Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Everything You Should Know About Newbie Gains, According to Science

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider checking out my VIP one-on-one coaching service where we can help you get in the best shape of your life. My team and I have helped people of all ages, circumstances, and needs. So no matter how complicated or maybe even hopeless you might think your situation is, we will figure it out and we will get you results. Every diet and every training program is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements and other products, and the list of benefits goes on and on. So to learn more, head over to www.legionathletics.com slash coaching. That's legionathletics.com slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call. I should also mention that there is usually a wait list and new slots do fill up very quickly. So do not wait. If this sounds even remotely interesting to you, go ahead and schedule your call now. Again, that URL is legionathletics.com slash coaching. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life.

Starting point is 00:01:34 I am Mike Matthews. Now, if you are new to proper weightlifting, you have a lot to look forward to. You are taking your first steps in a journey that can transform not only your body, but your entire life. And with every bit of muscle and strength you gain, you are going to look a little better, feel a little better, and thrill a little bit more at the prospect of what else you might be able to achieve if you apply yourself. You have a special advantage as well, one that even the most accomplished weightlifters envy. The biggest guys and gals in the gym, in a sense, wish they could experience what you are going to experience. Because whereas they have to fight tooth and nail for every ounce of improvement

Starting point is 00:02:26 on the scale bar, thanks to some physiological works, you are going to progress with relative ease. So for example, for someone like me, no matter how hard I work in the gym and no matter how disciplined I am with my diet, the best I could possibly do over the next year or so is maybe 30-ish pounds added to my key lifts. And that's only because my big lifts are lower now than they were at my best, mostly because I just weigh less now and I have a lower body fat percentage than I did at that time. When I set my all-time PRs, I was lean bulking, of course. And now, and for the last several years, I've just been maintaining a lower body fat percentage, which looks cool, but impairs performance. And as far as muscle gain goes, maybe I could gain, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:03:25 a pound to three pounds of muscle over the next year, regardless of how hard I work. You, however, are going to have it much better because in your first year of proper training, you should have no trouble increasing your whole body strength by several hundred pounds and gaining anywhere from 15 to 25 pounds of muscle and about half of that if you are a woman. And such is the power of newbie gains. Now notice that I've said proper a couple times here, proper weightlifting. And this is important because even if you have been into weightlifting for a while now, if you've made little progress since starting, you too can benefit from newbie gains. So in short, if you're a guy and you have yet to gain your first 15 to 25 pounds of muscle,

Starting point is 00:04:21 and if you're a woman, about half that amount, you can get there a lot faster than you might think. Now, if you're skeptical, I understand. Maybe you think that you are a hard gainer who's designed to stay small and weak, or maybe you think you have already more or less maxed out what your physique, what your genetics have to offer, and maybe you think your only hope for getting bigger or stronger at this point is steroids, and maybe you think your only hope for getting bigger or stronger at this point is steroids, or maybe you just don't know what to do in the gym to gain more muscle and strength. Well, I have good news because although some people do gain muscle and strength easier and faster than others, nobody has to remain forever frail. And although we do all have hard genetic ceilings for muscle and strength gain, you are probably

Starting point is 00:05:09 well short of yours. And lastly, the art and science of training can appear hopelessly complex, but all you probably need to do to achieve your goals is apply the fundamentals intelligently and rigorously. And I can back those statements up with a lot of proof through my books, articles, podcasts, and videos. I have helped thousands of everyday men and women build their best body ever, and I can help you do the same.

Starting point is 00:05:46 And I can start right here, right now in this podcast by providing you with an in-depth review of the science of newbie gains, which is a rather controversial phenomenon. Some people say newbie gains aren't really a thing because there's nothing special that's occurring at the physiological level. On the other hand, other people say that newbie gains are hit and miss and mostly come down to genetics. Either you have it or you don't. And other people still, they'll say that most people can benefit from newbie gains, but only as complete beginners to any sort of training. Meaning that only for people who are just starting out with resistance training. Now, who is right here? Well, the reality is if you are new to proper weightlifting and dieting, you will gain more muscle and

Starting point is 00:06:41 strength in your first year than ever again. In other words, you will be able to make newbie gains. What's also true though is it's easy to mess it up. It's easy to cheat yourself out of this honeymoon phase by just making a few common mistakes. And in this podcast, we are going to break it all down, including what newbie gains are and why they're possible, how much muscle you can expect to gain in your newbie phase, how long

Starting point is 00:07:12 newbie gains tend to last and why they eventually end, how to get more from your newbie gains, what to do when your newbie gains end and more. All right. So let's start with a simple question. What are newbie gains? Well, newbie gains refers to the rapid increase in muscle and strength that occurs usually in people with little to no previous weightlifting experience who just start out lifting weights. Now, again, it also can occur in people who have been lifting weights for a while, but who have been doing things quite wrong. And we'll be talking about that a little bit later. Now, typically the people who are new to weightlifting, they also gain very little fat

