Posted on April 19, 2016 by Jenny Cromack

While its no surprise that a significant number of personal training clients at motive8 North have weight loss goals in mind, it may come as a surprise to you that roughly half of my clients have aspirations of gaining weight, lean weight that is. Like a lot of individual’s training to gain muscle, overtraining is common, not only does this blunt anabolic hormones but it also reduces the intensity you’re able to train at in succeeding sessions.

Matt has been personal training with us for around a year now, and one of his key aims was to gain weight and lean muscle.

One of the first key obstacles for Matt was shifting from a rigorous daily training schedule attempting to develop numerous components of fitness at once, to a more relaxed focused 4 -5 hour training week. Remember, the old saying train smarter, not harder…this was definitely the main focus with Matt.

When Matt first started in August 2015 he weighed in at 161 lbs at 18.41% body fat (131.52 lbs lean mass, 29.64 lbs non lean mass). He now currently weighs in at 175.8lbs  at 16.35% body fat (147.06 lbs lean mass, 28.74lbs non lean mass). While the training did not result in any change in the total body fat on his frame, he was able to build 16 lbs of extra lean mass.

His training has broadly focused on three key phases:

Phase 1: (laying the foundations)

• Mechanical efficiency (i.e being efficiency in completing the core compound movements)
• Improving mobility, trunk strength and stability
• Building a base layer of strength (i.e under 5 rep max strength)
• Adjusting to 3 full body sessions per week

Phase 2: (correcting imbalances and developing absolute strength)

• Hip mobility was an issue limiting squat depth, as such more unilateral work was included until mobility improved
• Anterior strength was significantly higher than posterior strength, therefore higher volumes of pulling work in the horizontal and vertical plane was included
• In this phase Matt still completed 3 full body session per week, 2 of these sessions involved the systematic selection of exercises in a conjugate fashion developing 1-3 max strength.

Phase 3: (Building Muscle)

• Matt currently works through a 3 week cycle of 4 whole body sessions per week. Exercises are manipulated so that volume and intensity are managed per movement plane
• 2 sessions involve high volume training i.e 10+ repetitions and strategies such as post exhaustion.
• 2 sessions involve strength training, helping to further develop the neural system, utilizing agonist, antagonist supersets to really stimulate strength development. (3-6 repetitions)

Throughout the program, Matt will be the first to tell you he has struggled getting the calories in… it is hard gaining good weight. You need be eating a lot of complex carbs, good fats, good proteins and veg. But he’s really got a grasp of it and is now flying. It was interesting talking to Matt this week, and discussing his progress. In that session he had just completing 4 sets of 10, 10, 9, and 8 pull ups, considering in August of last year he was having trouble squeezing out 3.

Keep up the good work Matt its a pleasure training you!