Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1570: Eleven Ways to Build Muscle Faster

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover eleven factors that are key to building muscle faster. Why building muscle is NOT an easy process. (1:49) Eleven Ways to Build Muscle Faster.  #1 – Focus on strength. (3:49) #2 – Manipulate training frequency. (7:35) #3 – Incorporate priming and mobility work. (14:51) #4 – Concentrate on compound exercises. (19:55) #5 – Build your amplifier. (24:33) #6 – Eat your carbs. (29:08) #7 – Weigh-in daily. (30:51) #8 – Keep a food journal. (34:06) #9 – Add liquid calories. (36:26) #10 – Don't skip on the weekends. (38:26) #11 – Maximize your sleep! (40:24) Related Links/Products Mentioned June Promotion: MAPS Prime, Prime Pro, and the Prime Bundle 50% off!  **Promo code “JUNEPRIME” at checkout** Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! The Resistance Training Revolution – Book by Sal Di Stefano MAPS Fitness Anabolic | Muscle Adaptation Programming System What is the Best Way to Gain Strength in the Gym Fast? - Mind Pump Blog The Most Overlooked Muscle Building Principle – Mind Pump Blog The Breakdown Recovery Trap, Why You Aren’t Progressing – Mind Pump Blog How to Improve Weak and Stubborn Body Parts – Mind Pump Blog MAPS Prime Webinar 5 Most Important Exercises for Muscle Growth in an Effective Routine – Mind Pump Blog How To Eat If You Want To Pack On Muscle – Mind Pump Blog Why Calories Matter for Hardgainers – Mind Pump Blog MAPS Macro Calculator Hardgainers Not Eating Enough – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways To Optimize Sleep For Faster Muscle Gain And Fat Loss Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mindbub. Right, in today's episode, we talk about building muscle faster. Now, we're talking to people that are challenged by this. People that have issues with building muscle. You might want to label them maybe hard gainers. We give you

11 ways to make things happen faster. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chilly. Now Chilly makes devices that go on your bed. So it's like a mattress or cover almost that uses water to warm or cool your bed. Yes, I said cool, your bed. so it's like a mattress cover almost, that uses water to warm or cool your bed. Yes, I said cool, your bed. You can actually make your bed nice and chilly so you can sleep phenomenally. They also have products that have two sides of them. So if you and your spouse like different temperatures, that's okay. Don't get in a fight.

Just have them do their temperature and yours at your temperature. It's all controlled by an app. Really cool stuff makes a huge difference with sleep quality. Go check them out. And of course you get a discount because you listen to the best podcasts in the world. So head over to chileysleep.com.

That's CHILI sleep.com forward slash mine pump. And what you'll find on that page is an exclusive offer only for our listeners. Also one more thing, maps prime, maps prime pro, and our prime bundle are all 50% off. So in this episode, you actually hear us talk about priming. Well, those programs all help with that, and they're all 50% off.

So you can go check them out at mapsfitinusproducts.com, just use the code June Prime with no space for that discount. Let's talk about the 11 ways to build muscle faster. Faster, faster, faster. Everyone wants to build muscle, but everybody wants to build it faster. Hell, yes, I knew. No, this is a good topic because,

actually, I think what's going to happen in this discussion is people will listen and realize that they're not doing something from what we're talking about here. Building muscles tough, it's not easy. It's funny, I talk about this on a lot of podcasts I'm on now, especially when I'm talking about to women about building muscle, is that it's not an easy process. It takes a lot of time. It can be very challenging.

And there's often times, there's things that we do or don't do that just slow the process down. And some of them are simple, but oftentimes overlooked. So I think we should definitely cover this subject because I know these are pitfalls. I ran into that I had issues with, my clients did. Well, I'm also excited to do this too because a lot of times you may be building muscle and you don't think you are.

So the idea behind this, like when we first kind of created this was, you know, let's give people kind of like a checkoff list of are you hitting the big 11 things to build muscles as fast as you can? Because what can happen sometimes is the scale doesn't move and you start to stray away from some of these things. Right.

You start to freak out or adjust or move or do things differently because, oh my God, my goal was to build as much muscles as possible and my scale is either staying the same or maybe even a drop to pound and so you start freaking out. And so, I would have, and I didn't quite organize it the way we organized this episode today, but I'd have kind of a list of things similar to this that I'd go over with my clients. They'd listen, are you doing this?

Are you doing this? If we're doing all these things, okay? And I promise you, we're changing your body composition. Even if you think we're not, body composition, even if you think we're not, we're on the right track, we're checking all the boxes. Right. The first thing, which I think is the most important and the most basic, is to focus on strength.

Now, I know eventually when you get advanced, this one changes because you're not going to get stronger forever all the time. If that were the case, I think I'd be, you know, I'd be lifting thousands of pounds in each one of my exercises. So at some point this changes, but in the beginning and in the intermediate, this is the most important thing.

