How To Gain Muscle
6 Rules for Building Bigger Muscles
How To Gain Muscle Mass
Ask the average guy in the average gym how to build bigger muscles, and chances are he’ll tell you to do exactly what he’s doing: lots of sets and reps of lots of redundant exercises. Except . . . well, you notice it’s not working particularly well for him. Worse, you realize you’re already doing workouts similar to his, and it’s not happening for you, either.
1. Lift Big to Grow Big
The longer you’ve been lifting weights, the heavier the weights need to be in order for you to see results. On one hand, it’s a stupidly obvious point—of course you use bigger weights as you become stronger. But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.
When you were a beginner, you could gain size and strength as long as the weight you used on any given exercise was at least 60 percent of the amount you could lift for a single max-effort repetition. It’s a weight you could lift 15 to 20 times in a single set. By any definition, that’s pretty light.
2. Lift Fast to Get Big
You know you’re supposed to lift weights slowly and deliberately and under control. I have no problem with the “under control” part—good form requires it. But I want to take serious issue with “slowly and deliberately.”
The faster you lift, the better the results. If you’re trying to increase size, fast lifts activate more of the muscle fibers that have the most potential to grow. If you’re trying to become leaner, fast lifts do more to crank up your heart rate–and by extension your metabolism—than anything else. And if you’re trying to grow stronger . . . well, how many feats of strength can you list that are performed slowly and deliberately? Even if something looks slow from the outside, you can bet that the guy performing the feat is trying like hell to get it done as fast as possible.
3. Quit When You’re Ahead
A fast lift with a heavy weight uses more muscle fibers than a slower lift with a lighter weight. But those big, strong muscle fibers poop out really fast—usually in 15 seconds or less. Once they’ve quit on you, you’re left to struggle with the weight using fibers that aren’t up to the task.
Your body has two ways of tipping you off:
- The speed of your repetitions slows.
- Your form changes, and you either shorten your range of motion or have to cheat to accomplish the full range.
At that point, it makes more sense to end the set than to keep going with compromised speed or bad form. I say that knowing it’s one of the most unnatural things I could ask you to do in the weight room. After all, if the goal is to do sets of 8 reps and your speed slows down on the sixth, it takes discipline to end the set before grinding and shaking through those seventh and eighth reps. And it works only if you’re also willing to follow Principle 4.
4. Don’t Sweat the Small Sets
Every page of the old muscle-building playbook includes some prescription for sets and reps: a fixed number of sets of each exercise and a fixed number of reps in each set.
But if you follow Principle 3 and quit each set when your speed slows down or your form changes, you can’t complete a fixed number of repetitions.
The new playbook says this: Focus on total reps for each exercise, and let the sets take care of themselves. Say you’re doing a workout that specifies 5 sets of 5 reps. That’s 25 reps total. Now let’s say you use my method of doing all your reps perfectly: It might take you 6 sets instead of 5 to hit your 25-rep goal. The reward is a better workout, because you’re doing more work with your biggest, strongest muscle fibers.
5. Think Big to Grow Big
My final revision of the weight-lifting playbook makes it dramatically shorter and lighter: I’ve eliminated almost all the exercises that work only small muscles or single muscle groups in isolation. Instead, my workouts begin and end with the exercises that work your biggest muscles, with the goal of working as many of them as possible every time you lift.
Each workout is built around one lower-body exercise—squats, deadlifts, lunges, or stepups—and two upper-body exercises, one for pushing and one for pulling. Gone are the leg extensions and biceps curls.
If you’re wondering how you’re supposed to build big arms without curls, I have a simple assignment for you: Grab a chinup bar and try to pull yourself up without using your biceps. Impossible, right? So if you work your biceps with chinups or lat pulldowns, using an underhand grip, or any type of rowing exercise, why would you need to do curls? What benefit does a curl offer that you can’t achieve with a chinup or row? As a bonus, you burn a lot more calories when you train your biggest muscles.
6. The World’s Smartest Workout
If you want to pack on muscle fast, the old saying is true: You need to train smarter, not harder. Using my five new principles of size, all it takes is 3 exercises, 3 days a week.
Monday
- Bench press
- Chinup
- Deadlift
Do 25 total reps of each exercise, using a weight you can lift 4 to 6 times before your speed slows down or your form changes. Rest about 60 seconds between sets.
(Tuesday: Rest)
Wednesday
- Dumbbell single-arm shoulder press
- Dumbbell single-arm row
- Dumbbell lunge or stepup
Do 40 total reps of each exercise with each arm or each leg, using a weight you can lift 10 to 12 times before your speed slows down or your form changes. Do all the reps of each exercise before resting. Rest 45 seconds between sets.
(Thursday: Rest)
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