It’s not great genetics.

(Good genes help, but plenty of people have gotten huge without having been blessed with it at birth.)

It’s not that they all just live at the gym and do nothing else, or follow some magical workout. (When it comes to building muscle, many different approaches — low rep/high weight, high rep/low weight, straight sets, supersets, and on and on — can work. There is no one that’s “best.”)

And it’s not that they’re on performance-enhancing drugs. (You can pack on plenty of muscle naturally — look no further than any drug-free bodybuilding competition for proof.)

The thing they all have in common is this:

Patience.

Not the answer you expected? Here’s why being patient is so important.

The Problem with Bulking and Cutting

First, when most people set out to build muscle, they go through a phase where they eat a lot and train a lot. You’ve probably heard it called “bulking.”

Then, after a few weeks or months, they switch. Maybe they get self-conscious about the size the gained. Or maybe they think they’re starting to look fat. So they trim back on calories and change their training to try and burn the fat off. This phase is called “cutting.”

Most people bounce back and forth between these two phases — bulking and cutting, bulking and cutting — without making any real progress. Why? Because each new phase undoes the success of the last.

On our website, we’ve talked about Set Point Theory. It’s the idea that the body identifies with a certain weight and then becomes resistant to change. In our previous article, we discussed how it applied to weight loss. It’s one of the reasons why losing weight — and keeping it off — can be so hard.

But the concept also applies to muscle gain. Your body is used to being a certain weight. When you change that through strength training, it will take measures to go back to how it was — unless you teach it that this more muscular weight is it’s new normal.

You teach your body that through what’s called a maintenance phase. In a lecture on his site Renaissance Periodization, Dr. Mike Israetel discusses how people hold themselves back if they do not include this phase in their training. (The content itself is paywalled, but totally worth buying if you like to nerd out on the science of muscle-building.)

I don’t want to give too much away or do violence to the quality and depth of his explanation. So I’ll summarize it like this: During a maintenance phase, you ease up on training a little bit. And you aim to eat what’s called an isocaloric diet, meaning you try to eat as many calories as you’d need, but not more.

Sample Muscle-Building Macronutrient Formula

This formula from Adam’s Great Abs Experiment will help:

For Total Calories Per Day:

Take the body weight you wish to maintain and multiply it by 10 if you are training 1 hour or less per week. For each additional hour you train per week, add 1 to the multiplier. So if you’d muscled up to 200 pounds, and trained 4 hours per week, you’d multiply 13 by 200 and get 2,600 calories per day as your mark. You can split that total across however many meals per day you prefer to eat (two, three, four, five, whatever).

Protein:

Eat at least 1 gram per pound of bodyweight. So if you were 200 pounds, you’d aim for 200 grams of protein (800 calories total) per day.

Fat:

Eat half a gram of fat per pound of bodyweight. So at 200 pounds, you’d target 100 grams of fat (900 calories) per day.

Carbohydrates:

Determine how many carbohydrates to eat by subtracting the protein and fat calories from your daily total, and then dividing the remainder by 4. To continue the example we’ve been using here, it would be 2,600 calories total minus 800 calories (protein) and 900 calories (fat), leaving you with 900 calories for carbs. Divide that by 4 and you get 225 calories of carbs per day.

While the length of your maintenance phase can vary, you’d want to approach it as if it were something you could do for several months or even years. Why? Because — again — you want this to be your new normal.

You want to think of building muscle not in terms of days and weeks, but months and years. The biggest, most muscular people in the world are the ones who show up for training, again and again, for years on end.

READ MORE: 

Adding Muscle At Any Age: Defying Genetics And Designing The Muscle Building Workout

The New Rules Of Specialization: How To Add Muscle Mass

How To Master The Art Of “Old School” Muscle Building

5 Muscle Building Mistakes (And How To Make Gains)

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post How To Look More Muscular appeared first on Born Fitness.

In reality there are many (many) other fitness goals, and lots of other reasons to workout and eat healthy foods; but this is what interests—and confuses—most people. While losing the extra pounds can be the most frustrating process, building muscle is harder for most people to understand.

After all, if you go to the gym and lift weights consistently you should pack on slabs of new muscle, right? And yet, most gym goers would respond with a resounding, “NO!” Instead, more people are more familiar with training…and then training some more, and never seeing gains that are quite as good as they want.