It's the most tangible way to actually be able to measure your progress. I think that that's just one of those things that if you want to be serious about this and and this is where All this stuff matters and why we have this all stacked the way it is because to be efficient in building muscle We have to really be critical of all these you know types of ways of measuring it It's also one of the first places it goes when you fall off for a couple weeks So it's such an easy place for me to go back and measure like, oh am I on the right track again. Like if I take a week or two off, especially if

I take two weeks or beyond where I've been inconsistent in not lifting, one of the first things I see that I start to drop or lose is my strength. So it's also one of the best ways for me to know that, okay, I'm back on the right track when I start to see that go up. And your measure is not, oh, what's my PR? And I'm not PRing now. It's like, where did you start when you got back? Yeah, where did I start when I got back into training again or back to being consistent with all the things I'm doing now and how am I progressing from there?

Yeah, some of the best advice I got as a kid working out was exactly this. So we had a family friend who used to be a bodybuilder, who was a chiropractor, and as a kid working out, anytime we'd see this person, I was always like, oh man, I can't wait to ask him questions because he was the buffedest guy that I knew. And I finally, I remember one day I took him aside

and I built up the courage to ask this guy and I said, hey, what are the most important things I can do? And he said, eat a lot of high quality food and get strong. And I remember thinking like, what do you mean? Just get strong. He goes, look, if you double your squat, if you double your bench press, I promise you, you'll be bigger.

I promise you you're going to have more muscle. Your body will need to get bigger. And nothing, nothing has consistently built more muscle on me and on my clients than just getting stronger consistently. You can get stronger and not see muscle for a little while, but if you keep getting stronger, eventually you'll see more muscle on your body. Right, because you can be getting better at this and we'll cover this, right? The skill and things like that.

But ultimately, if you are sending a signal to the body that you need to get stronger, then it's also telling the body we should build more muscle. In order for us to get stronger, one of the most efficient ways that we can be stronger is to add muscle to build muscles. So that is like the loudest signal that you can send to the body to build the muscle. Right. And this was the part of the cornerstone of the first maps program, which is maps in

a ballac is get stronger. And people who don't necessarily focus on this, who go to the gym and focus on the burn or the sweat or the pump, they'll follow a program like that and they'll be like, I can't believe the results that I'm getting. I'm like, well, yeah, strength is the foundational pursuit. That's the thing that above all that muscle does,

is it contracts and allows you to move things, lift things, and as those muscles get bigger, you can lift more. So focus on strength, especially if you're in that beginner to intermediate stage, especially if you're in the first few years of your training career, if you get stronger at some of those very important exercises, your squats and your dead lifts and your overhead presses and your bench presses and your rows, and you do so consistently, you will build muscle. That's just basically the bottom line. Now the second one, also very important, and this one took me a long time to figure out, was training frequency. You know, I was, I'm old enough to remember when we were all told to train each body part once a week. This was law.

This wasn't just a recommendation. This was the law. Like, if you wanted to build muscle, how dare you work out your shoulders more than once a week, you have to rest them for seven days. Well, yeah, what a mistake. The thing there is the rest, because we know that rest is a vital component in building muscle, but their definition of the rest was just

off, right? So we would we would destroy one muscle group and we'd think the rest we have to we have to stay away from that muscle group and let it build back and develop, you know, as it should, but really what we should be doing is adding more activity to aid in the recovery of it, and actually helps to promote muscle group more effectively, and to be able to touch that same muscle group with a bit less intensity so we can get more volume. Well, I remember even as a trainer, I actually misunderstood this. I actually thought, understood this. I actually thought, and I even taught this for a while, that if my body was sore still, there's not only, do I not need to train that muscle again. It was bad. It was bad. Yeah. That, you know, and I used to say it like this, that, oh, you know,

you're tearing and breaking down when you go in and you train and when you intensely train. And if you come back in two or three days and that muscle still sore and you go in and you train and when you intensely train. And if you come back in two or three days and that muscle still soar and you go training it again, you're just tearing and breaking down again and you're never allowing yourself to repair and grow. So, and there's some truth to this, but I abused it to the point where I thought, okay, it was all about intensely training

and hammering the muscles hard that could, and then it's all about as giving it as much rest as I possibly could then then hit it again. And I would never want to touch that muscle for at least seven days before I did it again. Well, this was such a mind blowing revelation for me. The first time I applied this. And by the way, when I'm talking about frequency,

I mean that your volume and your intensity are still controlled, but the amount of time you train the muscle is more often. So what I mean by that is, it's the difference between, let's say, hitting your chest on Monday for 21 sets versus doing seven sets three days a week. You're still doing 21 sets for the whole amount. Same amount, but the difference is,

rather than doing all in one workout, you've got triple the frequency. Triple the frequency with the same volume, will give most people better results. And I find this to be more true, especially for people who really have a challenge building muscle. Hardgainers seem to do the best with this, where I take their total volume

and I divide it up among more frequent workouts, they seem to do much better. When I did this for myself, it blew my mind partially because I was Adam like you. I thought, you never trained a muscle group more than that, more frequently, especially if it's sore. But I remember when I first applied this, I trained body parts when they were a little sore. I noticed not only did they not get more sore, they actually felt a little better.

