Muscle Gain

Try these four nutrition tips to get the right foods, at the right time, to get the right gains.

Supplements are famous for overpromising and underdelivering—especially about muscle gain.

What does it mean to be anabolic? What do terms like “muscle protein synthesis” and “hypertrophy” mean? What really makes muscles grow, and why does building muscle matter? We need to clear this up.

The truths of muscle-gain can be well-hidden behind bro-science, gym lore, and internet dogma. Let’s pick apart some of the common “commandments” of muscle-gain—you’ll be surprised how many are fruitless, misleading, or just plain wrong.

Many benefits can be derived from endurance training. Not only health benefits, such as improving heart rate and blood pressure, but also physique benefits such as maintaining or losing body fat. But you may be thinking “cardio can kill your gains”. What does the science say?

In Part 1 we discussed the nuts-and-bolts of creating a hypertrophy program, including why it’s important to build muscle, exercise selection, rep schemes, and progressions. Now we will go a little deeper, answering some common FAQs and honing your mastery of the details.

Muscle requires work, and for all but rank-novices, it can be stubborn and even resistant to change. Here are the muscle-building must-dos, must-don’ts, and things that don’t matter as much as you thought they did.

Gaining weight will not happen overnight. It takes a lot of time, consistency, and patience, but the principles are pretty simple. Eat enough. Lift enough. Rest enough. These simple concepts are all it takes to support your goal of packing on muscle mass.