How Do I Gain Muscle?

Exercise | Fitness

Posted on August 04, 2015 by Jenny Cromack

Gaining muscle is a hard process which requires excellent programming in the gym, and equally as important, excellent dedication to eating the correct foods and in the right amounts. Many of our personal training clients will often ask ‘How do I gain muscle?, how easy is it to put on 1lb of muscle?

how to gain 1lb of muscle

First things first, gaining muscle means gaining weight, well for the majority of individuals, unless you have a significant amount of fat to lose. This can only be achieved through a surplus of calories, the daily suggestion is that if you’re looking to gain muscle 500 extra calories a day from your BMR adjusted for exercise is the starting point.

This will hopefully lead to 1lb of weight gain a week, wow you say 1lb of muscle a week, that’s amazing! While some people can gain 1lb of muscle a week, its quite rare that all of this will be muscle, maybe 60-80% of the gained weight will come in the form of muscle, the other 20-40% could include glycogen stores, water retention, fat mass, among other things. This all comes down to how well you selected your parents… providing your training is sufficient, and your diet is spot on.

So what would an ideal training program look like for gaining muscle? Here are the key tips to get towards that 1lb a week of muscle:

  • Train each body part every 4-5 days…. that’s right the ‘bro split’ aka ‘Chest – Monday, Legs – Tuesday’ is out, bring in the upper-lower split or if you can commit to working out on a weekend,the 5 day revolving split. The 5 day split in my experience is by far the best.
  • Reduce the rest periods, if you want to gain muscle quickly you’ve got to leave huge weights at the door. Cutting the rest period between sets is a key hormone stimulator. 60-90 seconds is the window you need to select to stimulate maximum growth. Any less and you’re getting towards endurance training, any more and its becoming more strength training.
  • Train to failure… this is a very controversial topic and requires specific guidelines. Training to failure is a bad idea if it means you will sacrifice volume later in the session, i.e going to failure on your first set of bench press is likely going to impact the load you have to lift during later sets, this is therefore a bad idea. However, if you have got a cheeky 3 day recovery period following the session, why not hammer the last quarter of the session and take the body somewhere it hasn’t been before… that’s the real secret to growth.
  • Varying the rep ranges is a good trick. If I’m working a muscle group over 6 sessions my clients will tell you the rep range is never the same, I follow a set pattern for the most part as below. This allows for maximal hypertrophy of all fibres, not just one spectrum
    • Week 1: 6-8 reps
    • Week 2: 8-10 reps
    • Week 3: 10-12 reps
    • Week 4: 6-8 reps
    • Week 5: 8-10 reps
    • Week 6: 10-12 reps
Okay now you’ve got the key program variables all squared away and your ready to start gaining that 1lb a week. Time to get into the trenches and cooking some food. Here are the fundamental nutritional principals to gain that 1 lb of muscle a week.
  • You need regular protein coming in… if you’re an 80kg individual I would recommend 5 doses of protein spread evenly over the day. Each meal should contain 20-25g of protein, from as wider variety of protein sources as possible. 
  • The most important meal is what you consume immediately after training. Research shows that 25g protein and a good dose of fast release carbs are critical for rapid hypertrophy. Leaving your meals to the end of the day leads to a reduction in muscle protein synthesis compared to if you consumed food at the start of the day so this and that 1lb of muscle won’t happen.
  • Miss breakfast and you’re not going to build muscle as quick as the individual that eats it… simples!
  • You need a source of protein during sleep, a slow release protein such as casein pre bed combined with full fat bovine milks has been shown time and time again to help elevate levels of muscle protein synthesis through the night
So in summary, the majority of you should be able to come close to gaining 1lb of weight a week. For the individual’s who choose their parents correctly, have a lifestyle that allows them to follow a 5 day split, can eat as required and sleep up to 8 hours a night 2 lbs a week may even happen. Some of you will struggle to gain 0.25lbs a week, the key with hypertrophy is that when you repeat, repeat and repeat all of the above points, even the most difficult gainer will eventually build muscle.