Starting point is 00:07:58 or even lose fat during this newbie phase while they're gaining a considerable amount of muscle and strength. And this is often referred to as body composition. Now, newbie gains occur because when someone is new to weightlifting or new to proper weightlifting, the body is hyper responsive to it. It's hyper responsive to the stimulus that's provided by the resistance training. And as a result, you can then gain muscle and strength much faster as a beginner than later in your fitness journey when you're much bigger and stronger than when you began. Now, unfortunately, there aren't any long-term studies looking at how much muscle people can gain in their first year of proper training, but we can extrapolate based on shorter studies that have been done. For example, a study conducted by scientists at

Starting point is 00:08:52 Gothenburg University found that beginner lifters gain about four to seven pounds of muscle in their first three months of weightlifting. And if we then assume that they keep gaining muscle at about the same rate for the first year, that works out to 16 to 28 pounds of muscle in that period, or an average of about 22 pounds. And that is perfectly in line with the large amount of anecdotal evidence that is out there and perfectly in line with what I've seen myself having worked with thousands of people now over the years. Most guys can gain 15 to 25 pounds of muscle in their first year of proper weightlifting and most gals can gain about half that. So why does this occur? Why do newbie gains occur? Well, to gain muscle, your body needs to create new muscle

Starting point is 00:09:46 proteins faster than it breaks them down. And the process of creating new muscle proteins is called muscle protein synthesis. And the process of breaking them down is called muscle protein breakdown. So whenever muscle protein synthesis outpaces muscle protein breakdown, you gain muscle mass. And that is fundamentally what we are trying to accomplish with our training, our nutrition, supplementation. Really what we want is a lot more muscle protein synthesis over time than muscle protein breakdown. Now, when you are new to weightlifting, training dramatically spikes muscle protein synthesis rates, throwing your body's muscle building machinery into overdrive, so to speak. And even better, it doesn't take a particularly grueling workout

Starting point is 00:10:38 to accomplish this either. Now, as you spend more time in the gym and you gain more muscle and strength, your body's response to your workouts changes in a number of ways. One of the more significant adaptations is muscle protein synthesis does not remain elevated for as long after a workout, which then, of course, results in less muscle gain. It drops from about two to three days on average when you're new to about 12 to 24 hours as you become more experienced. And you can find clear evidence of this phenomenon in the literature. studies on the muscle protein synthesis response to training and found that there is a much greater and more prolonged spike in newbies than experienced lifters. Again, on average in untrained people, it took three to four days for the post-workout muscle protein synthesis bump to subside, whereas in more experienced lifters, it was more like 12 to 24 hours. And if you want to look at the data in another way, when you add up the total boost in protein synthesis both groups experienced, the untrained and trained lifters, in the hours and days

Starting point is 00:11:58 following their workouts, the untrained lifters saw a 4,000% increase in muscle protein synthesis versus a 1,500% increase in the trained lifters. Now, experienced weightlifters can compensate for this to some degree by doing harder workouts, by doing more hard sets per week, increasing volume or focusing more on progressive overload and making sure that they are adding weight to the bar over time, but they'll never reach the newbie levels of muscle protein synthesis response again. And you also can only increase volume and intensity so much before you start running into problems, before you run into injuries and symptoms related to overtraining and burnout and so forth. Now, that's interesting, but what does it mean practically?

Starting point is 00:12:51 How big of a difference do newbie gains really make? Well, unfortunately, there isn't much scientific research available on newbie gains, so there isn't really a pat answer to that question. gains. So there isn't really a pat answer to that question. And additionally, what research we do have indicates that our ability to build muscle is highly variable. So for example, in a study that was conducted by scientists at Indiana University, 585 untrained men and women did simple biceps workouts with their non-dominant arms for 12 weeks. And the researchers recorded everyone's strength as well as their biceps size using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, before and after the 12-week study. Now, the result was that on average, everyone's biceps

Starting point is 00:13:38 grew about 19% and their biceps curl strength, their one rep max increased by about 54%. When you look into the data though, when you look at the individual data points, you get a much clearer picture of just how much the individual response to weightlifting can vary. So some people's biceps got slightly smaller during the study and one person's grew 60% larger. That's three times the average. And some people gained no strength to speak of. And one person though, increased their biceps curl one rep max by 250%. So while on average, everyone experienced a sharp and substantial uptick in their bicep size and strength in response to the new stimulus of resistance training. So this is the newbie Gains, there is quite a bit of expert opinion based on decades of in the trenches experience and anecdotal evidence. And two of those people are Lyle McDonald and Alan Aragon. So let's talk about Lyle's insights on Newbie

Starting point is 00:14:59 Gains first. If you're not familiar with Lyle, he is a writer, researcher, and the creator of bodycomposition.com, which is one of the best resources for evidence-based fitness knowledge on the interwebs. I've also had Lyle on my podcast a couple of times. And if you are interested in learning about fat loss for women, I believe that was the first interview we did and recovering from injuries better. That was the second. Just hit my podcast feed and search for Lyle. I think you're going to have to scroll back a bit because it's been, I mean, the fat loss for women was probably a couple of years ago and the injury interview was probably six months ago or so. Anyway, Lyle's estimate for how much muscle you can gain in your first year of proper lifting is about two pounds per month or 20 to 25 pounds for most guys.