And oh my gosh, I'm getting stronger and I'm building more muscle. What the hell is going on here? Well, the most important part that you just mentioned right now is actually explaining how you divided the same volume up. So the next mistake that I made was, okay, I don't remember exactly the study that I read when I came across this, but I finally read the research around frequency. And it says, you know, two to three times a week is ideal for the most muscle, right?

So then all I did was take the same level, you know, intensity mindset that I was that one day, we can just double the set. And then I doubled it or tripled it, you know, to throughout the week. And then I didn't see that much progress from that whatsoever. So you have to understand that as you increase frequency,

you also have to reduce the intensity. An intensity can be driven because of reducing it through volume or then how hard and or how hard you're training in the workout. Because that is where that part is true that I believed before, which is if you are hammering it that hard two, three times a week and never allowing the body to ever recover, then you can get stuck in that recovery chart.

Yes. And now, here's a thing. A lot of the things that get communicated in the fitness space, especially in the early days, were coming from these really genetically gifted individuals. And I use this example all the time to illustrate kind of what I'm talking about. But if you look at the genetic ability of your body to build muscle, there's a spectrum, right? On one end is very, very, your body just doesn't build muscle.

On the other end are your body builders. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. And to use a different example, if you look at height is a good example of this, right? On one end, you have people who are seven feet tall, on the other end, you have people with dwarfism, right? In real life, forget watching basketball games, forget going to NBA, how often have you ever seen

someone that's seven feet tall, right? Almost never, if you did, you'll remember it because it's so rare. That's how rare extreme muscle building genetics are. Now, why is this important? Because a lot of the information we got in still permeates comes from these genetically gifted individuals that make up .01% of the population. Part of what makes

them genetically gifted is they send a muscle building signal and their body is in positive building mode for a week or two weeks. The average person, that signal lasts like 24 to 48 hours. It's gone after that. After that, your body's not trying to build more muscle, even if you're sore. So this is why some people can work a body part once a week get great results. But why most people do better working the body part

two or three days a week. Now of course, you gotta control the volume and the intensity. So you're not doing 21 sets on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but you're doing what I said earlier, which is seven sets, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But there's other benefits to this. Number one, your fresher for all seven sets, right? Because if you do 21 sets and one workout,

by the time you get down with six or seven sets, the rest of the workout is like, you're just kind of hanging in there and you're getting a pump. But when you're fresh, you tend to focus on more effective exercises, you're stronger, you don't do these finishers that tend to be at the end of this long, super long workout, and you have this triple frequency, and you also practice more often. Well, yeah, practice.

That's where the athletic mind, you know, kind of went in this direction and realized, if you look at it, I'm playing in a high intensity game. Something like that, that's gonna be a bit damaging on the body, but if I was to do that multiple times a week, and that's gonna be taxing on your body, it's the same type of mentality going into the workouts.

If that's always going to be my mindset of crushing this workout, it's going to be really taxing on your body. Your body's not going to have a chance to really fully recover versus practicing and going a little bit lighter, you're not really practicing these same moves in adjusting things accordingly to then feel fresh, feel like you're energized,

leading into, like, let's say, every now and then you're going to test your abilities. Now, the next one that I think goes hand in hand with increasing the frequency of how much you're training is also incorporating priming and mobility work. This was something too way later in my career. Did I finally figure it all this? This gets in the way for so many people. I know. For building muscle.

Well, I think, if you were to tell 22-year-old me about this, I know that I would be tough to get it through to my head. Would tough to, because I would see it as like, oh, this is like, you know, this is like a yoga, flexibility stuff. I'm trying to build as much muscle as I possibly want. I'm not getting sore from this, I'm not sweating from this, it's not really hard. I'm spending 10 minutes before I get started in my workout. I could be doing three more sets of something

intensely inside my workout. The young kid and me thought it was a waste of time in my pursuit of building the most muscle. It wasn't until later did I realize how much this would accelerate my muscle building from. No, if you could give a point, a score, I should say, to an exercise, let's say you could give squats a 10, right? On a scale of one to 10, for building muscle, let's say squats score a 10. That doesn't mean doing squats muscle, let's say squats score a 10. That doesn't mean doing squats any way you want will give you a 10. The 10 comes from

squats done well, full range of motion, being connected, feeling the muscles that are supposed to be working control, good control. That's what gives it the 10. The worst you do squats, the less points you get for doing them in terms of its muscle building ability. I think back to when I was a kid, working out, the first time I started doing squats, I remember the difference in my leg development from doing half squats, doing full squats.

It was like a completely different exercise. Same thing with shoulder presses, same thing with the bench press, right? The fuller range of motion with good control, it was like I would doing a brand new exercise in terms of its effectiveness. It makes that big of a difference. And a lot of people, because they don't prime properly, because they don't work on mobility properly, they're not able to do some of the most effective exercise, or they do those

exercises, but they can't do them effectively. Yeah, I look at it too, is you get a stock car that has all these governings on them to not allow you to go the certain speed. You know the engine is fully capable of going, but the systems aren't in place to be able to handle that kind of stress it's gonna place on the car. It's the same with the body has, is very smart.

