The age-old question I get from men of all ages is how do I build mass? It is not really complicated if you know your way around a gym pretty well. There are just a few guidelines that I tend to follow.
One of the first things I do is look at training habits. People have a misconception that if you spend more time training then the end result will be more mass. This could not be more false! Overtraining is one of the biggest inhibitors of progress in the gym that I have ever seen. I hate to sound cliché but in this case, less is more. Reduce the overall activity level. Don’t do two hours in the gym, catch an hour of aerobics and then jump on your mountain bike and ride home. If you do that you have over-trained. The goal is to workout with high-intensity with heavy weights… that means keeping repetitions within a four to ten range with your last “rep” (or reps) being next to impossible. 45 min to an hour of working out is plenty of time to achieve this. If you do more than that then, again, you have probably over-trained.
Along this vein another important factor is proper rest. Remember that the key to muscle growth is muscle recovery. If you train with intensity and you achieve muscular hypertrophy then your muscles need from five to ten days to make a full recovery. Hypertrophy is defined in the dictionary as “a nontumorous enlargement of an organ or tissue as a result of an increase in the size rather that the number of constituent cells.” What it means to you is that you must do damage on a cellular level to the muscle to stimulate growth. When you train with intensity you do damage on a microscopic level to the muscle cell which then signals the body to build more sarcomeres, increasing the size of the muscle cell. In further discussions we will learn more about the nature of hypertrophy and specifically what part of the exercise causes it. In a weight gain phase I will train each body part once a week. This can be done in a three day, four day, or a five day split. I prefer a five day split because I can focus an entire workout on one body part and really hit it hard, but I have more access because I am in a gym all day. If your schedule will not allow for a five-day split, a three day split will suffice. These workouts should be much more intense but you do get a week to let the muscle group recover. Another thing I tell clients to do is get plenty of sleep–at least 6 hours (more if you require) and take frequent naps if your schedule allows. They don’t have to be long ones. Sometimes just a fifteen minute snooze can really rejuvenate you.
It is very important to nutritionally support the work you are doing. When on this kind of routine you are actually doing more damage on a cellular level and your body will need more sustenance. It would be impossible to give you general figures on how much to eat in terms of calories. I could say just eat a lot and often but without knowledge of your basil metabolic rate (BMR) it is shooting in the dark. If you are young and you have a fast metabolism you can get away with a lot more than a 30 or 40-plus year old in terms of total caloric intake. An average that usually works is to multiply your body weight times eleven (if you are relatively lean—under 15% body fat). There is a more precise formula to determine your exact BMR that is a lot more involved (that’s another column). With that base number add 500 just for daily activity. If your work is heavy activity (like loading trucks or farm work) raise it another 500. Add to that an additional 500 to 700 calories for your workouts(depends on how intense your training is). Try that for about a week. If you see no change, raise calories another 300. Do that until you find the necessary calorie level to gain mass. I am still from the old school of eating a 60-40-10 ratio of carbs, protein, and fat. That means eating 60% of your total daily calories from carbohydrates (preferably complex carbs), 30% from protein (preferably from whey, egg or animal products), and 10% from fats. For men that usually means eating about a gram and a half of protein per pound of lean body weight. If you simply avoid fat altogether where you can you will naturally get about 10% of your calories from fats. There are new some diets that are receiving a lot of attention right now generally labeled as “ketogenic” diets or high protein diets. They are more concerned with lowering body fat levels without losing muscle tone. It is possible to make some gains while on these diets but it is not ideal and that is the condition we are looking for. You know you have to eat a lot but don’t feel like you can just go for broke and eat everything in sight. I have seen this quite a bit in the past–people go on a high-cal diet, put on more fat than they anticipated and then have a hell of a time getting rid of it. You still have to make healthy food choices, just a lot more of them!