Starting point is 00:15:50 But then in year two, it drops to about one pound per month or about 10 to 12 pounds for most guys. And again, for women, you can just cut the male numbers in half and they'll be relatively accurate. Third year of training, just five to six pounds of muscle or about a half a pound per month. And then fourth year and beyond is just two to three pounds of muscle per year or less, like where it's not even worth calculating on a monthly level. And Lyle's formula is based on his extensive reading of the literature and experience helping thousands of people improve their body composition, including high-level athletes and bodybuilders. So he has seen a lot. And why is that first year so explosive? Well, newbie gains, of course. And I should also mention that those numbers are

Starting point is 00:16:37 pounds of lean mass, not simply body weight, because you can find people online who claim to or even appear to gain 40 to 50 pounds of body weight in their first year, but that's not all muscle. Remember, there's body fat, there's water, there's glycogen, which are both stored in the muscles themselves. So when I'm saying that you can gain 20 to 25 pounds of muscle, and that's also what Lyle is saying, somewhere around 20 pounds of muscle in your first year of weightlifting. If you're a guy, remember that's true muscle mass. That is, if you were to start and end your first year at the same body fat percentage, you would have 20 to 25 pounds of steak added to everywhere around your body. All right. So now let's talk about Alan's thoughts on the matter. Alan Aragon,

Starting point is 00:17:24 who is a published researcher and fitness author and coach who's been around for about 20 years now in the game, designing diet and exercise programs for high-level athletes and bodybuilders. He also has a long running and popular research review. And based on what Alan has seen working with everyone from just everyday gym goers to Olympic athletes, most men can gain muscle at about 1% to 1.5% of their total body weight per month. And that's for the first year, that's the beginner, the newbie phase. And then as an intermediate, it's about a half of a percent to 1% of total body weight per month. And advanced, which is again, third or fourth year and beyond is about a quarter to a half percent of total body weight. And those numbers apply equally to men and women

Starting point is 00:18:12 because of course it's based on body weight and most women start out quite a bit lighter than most men when they get in the gym. And of course, women generally start out with a lot less muscle than most men, which is one of the major limiting factors as to why they can't gain nearly as much muscle and gain muscle as quickly as men. It's not so much hormones or other physiological factors, genetics. It's actually mostly the fact that they just start out with a lot less muscle and therefore are just not able to train as effectively as men, at least in the beginning. Another useful evidence-based model for calculating potential muscle gain is Dr. Casey Butt's frame size model, which revolves around the premise that the size of your skeleton mostly

Starting point is 00:19:00 determines how much muscle you can gain over your lifetime. And I know that sounds a bit simplistic, but it is supported by good evidence and in fact is likely the most accurate method we currently have for estimating our potential for whole body muscle gain. And if you want to learn about it, I recorded a podcast where I went into all the details along the lines of how much muscle you can gain naturally, I think was the title, something like that. If you just hit the podcast feed and search for naturally, you will find it. I also have an article on it over at legionathletics.com. So I won't go into all the particulars here because I don't want to get too sidetracked.

Starting point is 00:19:45 But the key takeaways for the purposes of our discussion here is the bigger your bones are, the more muscle you'll be able to gain. And you can determine how big your bones are. An easy way to do it is by measuring the circumference of your wrists and ankles. It's also worth noting that most people are going to gain up to or can gain up to about 50% of all the muscle they will ever gain in their first year. respond well to weightlifting and do the most important things mostly right most of the time, they can gain up to about half of the muscle they will ever gain in that first year. And again, that is the power of newbie gains. And to take that even a little bit further, the majority of the first year gains come actually in the first six months. So just to put some numbers to this, a guy with average genetics could expect to gain anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds of muscle in his first six months in the gym, and then another 5 to 10 pounds of muscle in the following six months. For a grand total of about 50% of the muscle he'll gain in his lifetime, regardless of how hard he trains or how disciplined he is with his diet and so forth.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for LifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. Now, if all of these numbers I've been sharing, these expectations, sound a little pessimistic for you and don't exactly line up with what you've seen on the gram, on the gram where there is no shortage of super jacked dudes who claim to have gained 30 to 40 pounds of pure muscle in their first year of training and who now many years later are still