It adjusts and makes sure that, you know, these ranges of motion and these types of activities, you don't apply too much of what you already could produce because you're gonna injure yourself. And so we're working against these systems that we already have. So priming itself will really unlock a whole amount of new potential for you to produce force.

Not to mention the amount of muscle fibers that you recruit when you do an exercise actually is directly correlated to the amount of strength and muscle you gain from that exercise. So when you look at muscles, if you look at them under a microscope, there are lots of different fibers. I'm just going to give a number. Let's say you have, this is not accurate, but just for argument's sake, let's say in your bicep, you have 100 fibers.

That's total muscle fibers in your bicep. But when you do curls, your body's only really calling on 60 of them. There's going to be a big difference between your body calling upon 60 or recruiting 100. Part of what allows you to recruit more muscle fibers is how connected you are to the exercise, how stable you are to that exercise. This is why some people, not all the reasons, but part of the reason why some people don't

build their glutes as effectively doing squats as someone else or their chest is effectively when doing bench press as someone else. They're not able to recruit the same amount of muscle fibers because they're not as connected, they don't have that technique and the form. Mobility and priming is a very integral part of not just avoiding injury,

but of maximizing your workouts you can build the most amount of. Well, and that dramatically adds up over time. So most people are following some sort of a routine where they have squats, bench press, whatever exercise we're talking about, where they have to do three to four sets of each exercise. Well, most people that don't do priming and set themselves up for all those exercises to your point only recruiting so much muscle fiber sets one and two they only get X amount percent out of that where they could potentially double or triple the amount they get out of all those sets.

You add that up over workouts over weeks and over months and over years that really starts to compound. It makes a huge difference. So our program maps prime and maps prime pro focus specifically on that. We do have a free webinar. I want to mention that so people can go and learn some of the stuff. They don't have to buy anything. It's maps prime pro or excuse me, maps prime webinar dot com. So you can go there. Now the second, then the next one is also very, very important. This one is one we communicate all the time, but I think we can't say it enough.

And that is if you want to build muscle, focus on the most effective exercises. I mean, there's a lot of exercises. All of them have some value, but not all of them are equal. And when it comes to building muscle, they're definitely not equal. Some are really good at building muscle.

Others are not very good at all at building muscle. The most effective exercises for building muscle are compound exercises or compound lifts. are not very good at all at building muscle. The most effective exercises for building muscle are compound exercises or compound lifts. The term compound means you're using more than one joint when doing the lift. So a non compound movement, an isolation movement or a single joint exercise would be like a curl, right?

A compound movement that would work the biceps would be like a chin up with my palms facing back and a supinated grip. That would be a compound lift for my biceps. Other compound lifts include squats, dead lifts, bench presses, overhead presses, rows, horizontal presses. Those are all the big muscle building exercises. If you get good at those, you'll build way more muscle

than if you get good at single joint exercise. And of course, these are the ones that require a bit more skill in terms of the performing of the exercise where in a controlled setting where you're in a machine, it's a lot of those things have been accounted for. And so it's great for rehab. It's great for being able to really hone in

on very specific muscles. But when we're trying to build muscle, we need to send the loudest signal we possibly can. And so these types of lifts where we use multi-joint, really put a lot of demand on the body, which then in turn signals to the body. Okay, we need to be able to build some muscle to be able to resist this.

Well, you're going to tell your speaker and amp analogy that you give a lot that we haven't talked about very much lately in the podcast because there is this movement right now in the muscle building community around doing these exercises where you feel it the most in it And that's more important than these compound lifts in fact And there's a lot of and there's very smart intelligent people that are promoting this message But I think it's a terrible message for the masses, which is this oh, you know, you don't need to do squats You don't need to do these compound lifts. You can do exercises that target the quads or target the hamstrings or target the glutes better, but there's massive benefits that go into compound lifting for reasons. It's not just about feeling a specific muscle that's

going to build the most muscle, there's also other benefits primarily talking about the central nervous system. Yeah, so the CNS is the controller, right? That's what tells your muscles to contract or relax. Your brain is a part of the central nervous system. And the CNS would be like your amplifier if you were to have a stereo system. That's the amp. That's what sends the juice.

And the speakers are like muscle. Well, you could have whatever speakers you want, but they're not gonna do anything if the amp is very, very weak. And training your central nervous system leads to better muscle fiber recruitment and a louder muscle building signal. Compound lifts are a loud signal.

Isolation lifts are not. You don't believe me? Go do a set of leg extensions to failure and then go do a set of barbell squats to failure and tell you how you feel afterwards, right? It's a very loud, very big signal and it calls upon your body to elicit the strongest adaptation response.