Your muscles are greedy, so to keep them happy you must give them what they want: variety.

To dig a little deeper and find the answers to the your muscle gaining struggles, I reached out to Brad Schoenfeld, MS, CSCS, author of The MAX Muscle Plan: Blast Through Training Plateaus for Your Best Body Ever, educator, and trainer. 

Brad literally spends each and every day researching muscle gain, so I asked him to share his thoughts on why so many people struggle to add size. Here are 5 common muscle-building mistakes he’s identified, and the fixes that can help you upgrade your body.

5 Muscle-Building Mistakes (And How To Make Gains)

By Brad Schoenfeld

1) You Always Train in the Same Rep Range

The claim that muscle growth is maximized in a moderate rep range (6-12 reps per set) continues to be a source of debate in the fitness field. Although this theory is backed by some research, evidence on the topic remains far from conclusive. But for arguments sake let’s say that moderate reps are in fact best for gaining size. Does that mean that you should train exclusively in this narrow rep range? The answer is an unqualified, “No!”

Training in a lower rep range (1-5 per set) maximizes strength increases, thereby facilitating your ability to use heavier weights during moderate rep training. In this way, you create greater tension in the muscles, spurring better growth. High reps (15-20 per set), on the other hand, help to increase your lactate threshold.

By delaying the buildup of lactic acid, you stave off fatigue when training in the “hypertrophy range,” (the muscle building range) thus increasing time under tension—another important aspect of the growth process. Bottom line is that optimum muscle development is best achieved by using the full spectrum of rep ranges.

Your fix: Periodize your program so that it is built around a moderate repetition protocol, but you make sure to include training in both the lower and higher rep ranges.

Although a number of different periodization models work, I recommend a modified linear approach beginning with a strength phase (lower reps), followed by a fairly short metabolic phase (high reps) and then culminating with a hypertrophy phase (the typical 6 to 12 range).

Depending on your goals and body, this might mean sticking with a particular rep range for a longer period of time. (Such as not changing every 4 weeks.) When properly implemented, this produces a “supercompensation effect” so that you maximize muscular gains and see a peak at the end of the training cycle.

With time, you might then want to shift to a non-linear approach, where you shift rep ranges more frequently to hit all phases.

2) You Use the Same Exercises Every Day

Most people have a limited number of favorite exercises that are staples in their routine. That’s human nature. While it’s okay to have your old stand-bys, they shouldn’t be performed at the exclusion of other movements.

Changing up your exercise selection has a couple of important benefits from a mass-building standpoint. For one, it helps to prevent the so-called “repeated-bout effect” whereby muscles become accustomed to the continual use of the same movements, making them increasingly resistant to trauma.

Staving off such accommodation allows for greater structural perturbations to muscle fibers. That might sound like a bunch of confusing science to some of you, but what it all means is that changing exercises can facilitate increased growth.

What’s more, muscle fibers don’t necessarily span the entire length of a fiber and are often innervated by different nerve branches. Thus, exercise variety alters recruitment patterns in the musculature, ensuring optimal stimulation of all fibers.

Think of it this way: Some people like blonds, other prefers brunettes, and you have those that love redheads. Your muscles are greedy, so to keep them happy you must give them what they want: variety.

That’s why exercise variety provides your muscles with the variety it literally needs for optimal growth. Even slight variations in the exercises you employ will work the muscles somewhat differently, enhancing results.

Your fix: Employ a diverse selection of exercises over the course of your training cycle. This can be accomplished by switching around modalities, training angles, planes of movement, and even your hand and foot spacing. (For instance, on dumbbell curls, think about holding the handle with your pinky against one end of the bell, and on the next set perform with your thumb against the bell.

That slight shift will work your biceps in different ways.) The possibilities are almost endless if you think outside the box. There is no hard rule as to how frequently exercises should be changed, but a general guideline is to do so at least on a monthly basis.

3) You Over- or Under-Isolate Your Muscles

When it comes to exercise selection, there are two basic camps. On one end of the spectrum are those who preach that the only way to get big is by performing the “big lifts” such as squats, presses, and rows. On the other end of the spectrum are those who claim that key to muscle-building is “isolating” muscles with flys, curls, extensions, and the like. Who’s right?

Both camps!

