"No Fail" Principles For Quick and Easy Weight Gain

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I got into weight training to gain mass and put on weight so believe me when I tell you…when it comes to wanting mass I know EXACTLY where you're coming from. Because when I started training, I weighed 145 lbs soaking wet. Today, I'm a lean 210 lbs (at a height of 5'10")!

I've got four "no fail" principles that I recommend to people who are trying to build muscle mass and gain some weight.

And I'll tell you right up front - these principles are NOT rocket science…these are the basic things you SHOULD be doing if you want to gain mass, yet I see plenty of people only doing one or two of them and wondering why they can't put on any mass!

Combining these four principles consistently will definitely get the job done!

1. Train Heavy and Just SHORT of Muscular Failure

In order to gain muscle mass, you need to give your muscles a REASON to grow. Training with heavy weights (relatively speaking, of course - what's heavy for one person may be light for another) to just short of muscular failure is the stimulus that starts the process

And by muscular failure, I mean the point where you physically can't perform another rep WITH GOOD FORM - reps done with terrible form don't count!

The best rep range to train for muscle growth, in my experience, is between 6 to 10 repetitions per set. Training in the range below that (1 to 5 reps) will primarily lead to strength gains rather than muscle gains.

Training in the higher rep ranges (for the most part, unless you're using specialized high-rep techniques) will primarily work on muscular endurance with minimal effects on muscle mass.

Training to just short muscular failure is VERY important for muscle gain. The reason we want to stay just short of total failure is that this is very hard on the nervous system. By keeping that do-or-die rep in you, you still get the benefits of the heavy training but without the nervous system burnout.

Muscles will not grow unless they are pushed beyond what they're used to. Doing your sets only up to a certain number of reps and stopping on that number regardless of whether the muscle has been worked or not is a very common mistake made by both men and women alike. Counting reps and stopping on an arbitrary number will NOT work the muscles fully and will hamper weight gain.

Even though you're not pushing to total failure, you still want to be pushing HARD!

So to train for optimum muscle gain, select a weight that will cause you to reach just short of muscular failure in the 6 to 10 rep range.

2. Utilize Basic Exercises for Most of Your Training

Dumbell tricep kick-backs will NOT help you gain weight. The Pec Deck will NOT help you gain weight. Leg extensions will NOT help you gain weight.

These exercises are not bad exercises; they're just NOT the exercises that are going to give you the results you want. In fact, doing exercises like these at the expense of the basic exercises can actually detract from weight gain, especially if you have a hard time gaining weight. They will use up your valuable time and energy!

Basic exercises are the exercises that use the most muscle mass. They are the HARDEST exercises…the ones you either love or hate. This "make or break" challenge is what makes them the most productive for building muscle.

Basic exercises include squats, deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press, barbell curls, barbell bent-over rows, dips, chin-ups, lunges, and calf raises. This is not a comprehensive list but it will give you an idea of what a basic exercise is. Essentially, a basic exercise is an exercise that you can use a lot of weight on and that requires the most effort.

Use these basic exercises consistently for the majority of your sets and you WILL gain muscle.

3. Eat Good Quality Nutrition in Sufficient Quantities

Now that you've stimulated your muscles with hard, heavy training, it's time to feed them. Gaining weight, a.k.a. building muscle, requires a caloric intake in excess of what it takes to maintain your current bodyweight.

Basically, you need to eat more.

The amount of calories you require to gain weight will vary greatly depending on several factors, primarily your current amount of muscle mass, your daily activity level and your metabolic rate.

The more muscle you already have and the more active you are, the more calories you're going to need to eat in order to gain weight. If you are already thin, you probably have a fast metabolism (i.e. you lose weight quickly and gain it slowly), and you're going to need to eat even MORE.

In order to keep your muscles supplied with nutrients, you're going to need to eat frequently throughout the day. It's best if you can manage to eat 5 or 6 meals over the course of the day. Naturally, these meals will be smaller than your regular meals if you currently eat 3 per day.

And whatever you do, if you want to gain weight, DO NOT skip breakfast! It's an important meal for increasing your overall caloric load for the day, which is critical for increasing muscle mass.

Besides sufficient caloric intake, protein is also critical for muscle gain. Protein is the structural nutrient that your muscles are made of. You must feed your body protein in order to help your muscles rebuild.

Good protein sources include fish, poultry, dairy, meats, soy, legumes (beans), eggs, and whey. A typical recommended protein intake for a person looking to gain muscle would be around 0.8 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. For example, as a 136-pound person, this would have you eating 109 to 136 grams of protein per day.