Remember, adaptation is what we're looking for when we're working out. Our bodies trying to get better at what we're telling it to do. Compound lifts are just way more effective partially because they activate so much muscle in the body. They tell everything to turn on. Your CNS is loud when you're doing these exercises.

And so it's like nothing's in a build more muscle. If you add 50 pounds to your squat, look at how much muscle you build on your legs versus adding 50 pounds on the leg extension. I mean, there's no comparison. A 50 pound ad to your squat, you're gonna see more muscle. 50 pounds on a leg extension, you might not even notice that much of a difference.

That's how big of a difference it is when we're talking about these compound lifts. And for a lot of people who are training, if you're looking at your routine and you're like, why am I not building muscle? And you look at your workout and two thirds of your workout is our single joint exercises. Okay, you gotta flip that. Two thirds should be compound. One third should be the single

joint isolation movement. Now this next one is really funny. I'm gonna tell a story, kind of illustrate what it's all about. I remember years ago, I got this guy that hired me as a kid. He was 17 years old and he wanted to get bigger, he wanted to build more muscle. And so when I talked to him and he wanted to hire me and so we started talking about his routine and it kind of sounded like he knew what he was talking about and he was doing the right diet, taking the right supplements and I said, well, let me look at your workout. And I looked at his workout and I quickly realized that he didn't spend much time training his legs. And so I asked him, I said, this is common for people, right?

They'll not focus on a body part because it may be not flashy for them or whatever. Or it's hard. Or it's hard, right? But legs is one, right? You know, the beach muscles, right? He's chest and biceps all the time and you know, my legs that come more pants. That was his whole deal. And he was a kid.

So I said, why aren't you working your legs that much? It was, I don't really care about having super muscular legs, but what I wanna do is I wanna add more size to my arms. So I said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna get you really strong at squats and build your legs. And he's like, well, that doesn't make any sense. I said, oh, it will make sense once we do it.

I said, but here's a deal. You're, we can build a body part, and that body part will definitely build, but there's a deal. You're, we can build a body part, and that body part will definitely build, but there's a signal that sends the whole body, get this kind of whole body systemic effect. And I remember as a kid reading articles saying, if you wanted to get bigger arms, you got to get better at squats.

And I thought it was silly, but I tested it myself as a kid, totally worked. It worked on this kid too. His squat went up, of course, his legs got bigger, but the rest of his body built as well. There are studies that show, for example, to kind of illustrate this, where they'll have somebody will,

they'll put one arm, they'll immobilize one arm, so your left arm immobilize. And when you do that, like if you have your arm in the cast, you'll notice lots of muscle loss. But in these studies, the participants will train the right arm. Here's what they find. The right arm definitely gets stronger. The arm that's immobilized loses less muscle.

In fact, when they don't immobilize one of the arms, but they still train one arm, most of the gains go on that one arm they train. Some of the gains go on the other arm. It's like you get this localized muscle-building effect, but you also get this systemic muscle building effect. Now let's talk about the legs for a second. That's a half of your body.

Training your legs sends, definitely there's a local signal that goes to legs, but there's a very loud systemic signal that goes to the rest of your body. So call out the concept, it's a radiation. And so as you like put stress in one joint, your body is still stabilizing. It's still actively contracting.

And it's affecting your body in a lot more ways than you actually realize. So you training your legs definitely puts your upper body, you're just gonna be affected by that. In your overall body in general, the more type of demand you're going to put on, you're going to build muscles and results. Well, this is why, too, I really like how the speaker and amplifier analogy you talk about, too,

because that makes total sense when you think of it like that, too. Knowing that the legs are so big, if you are training those compound lifts and you're doing it, you're going to get some benefit to the amplifier. So even though you did maybe upgrade the speakers in your arms, like you can get bigger speakers necessarily right away, but you're now sending a louder signal to those because you've trained those lifts. So that's why I like that analogy so much because it makes sense to me that even if someone is not training that right arm like you're talking about, and they're only training the left arm, They're at least still stretches your capacity out.

They're still, you know, they're still getting a better amplifier so that going forward when they do those other lifts they're gonna get more bang for their butt. There is, it's true. And so let's extend this a little further. Don't skip body parts. Skipping body parts means that even though you have a body part

that I don't really care about training it that much Yes, you're not going to develop that body part But you're also not going to develop the other body parts of the full potential your body will limit the muscle building signal Number one because it wants to maintain some sort of balance in number two because you're missing that systemic Muscle building effect. So if you're training in a way that Skips body parts, you're actually limiting your capacity to build muscle, especially if it's a big body part. And guys, it tends to be legs,

and women, it tends to be like chest. I've had a lot of female clients, I don't need to train my chest. I'm like, you want nice shoulders, you want nice back? Well, yeah, well, let's train your chest and see what happens, and sure enough, they would notice better results in the rest of the body. Now, the next one, this one's important because I think sometimes people,

especially people who want to build muscle, but they also are afraid of gaining body fat. They tend to shy away from carbohydrates. I tell you what, this is coming from someone who often eats very, very low carbohydrates and sometimes even eats ketogenic. Now, I do those things because not because I'm trying to build muscle and not because I'm trying to get lean, but rather it works on an individual basis for my gut health. This is why I do it. But believe me, if I had a choice, I would eat carbs. Not just because they're delicious, but because you build muscle way easier when you build carbs, and when you eat carbs.

