that this program has a built-in progression. Each week you find yourself in a position where you have to surpass your performance from the previous week. Instead of having time to hang around the gym asking hot girls if they need help with their exercise routine, you'll need to focus on your own training. The alternative is to carry on as you are and continue to suck at building muscle.
By Paul Carter
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/how-to-cure-smallness-with-pain-food