Supplements can also be extremely useful for weight gain. Whey protein, creatine monohydrate, and the amino acid glutamine are among the most effective supplements.

And I'll tell you right now, there's no need to get crazy with your supplement purchases… manufacturers will often prey upon your strong desire to gain mass and try and sell you a TON of supplements you really don't need.

Keep it simple and get your training and eating in order. THAT is what builds an impressive body - not a boatload of bizarre supplements.

So to sum it up: eat a lot, eat frequently and eat plenty of protein.

4. Get Enough Rest

Your muscles don't grow while you're training. Your muscles actually grow AFTER your training session is done. One of the best things you can do to help you reach your goal of gaining weight is to learn to relax. This is especially important both after a workout and at night.

Immediately following a workout, your body is in an emergency situation. You've just put a lot of stress on your body and your body needs time to recover from it.

If you immediately have to rush off to do errands or some other stressful chore, you're not going to get optimal recovery and that means you're not going to get optimal muscle growth. If you can manage it, try to schedule your workouts for when you have a little time to relax after. Heck, take a nap about an hour or so later if you can!

Getting some good, solid sleep at night is also very important. A large part of your growth process occurs at night. If you don't get enough sleep or your sleep is restless, your body will not be able to take full advantage of the growth you've stimulated with your training

Conclusion:

If you want to gain mass, you HAVE to do the basic things right…train hard with heavy, basic exercises, eat well and get plenty of rest. As I mentioned above, this ain't rocket science, yet you'd be surprised at how many people miss more than one of these items!

Don't stop yourself before you even get started - make sure you're got this

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Lessons I Learned In My Very First Year of Training That Can Help YOU

The Most Critical Lessons I Learned In My Very First Year of Training That Can Help YOU Maximize Muscle and Fat Loss

IN THE BEGINNING...

I wanted nothing more than to get big and strong. I had been an endurance athlete all through high school (cross-country running, speed skating, skiing) but wanted to make a change. I was 17 years old and skinny and jumped into weight training with both feet. I saved up some money, bought the Cybergenics supplement program (mistake #1! - basically that was just an expensive multivitamin) and started training. It was June of 1991, just heading into summer.

I had a good program and I started getting stronger right away but wasn't really gaining much muscle. I was, however, getting absolutely ripped to the bone!
By the end of the summer, I still weighed about 150 lbs soaking wet (right where I started 4 months earlier) but I swear I was about 4 or 5% bodyfat. When you can see the division line between your upper pecs and lower pecs without flexing the chest, you know you're at low bodyfat!
LESSON #1
I wasn't eating NEARLY enough or frequently enough and wasn't getting enough protein. I would rollerblade or bike to the gym first thing in the morning and do my workout, eating NOTHING immediately after training. I would rollerblade home then eat a bowl of cereal. Then I would go to work as a lifeguard the rest of the day, eating maybe once or twice more that day with my largest meal being dinner.

THEN IT WAS OFF TO UNIVERSITY...

Having just graduated from high school, I enrolled in university that fall. I had learned my lesson about not eating enough and I was determined to make up for it.
And make up for it I did...with cafeteria food! Some people drink too much their first year of college - I ate too much.
Not to knock the food service there, but I'm just sure they deep-fried the salad. To show you my knowledge of nutrition at the time, I would (in the interest of trying to keep fat levels in my diet down) order fried eggs and cut out the yolks, eating only the whites (which were shiny with overused cooking oil). All this never realizing that I would have been better off cutting off the whites and eating the yolks (that's where the fat-emulsifying lecithin and the majority of the good nutrients in the egg are!).
Eight months later, at the end of my first year of school, I was 70 pounds heavier, probably about half of which was actually muscle mass. At one point, I sat down and calculated my caloric intake on some of my "big eating" days and found it to be almost 9,000 calories per day!
LESSON #2
When I learned my lesson about eating more to gain muscle, I didn't learn the lesson that you can eat WAY too much and you can easily eat the wrong types of foods. Sure, I got big and strong, but I probably went from 5% bodyfat to 15 to 20% bodyfat at the same time. NOT the results I was looking for! What I needed to do was eat more, certainly, but also eat a better quality of food.
That, plus I'm sure all the "Weight Gain 3000" type of supplements I was taking didn't help matters! Looking back on the ingredients, it was mostly cheap milk protein and maltodextrin (a high glycemic, cheap carb source).