And it's also just easier to get the calories that way. It's really tough. Most people that struggle with building muscle also struggle with getting enough calories. I mean, I know this was where I was stuck for so many years was I was a trainer, I was active, I like to play sports. I did all the stuff that was burning so many calories, and I just was not fueling the body enough carbohydrates

to stay up with my chloric intake so that I can build. You can lift weights all day long, but if you're not giving your body enough calories to build muscle, it's gonna have a really hard time putting any muscle in. Yeah, the other part to that, and this one's very obvious, is don't miss your protein intake.

That is very... That's why I like to target that first, right? So like, for myself, this is even if I'm not tracking, like if I'm not logging everything I eat, the first thing I'll do is I'll go, okay, I'm just gonna really focus on making sure I hit my protein intake. I'll just track my protein, make sure I hit my protein,

and then I'll just, I'll pile on the carbohydrates and allow fat to get in there. But if you hit that first and make sure you hit those numbers and then you pile on the other calories from carbs and fat, much easier strategy. Totally. The next one, this one is more for the hard gainer, the person who has a tough time gaining weight.

Daily weigh-ins can be really good. They can kind of keep you on track. This was a big one for me as a kid because I could see every single day what was going on. It also kept me on track with my nutrition. Well, I think it's important too that we, you know, this episode is geared towards someone who's like a hard game. Yeah, it's like needs the bit. I know someone here is you say that. They're like, wait a second, I hear my pump all the time and they actually normally tell people like, don't get hung up on the scale. You gotta remember who we're talking to right now.

I don't think that weighing every single day for the person who has body image issues and is got, you know, freaked out about the scale going up or down. This is for the person who is struggling to build muscle and being able to check in on the scale as far as an accountability piece to see where you're at, there is tremendous value in doing it for that person.

No, and also to make sure, like, what kind of weight you're gaining. That's right. And that's going to be highlighted most if you're gaining weight a bit too fast. And you're really looking at your consumption versus your activity levels and to be able to see not so much of progress for a while, probably gonna be the better of approach where you're recomping your body so now we're getting more lean muscle. Yeah, and now there's one caveat to this,

which is don't get hung up on the day-to-day changes. Look at the trends. So I would chart this and I would see on a week-by-week basis the trends because daily you can lose or gain water. Also weigh yourself at the same time with the same clothes on or no clothes at all on because your body weight will fluctuate between morning and evening. But what you're looking for is the trend. If you get hung up on the day to day, you may find yourself eating foods that promote water retention or weighing yourselves at

the end of the day because you're like, oh, I'm a little heavier at the end of the day. Just see what's going on. It's really there just like Justin said to help you calibrate, right? So if you've done a very good job, you're following a meal plan or you've figured out your macros and you know where you're supposed to be in order for you to gain muscle. Alright, you stick there. Now what we know is that no, no, no, even the best macro calculator out there is not precise

to you. And this is where you use the scale as a tool for you to kind of measure like how accurate it was to you. So I figured out where I'm supposed to be calorie and macro wise. And then I'm weighing every day to see and what I'm really looking for is massive swings in one direction or the other. And then I'm adjusting accordingly, like you said, if I see my scale go up four pounds,

you know, consistently in two days in a row, okay, I probably need to scale back on my calories. Well, this is what's tough because we do have tools out there that are great, like our macro calculators and all these things that will help to give you some sort of structure, which is those numbers are useful. However, you have to individualize that even more by doing those other things, like by

taking pictures, by also like, you know, weighing and measuring yourself to be able to see how all these work together and where you really are. Yeah. Now, the next one, this one, you're a big one on Adam, which was food journal. Keeping a food journal, writing now what you're eating. You know, it's funny what this one is, even the hard gainers of the issue, the people have issues trying to put on muscle.

They oftentimes overestimate how many calories are protein that the protein is a big one. Oh, I eat a lot, I eat all the time. I have this, then they keep a food journal, we add it up. It's like, hey man, you're 150 pounds, you're eating 70 grams of protein. Well listen, again, this is another one of those things that's kind of counter to some of the stuff that we talk about on the podcast when we're talking in general. This is a very specific targeted episode toward towards somebody who is a

hard gainer or struggling to put on muscle or who wants to put on the most muscle as fast as you can. If you're trying to put on as much as much as much muscle as you possibly can as fast as you can, then these types of things, this is where this becomes important. Like you can't tell me that that's your goal. And then you say, oh, I don't really feel like tracking them because then then I'm gonna challenge, we're not gonna build the most muscle, the fastest, if you're not willing to do that work. Because I've got to be able to track with you

and then recalibrate if we need to. So that's why you want to do this. And then to your point, Sal, almost everybody either overestimates or underestimates, I still to this day. Like before I even started tracking just recently again, I was going, okay, I think I'm around this. Or I'm kind of guessing where I'm at.

