Gaining weight will not happen overnight.
It takes a lot of time, consistency, and patience, but the principles underlying muscle growth are pretty simple.
Eat enough. Lift enough. Rest enough.
1. Eat Enough
In order for us to gain muscle, we need to build new proteins in our muscles. There is a constant game of “tug of war” going on in your body: muscle protein synthesis builds new proteins, but muscle protein breakdown degrades existing proteins. When you tip the scales in favor of muscle protein synthesis, you build new proteins faster than you break them down, resulting in muscle growth.
As you could probably guess, resistance training and protein intake are both really important for increasing protein synthesis. However, people often overlook the fact that energy is like the body’s version of money, and muscle protein synthesis is really expensive!
If you’re not eating enough total calories, you can’t “afford” maximal rates of protein synthesis, and muscle growth is impeded [1].
When you eat below maintenance calories, cellular processes that stimulate protein synthesis are turned down, and processes that stimulate breakdown get turned up [1].
For this reason, you need a caloric surplus to maximize muscle gains. But remember, you can only stimulate so much protein synthesis at a single time. You need to eat enough to fuel this process, but eating more than enough will not result in more muscle gains.
2. Lift Enough
As mentioned above, resistance training is the primary stimulus to kick-start muscle growth. But it’s not quite that simple— should you be lifting light weights for many repetitions per set, or heavier weights for fewer repetitions?
A wide range of weights can be used to increase muscle size, which gives lifters plenty of flexibility to train the way they prefer. Muscle growth is similar when you’re using heavy or light loads, as long as you’re training hard and getting close to the point of failure.
The term “training volume” essentially means “how much stuff you did.” It’s most commonly quantified by multiplying your weight lifted × # of sets × # of repetitions. Research has shown that muscle growth is similar whether you use light or heavy weights, as long as training volume is similar [2].
However, more isn’t always better; if you complete too much volume, growth is hindered by the inability to recover. As such, current recommendations call for about 40-70 repetitions per muscle group per workout session, using loads that are adequately challenging [3].
The primary mechanisms stimulating growth are mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress [4], and these can be achieved using a variety of loads. However, it’s important to consider the pros and cons when choosing your loads. Heavier weights will apply higher levels of tension and increase strength more, but can be tougher on the joints and require more time to achieve a large amount of training volume.
Lighter loads cause more metabolic stress and can be more time-efficient and easier on the joints, but pushing light loads to failure can be brutally unpleasant. As a result, it might be best to include a variety of heavy (1-5 reps per set), moderate (6-12 reps per set), and light (>12 reps per set) loads in your training, depending on your goals and preferences.
The primary emphasis should be on compound exercises that involve multiple joints, such as the squat, bench press, row, and deadlift [3]. However, single-joint exercises (like leg extensions for your quads and dumbbell curls for your biceps) performed after these compound lifts can be beneficial for promoting growth, especially for muscles that aren’t primarily targeted by compound exercises [3].
Tip: Here is Avatar’s Complete Guide to Muscle Gain Programming Part 1 & Part 2!
3. Rest Enough
You need to train hard to grow, but you need to rest in order to train hard! “Rest” includes how long you wait between sets, how many days you wait between training sessions, and how much you sleep. Short rest periods may increase short-term hormone responses to exercise [5], but these appear to be fairly irrelevant to muscle growth. Studies have shown that resting 3 minutes between sets is better for growth than 1 minute [6], but there is no additional benefit to waiting more than 2-3 minutes or so [7].
Muscle recovery takes some time, so you’ll want to give a muscle time to rest before you train it again. There are several ways to split up your workouts throughout the week; these “splits” fit on a spectrum of how many muscle groups are trained in each workout, and how frequently each muscle gets trained. Some popular training splits are:
There is no “correct” split, but your split will have an impact on training volume and training frequency. High-frequency splits make it hard to get a ton of volume per muscle group in each workout, unless you have really long workouts. However, they allow you to train a muscle group several times per week. Low-frequency programs offer plenty of volume per session, but make it difficult to train a muscle more than once or twice per week.
There is debate over how much rest a muscle needs before it is trained again, because there are several ways to measure “recovery.” Soreness peaks 2-3 days after exercise, blood markers of muscle damage peak around 3-5 days after, and reduced force output peaks very shortly after exercise [8]. This topic is further complicated by the fact that recovery time may be influenced by training status, sex, menstrual cycle phase, nutrition, and specific characteristics of your exercise program.
The ability to generate force is a particularly useful measure of recovery, as it directly assesses your ability to train hard again. The ability to do a single, forceful contraction is mostly restored by about 48-72 hours after exercise, whereas the ability to effectively perform multiple repetitions can still be hindered up to 96 hours after [9].
As a starting point, it’s ideal to find a split that allows you to perform 40-70 repetitions per muscle group, while training each muscle group 2-3 times per week, thereby giving each muscle group about 48-96 hours of rest between sessions [3]. As you become more advanced, the ability to recover often improves; at that point, you might consider adapting your split to accommodate more volume per week, either by adding more volume per session, or a higher frequency of training.
Finally, sleep can’t be ignored. Sleep deprivation has negative effects on metabolism, exercise performance, pain perception, inflammation, recovery, and appetite [10]. It is also associated with higher levels of hormones that break down muscle, and lower levels of hormones that help build muscle [10]. As a result, getting enough sleep will support your physique goals by allowing you to train better, recover better, stick to your diet better, and ultimately build more muscle.
Conclusion
Muscle gain isn’t rocket science— eat enough, lift enough, and rest enough, and you’ll be well on your way! These simple concepts, when applied with some consistency and patience, are all it takes to support your goal of packing on muscle mass.