TRAINING AT UNIVERSITY...

As I was eating more at University, I also ramped up my training. I would try and do more and more sets and use more and more weight. Because I was eating so much more, I was still making great progress! Plus, being then 18 years old, I could beat the tar out of myself in the gym and still recover from it pretty much without a problem.
I was seeing increases in strength and bodyweight on almost a daily basis. But then something happened...something that opened up my eyes...one workout I was in the gym for almost 2 and a half hours!
LESSON #3
I was training WAY too long and with too many sets. I was still making progress but only because I was eating so much. Little did I know, I could actually make BETTER progress by cutting my training time WAY down. From that day on, I always stopped my workouts at the 1 hour mark, no matter where I was at in the program. And it did wonders for my results. I think the week after I started cutting back, my strength shot up and my bodyweight went up 10 pounds. THAT opened my eyes.
In the Spring Semester, I tried a program that, if you've been training awhile, may be familiar with: Serious Growth by Leo Costa. At that point, I started training twice a day, six days a week, but only 45 minutes per session, at the most. Still eating a ton of food every day, I made excellent progress with this system and learned about the benefits of keeping your eyes on (and cycling) training volume.

BUT I TOTALLY NEGLECTED CARDIO TRAINING...

At the start of the eight months when I was furiously trying to increase my bodyweight, I had read that when trying to gain muscle, you should reduce cardio training. The aerobic work could burn up calories that could be used by the body for building muscle and might interfere physiologically with the muscle-building process.
Well, I took that a little too far and cut cardio training completely out. My thought was, I was doing cardio in the summer (blading to the gym and back) and didn't gain any muscle. When I was endurance training, I didn't gain any muscle. So maybe cutting it out was necessary. So I didn't even hardly walk up flights of stairs unless I had to.
LESSON #4
Too much cardio training (especially long-duration cardio training) CAN interfere with muscle growth, sure, but as I've learned since that time, SOME cardio training should always be a part of any mass-building program. The key is to do the RIGHT kind of cardio training (i.e. interval training, which can actually help the muscle-building process).
Let me put it this way, it's nice to be big and strong but when you're big and fat and strong and lose your breath going up a flight of stairs, you're not exactly at the pinnacle of health. Plus, think of it is this way...you NEED good cardiovascular functioning when training for muscle mass. What pumps blood and nutrients to the muscles? What helps you recover faster in between sets?
Cardio and muscle-building are not mutually exclusive concepts. I include it in ALL my muscle-building programs now.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR?

Well, at that point, being big and strong but big and fat, I decided I needed to burn off of the excess (the old bulk-and-cut concept). But then I made a HUGE mistake. I went back to similar habits that got me lean the previous summer. I didn't eat nearly enough to support the muscle mass that I had built and I didn't eat enough protein.
I also started running again, which at this point having not done any cardio training for 8 months, was a HARD lesson to learn. Imagine going from being a 150 lb cross-country runner who could do 5 km in about 15 minutes to being a 220 lb weightlifter who couldn't even jog slowly for more than 3 minutes straight!
Now, even though I was TRYING to do long-duration cardio, it actually resembled interval training more than anything because I had to stop and walk every few minutes. As I got in better cardio shape, I started running longer distances straight through (I would have been better off sticking with the intervals - little did I know!).
And I did lose weight and did lose some fat but I lost a LOT of muscle along with it. Nothing is more depressing than losing what you've worked so hard to build. I didn't lose all of my muscle and strength but it was enough to set me back.
LESSON #5
What you should eat and how you should train are actually fairly similar when you're trying to build muscle or burn fat. The main differences lie in how much you're eating and training variables such as rest periods and cardio frequency. You still need to eat a lot of protein regardless of your goals and you still need to lift heavy, even when on a fat loss program (it's how you tell your body that it needs to hold onto muscle).
Increasing cardio frequency, eating fewer calories and decreasing rest periods in between sets will get the fat burning process moving in the right direction. Don't starve yourself or go nuts by dramatically increasing your training workload.

SO WHAT HAPPENED IN MY SECOND YEAR OF TRAINING?

That's a story for another day...it involves going so far in the opposite direction of my first year of training that I actually made my roommate throw out a pot of water he was boiling for spaghetti because he added a pinch of salt (never mind that the sauce we were using had about 20 times that much salt in it already)!

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The 8 Biggest Mistakes I've Made

The 8 Biggest Mistakes I've Made
In My Training and How
You Can Avoid Them

1. Training Too Long

When I first started training, I wanted to get the fastest results possible so I figured more would be better. My wake-up call came when one day I did a 2 1/2 hour session and then lost a considerable amount of strength in my next session.