As soon as I start running down, I'm always awful little bit. Specific goals, I mean, they require just more attention to detail. And that's just the bottom line. I mean, there's a lot of healthy approaches out there where we can sort of go through intuitively what I feel is good for my body, what I want to train for the day, and all that kind of stuff for lifestyle.

But when we're really trying to focus in on gaining muscle and like how to do that in the most efficient way possible, have to be really, you know, potentials of details. It's also going to help you dial in the weight thing, right? If you have figured out your macros and you know right where you're supposed to be and you don't see the scale going, I don't care what the macro calculator said, if you see the scale going down every single day, you got to, yeah, you need more calories. You, you, it underestimated how much you're burning. So that's why you have to do this tracking.

It doesn't mean you're going to track the rest of your life, but especially when we're first building this routine or trying to get you started in the right direction, we've got to figure all this stuff out. Yeah, now this next one, this one's for the people that are challenged with eating enough calories. I was one of these people myself at a very fast metabolism.

It's very, once I started to kind of track, I realized while I'm not eating enough, I need to eat much more. How am I gonna do this? I'm full, it's hard to consume. And that's when adding liquid calories actually makes a difference. Of course, remember, we're talking to a specific person right now. But adding liquid calories can make a huge difference.

Protein shakes are a great example because they give you the protein that you might be missing and you get extra calories. If you're not dairy intolerant, milk is incredible for this. This is great, especially for the person who really struggles with putting on any body weight. It's like, how about this? Eat what you're normally eating. Just have a big glass of whole milk with every single meal. Boom. They added three or four hundred calories to the diet and some high quality protein. Well, this is one of my favorite ways to gain right here is that my

goal is, and I'm tracking is is to Hit my protein in targets get all the calories supposed supposed to with whole foods within the day, right? So that's my goal and then at the end of the day is where I love to make like this bulking type of shake Then I look at the end of the day and I go, okay, I was supposed to get to 3500 calories. I just got to there I just hit barely my protein intake. Now I'm gonna have like this bulk shake at the end of the night. And for somebody who struggles with eating enough calories, things like this become extremely beneficial.

And I have, I think I've shared this one on the podcast before where you go whole milk, a way protein, a banana, one tablespoon of Nutella, two tablespoons of peanut butter, all blended on ice. That sounds good. It is. It's like an 800 calories shake. It's like 40 something grams of protein, depending on what way you're using,

and it tastes phenomenal. It's a great way to end the night. It's also great for somebody that may be like me who likes ice cream or sweets. And so it gives me kind of that sweet taste, but then I'm also getting this big punch of protein at the end of the night. Now, this next one is funny.

It's a challenge whether you're trying to lose weight or gain weight or no matter what your goals are, I tend to find that people tend to go off on the weekends, right? So like people who are trying to lose weight, they often find that on the weekends, they go off and eat too much. People trying to pack on muscle and size

is the same thing just in the reverse. Like they do really well Monday through Friday, then the weekend comes a sleep in, so that means they skip breakfast or lunch wasn't that structured, and next thing you know, their calories are low, the protein is low, and remember, it's all averaged out, right? So, if you're in a calorie surplus,

you know, a 500 calories Monday through Friday, but then you're in a deficit of 1,000 on Saturday and Sunday. Well, that means that you're barely, it is surplus for the whole week. I like it because the weekend makes a big difference. I like this tip a lot because you're right, it does work both directions. And this actually happened way later in my career,

I started to piece this together. It didn't matter if I was on a bulk or a cut. I just started to say, okay, I'm not gonna tell myself I can't have these foods during the week. I'm gonna stop just doing it on Saturday and Sunday, and I'm gonna start making Saturday and Sunday my more dialed in days. And then if I want to have these other things

or I wanna take a day off from lifting, I'm gonna schedule those days somewhere in the week. And what I found would happen is, when I organized my weekends, when I got work and I got all these things that are already scheduled in my day in the week. And what I found would happen is when I organized my weekends, when I got work and I got all these things that are already scheduled in my day during the week, I'm much better on the diet, I'm more consistent with my workouts.

So if I just made it a goal that I'm gonna be dialed on the weekends and I said, and then I'll give myself flexibility if I want it or the free to take a day off or whatever during the week, what I found was I was more consistent when I did that. This is just true with any goal. I mean, that I found in my career

with clients in general, it's just during the week, people are just tend to be more structured and have that going for them. And so they could just add this in. They're more regimented about it. If this is a specific goal of yours to be able to carry that into the weekend is gonna do wonders for you.

Yes, now this last one, boy did this take me a long time to figure out how long did it take you guys to figure out the sleep component when it came to putting on muscle. Oh man, that wasn't until, forever. Yeah, I wasn't until way later, because I was the, I mean, we've opened up.