Realize that this isn’t an either-or debate; the two types of movements are in fact complementary. Multi-joint exercises involve large amounts of muscle and therefore are highly efficient for packing on mass.

Alternatively, single-joint exercises allow for greater targeting of individual muscles (or even portions of muscles), enhancing overall growth and symmetry. Integrating a mix of both types of movements into your routine can have a synergistic effect that improves both muscle size and symmetry.

Your fix: Structure your routine so that it is comprised of a combination of multi- and single-joint exercises. As a general rule, every workout should contain at least one or two “big lifts” and a single-joint move.

Oh, and realize that for all practical purposes you can’t “isolate” muscles. The body is designed so that multiple muscles will always be active during exercise performance. Thus, you can only target a given muscle so that it is more active in a given movement.

4) You Always Follow the Straight and Narrow (Sets)

Typical resistance training routines involve performing “straight” sets where you do a set, rest, perform another set of the same exercise, rest, and then continue in this fashion throughout each exercise in your workout.

There’s nothing “wrong” with the basic approach; straight sets can and perhaps even should form the foundation of your routine. But it’s also good to mix things up a bit with some specialized techniques.

Supersets (performing one exercise followed immediate by another exercise without rest), drop sets (performing a set to muscular failure with a given load and then immediately reducing the load and continuing to train until subsequent failure) and heavy negatives (performing eccentric actions—the lowering of a weight—at a weight greater than concentric 1-repetition maximum) can be excellent additions to a mass-building routine. They help to induce greater metabolic stress and structural perturbations that can take your muscle growth to new heights. These strategies are particularly effective for advanced lifters who need to “shock” their body to spur greater growth.

Your fix: Selectively add specialized techniques such as supersets, drop sets, and heavy negatives into your routine. A word of caution: these techniques should be considered advanced training strategies. Their fatiguing nature increases the risk for overtraining, and it is therefore wise to limit their use to no more than a few microcycles over the course of a periodized program.

5) You Do Too Much Cardio

A goal of many lifters is to increase muscle development while simultaneously reducing body fat levels. In an attempt to accelerate fat loss, cardio is frequently ramped up while performing intense resistance training. Adding some aerobic training a muscle-building routine isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Overdoing it, however, certainly is.

You see, the signaling pathways for resistance training and aerobic training are contradictory. Some researchers have coined the term “AMPK-PKB switch” whereby aerobic training promotes catabolic processes (AMPK is involved in pathways associated with protein breakdown, which for your sake can be considered “muscle wasting”) and resistance training promotes anabolic processes (PKB is involved in pathways associated with protein synthesis, or for you, “muscle gaining”).

While the concept of a “switch” is a bit overly simplistic (most of the evidence points to anabolism and catabolism taking place along a continuum), there is little doubt that concurrent training has the potential to interfere with anabolism and thereby undermine your ability to build muscle. What’s more, adding extensive cardio to an already demanding resistance-training program can hasten the onset of overtraining, which brings muscle growth to crashing halt.

Your fix: If your goal is to maximize muscle, keep cardio at moderate levels. How much is too much? It ultimately depends on the individual, as some can tolerate more than others. A general guideline is to limit steady state cardio to no more than about 3 or 4 weekly bouts lasting 30 to 40 minutes.

Alternatively, 2 to 3 high-intensity interval training workouts a week should be fine for most lifters. Just make sure that you stay in tune with your body and be aware of any signs of overtraining.

You also should be aware that unless you’re a newbie to lifting with a fair amount of weight to lose, it becomes increasingly difficult trying to simultaneously gain lean mass while losing body fat. Once you’ve been training for a number of years, it’s best to focus on one goal or the other.

Looking for Muscle Building Guidance?

If you want help building muscle, losing fat–or both–join me in the Born Fitness online coaching program. You’ll receive professionally designed workouts, have access to me and some of the best strength and nutrition coaches to ask your questions, and receive exclusive access to an exercise library, personalized workouts, and 24/7 support.

Learn More About Born Fitness online coaching.

READ MORE: 

The Tension Weightlifting Technique: How to Make Every Exercise More Effective

Are Planks Overrated?

Why Creatine is Even Better Than You Thought

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post 5 Muscle Building Mistakes (And How to Make Gains) appeared first on Born Fitness.