Lesson: keep your training sessions from approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour MAX! Any longer and you are either just breaking your body down or not working hard enough to get results.

2. Not Eating Enough Protein

After training for about a year and gaining a whole lot of weight (not all of it muscle!), I went on a very low-fat diet. The problem with this was I hardly ate any protein because meat had fat in it! I couldn't figure out what the problem was until one day, when I had had enough of low-fat eating, I cooked up four chicken breasts (with skin) and ate them all in one sitting. My strength jumped up immediately!

Lesson: protein is critical for muscle-building (and dieting). Don't get enough and you will compromise your results.

3. Not Enough Cardiovascular Training

When I first began training, I went from a 145-pound cross-country runner to a 217-pound weight lifter in 8 months. During that entire time I didn't do any cardio training. Not only was a lot of that weight gain fat, I felt really unhealthy and unbalanced.

Lesson: even if you're trying to gain weight, keep at least some cardio training in your program, even if it's just walking a couple of times per week. Your heart (and muscles) will thank you for it.

4. Too Much Cardiovascular Training

After the previous extreme, there was a time when I was trying to lose fat and went to the other extreme: too much cardio. I remember one session where I did 20 minutes at the highest setting on the Stair Master, then skipped rope for 10 minutes, then did the stationary bike for 20 minutes, then the Stair Master for another 20 on high, then 10 more minutes of skipping.

I was in great cardio shape but my strength and muscle mass plummeted and, to be honest, I could have achieved better fat-loss results with 15 minutes of high-intensity interval training.

Lesson: too much cardio can be counterproductive. Certainly, it will burn a lot of calories but your muscles will burn more during the day just sitting there. Short, intense sessions will spare your muscle mass and boost your metabolism more effectively.

5. Using a Weightlifting Belt

When I started training, I used a weightlifting belt for every exercise. I would basically keep the belt on for my entire workout. It was a big mistake and here's why:

A belt is very effective for stabilizing the abdominal core area. However, it is so effective that your core muscles aren't challenged and don't develop effectively. This can leave them weak and your core unstable, fostering a reliance on the belt.

A belt should really only be used for near-maximal lifting with very heavy weights. If you need a belt to do bench presses or barbell curls, you should re-examine your form and honestly evaluate your core strength. You may be setting yourself up for a back injury.

Here is another thing to think about: a belt works to stabilize your core by making your abs push outwards against it. Do you really want to be training your abs to push out and stay there? It's like training to make your gut stick out.

Lesson: ease yourself off the belt if you currently use one. You will need to slowly work back up to your current weights to ensure you don't hurt yourself. When you go to do a lift, suck in your gut and tighten your abs. You will develop far better core strength and stability, not to mention tighter, flatter abs.

6. Lifting Too Heavy

My goal has always been to develop muscle mass and strength. There have been times when I used a weight that either caused me to compromise my form or didn't allow me to get enough reps to build mass.

The rep range between 6 to 12 reps per set is most effective for building muscle mass. If you consistently use weights that only allow you to get 5 or fewer reps per set, you will build strength and some muscle but most likely not nearly as much as you are capable of.

Lesson: if you want strength, do 1 to 5 reps per set. If you want muscle, do 6 to 12 reps per set. Always push yourself to use more weight but not so much that you compromise your form or results.

7. Working Too Hard

I can clearly remember one dieting cycle I did where I was so enthusiastic to lose fat that I severely overtrained myself within the first two weeks. In my enthusiasm, I buried my recovery ability with extreme training volume and intensity. Coupled with a reduced-calorie diet, this overly-hard work spelled disaster.

Lesson: train hard but don't overwhelm yourself. Your body needs time and nutrients to recover and rebuild. This is especially important when dieting for fat loss.

8. Not Eating Enough

This is a mistake I've made many times before and am sure I will make again. It applies not only to muscle-building but to fat loss as well. Not eating enough can really limit your results. But, as we all know, life gets busy and it's hard to eat and prepare frequent, healthy meals.

Lesson: Do your best with the time and food you've got and be aware that the more regularly and frequently you can eat, the better. If you want to gain a lot of muscle, you are going to have to eat even when you don't feel like you necessarily need to or even want to.

Conclusion:

Everybody makes mistakes. There is no doubt about that. I sincerely hope that the information I've shared with you here will help you to avoid making the same mistakes I have.