I'll sleep when I'm dead. That's right, we openly have discussed the young 20 year olds that we all were in all saying that sleep is overrated and I'd work out and do things till late at night and get up super early every time. I didn't realize what, because it's one of those ones that it's not like, you can get away with not going up at all.

So you think that you're falling? Yeah, you don't see a swing in any direction right away. It's not like you get one bad night of rest and then the next day you lose five pounds of muscles. It's got a compounding effect and the body is resilient as shit, so it'll adapt to whatever you make it do all. You'll be able to get through your day. You'll be able to take a pre-workout and get your workout, but are you maximizing? No. I remember when I first kind of started to peer into this.

I still didn't learn my lesson, but I did enjoy some incredible benefits. I had been reading articles and books, and I remember I had read a few books, and each one of them made this big deal about getting enough sleep. And I remember finally saying, all right, let me see what the deal, because I was one of those kids that I could get away

with five hours of sleep, and I was totally fine. I thought, oh, this is not for me. Well, anyway, I remember thinking that's it. This, the next 30 days, I'm gonna make a concentrated effort to go to bed early to sleep, at least eight hours every single night, which was a big improvement for me, and to see what happens.

And sure enough, I gained like four or five pounds of muscle in that month. Now, the reason why I didn't keep doing it is because I was a hard-headed kid, and, you know, sleeping is boring and being awake, there's all kinds of things you could do. Later on as an adult, I put this together and it's important for many other things aside

from just building muscle, but I tell you right now, especially hard-gainers. I'd say probably seven out of 10 times, 70% of time, when someone comes to me and says, man, I just, my body doesn't build muscle. Sleep is always an issue. Like 70% of time, I look at their sleep and I go, oh, well, you're only sleeping, so you don't value it

until you can't get it anymore. It's just like everything else, you know? Like I didn't really realize the power of it until I couldn't sleep as much. And I had to get up and I had to do all these, I was always responsibilities now that I had in front of me, you know, didn't allow me to sleep and go through that like I used to, but again, it was always like,

I was working against my bodies how I felt when I wasn't getting sleep. So it didn't even matter if I was young and resilient and all those things, I could have benefited from it massively if I would have applied a structure to that where I had an allotted amount of time for me to sleep and recover, it was like, I'm always like playing that catch-up game

which I'm sure a lot of young people can relate to. Well, wouldn't you say Sal too, that big part of that too is just what's going on hormonally and like with insulin and cortisol, I mean, those are such key indicators on you building muscle or burning body fat. And when you are when your sleep is off, when your circadian rhythm is off, that throws a lot of that off. And so big time. Right. And to your body, telling your body that it's going to build muscle

or burn body fat, when those are all out of whack is just really tough. If someone gave me, if someone made a bet with me and gave me money and said, let's see how fast you could lower your testosterone or someone else's testosterone. And you can only do one thing. The one thing I would do is do sleep deprivation. It's guaranteed to hammer your anabolic hormones. Your growth hormone goes to shit. Your testosterone totally drops. Cortisol goes up. Your body actually primes itself to reduce muscle and store body fat. Lots and lots of literature on the connection between bad sleep and fat gain or bad sleep and performance reductions. Sleep really primes the body with these beneficial hormones.

Hormones that oftentimes people take exogenous to build more muscle. You produce less melatonin, which means you produce less growth hormone, which now means your body is becoming, you know, it's not going to burn body fat as well. Your insulin sensitivity starts to drop. Insulin is also very anabolic. In women, you see these imbalances between estrogen and progesterone, just from not getting great sleep. And by the way, it's not just getting terrible sleep

that does that, it's getting anything less than optimal. You start to see those changes. Literally, so it is a spectrum, meaning the best sleep you get gives you the best results, anything less than that is less than that. So it's not just the difference between great sleep and shitty sleep. It's like, well, I get seven hours or six and a half,

but I think I'm okay. Be a big difference just by prioritizing it, getting eight hours and allowing your body to prime itself, you're having to build muscle. Now, a big part of this game is the mental game, right? We always talk about how you play mind games with yourself. If you're gaining and you're losing, I'm not sure, I look at myself in the mirror

every single day, I can't tell. This is why I love using this episode. If you're somebody who I'm not sure, I look at myself in the mirror, every single day I can't tell. This isn't why I love using this episode. If you're somebody who struggles with building muscle and you think or you think you're not building muscle, use this as a checkoff list. And start checking off all these things. If you're doing all these things, I promise you're heading the right direction.

If you're doing all these things and you're following a good program and a routine, I promise the body, the body composition is changing. You're probably building muscle. Hopefully you're also burning some body fat. So even if you're not seeing this huge fluctuation on the scale or you're not getting people to every single day complimenting you

until you're getting massive and building on kinds of muscle the next day, be patient, stay with it and just get good at all 11 of these things. Very well said. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpFree.com. We have lots of free stuff that we offer. All of our listeners, great, great free information,

MindPumpFree.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram, so you can find Justin at MindPump Justin, me at MindPump Salon, Adam at MindPump Adam. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps and a ballad, maps for performance and maps

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