Starting point is 00:22:13 adding considerable amounts of muscle each and every year. I understand, but their secret is not hashtag dedication or hashtag no days off. Hashtag my dad was a bodybuilder. No, their secret is drugs, a lot of drugs. That's how you get and stay freakishly big and lean and strong while continuing to add more and more muscle and strength. And if you want to learn more about that, you can find a podcast that I recorded on steroids and how effective they really are and side effects and so forth. Again, hit the podcast feed, search for steroids and you'll find it. You can also read articles I've written about steroids over at legionathletics.com. But I just want you to know that that's what you're looking at. And the same goes for guys

Starting point is 00:23:02 or gals who after several years of effective training, proper training, and gaining a lot of muscle and strength, who then suddenly experience a second wind of newbie gains. They suddenly just get big and strong fast. No, it's not the new diet. It's not the new training program. It's not the supplements. It's the hashtag dedication, program. It's not the supplements. It's the hashtag dedication, the 10 grams that they're injecting every week. So my point with this is don't indiscriminately base your expectations for muscle and strength gain on what you see online. Just follow the advice in this podcast and you will find it much easier to get and stay motivated to keep putting in the work, and much harder to fall prey to the fitness predators who would steal the pennies off of a dead man's eyes. All right, moving along, let's talk about why newbie gains eventually end. We know they can't

Starting point is 00:23:57 go on forever, but why not? Why do things slow down so considerably after the first year? Good questions. And to get at answers, let's review a concept known as the repeated bout effect. Now, this simple principle states that the more you do a certain kind of exercise, the more your body becomes accustomed to it and the less adaptation is stimulated by it. So in other words, as you accumulate more training experience, you get less and less muscle and strength gain per unit of training effort. And when you think about this through the lens of evolution, it makes sense. Muscle mass certainly would have helped our ancestors survive by making them more effective hunters, gatherers, and fighters. It is an expensive organ. It's metabolically expensive. It requires a lot of

Starting point is 00:24:52 protein. It requires a lot of nutrients and calories to maintain. And as our early human ancestors often had to endure severe food shortages, we most likely evolved to use energy, to use calories as efficiently as possible. Therefore, the body is designed to build just enough muscle as necessary to complete the tasks at hand and no more. And apparently, evolution has determined that for most purposes, we humans do not need more than, let's say, 30 to 50 pounds of additional muscle, which is about the limit of what most natural lifters can gain. So once you've gained your 30 pounds, that would probably be the upper limit for most women or 50 pounds upper limit for most men of muscle, you're going to have to work incredibly hard to convince your body to

Starting point is 00:25:46 build any more. So this is a matter of physiological ROI. The positives of building muscle are things like greater strength, performance, and so forth, and thus survivability. And the downsides are primarily the increased energy and nutritional needs. So when you're new to lifting, every pound of muscle you gain brings a lot more positives than negatives. It's a high ROI activity, so your body readily builds more. As you get more and more jacked though, the functional utility of every additional pound of muscle declines markedly, but the drawbacks remain the same. Hence, the ROI gets worse and the body becomes less and less willing to just continue building more. And that is why then, after your honeymoon phase has ended, the grind begins. And the best you can hope for

Starting point is 00:26:39 at that point is to just keep making small incremental improvements, small incremental increases in muscle and strength year after year. All right, now let's address a question that I'm asked fairly often about newbie gains, and that is if you can miss out on them. Some people believe that if you train and eat poorly during your first year of lifting, you're going to miss out on your newbie gains. They're gone for good. It's kind of like the training version of the anabolic window, right? And there's a kernel of truth there, but it's more wrong than right. If you do a lot wrong during your first year of lifting, like I did, by the way, then you are not going to gain as much muscle and strength as you should.

Starting point is 00:27:23 So for example, if you aren't eating enough calories or protein, or you aren't trying to add weight or reps to your lifts every time you step in the gym, or you're not sleeping enough, then you probably won't build as much muscle in your first year as the formulas I've shared in this podcast would predict. Now, some people continue to make these mistakes for months and even years and decades and forever. Some people never even realize they're of their ways. Some do though, and think it's too late because now they're in their thirties or in their forties. And while it's true that once you hit your thirties or your forties and beyond, you're not going to be able to train as hard or heavier often as when you were younger. And you're probably not going to gain muscle and strength as

Starting point is 00:28:12 quickly, but it's never too late to get into great shape. And nobody should let something as trivial as a bit less potential muscle and strength gain stop them from building a body that they can really be proud of. And yes, they will experience newbie gains to some degree. And again, I'm talking about the person who has been in the gym for a long time, doing a lot of things wrong and doesn't have much to show for it. So let's say it's a guy who's gained 10 or 15 pounds of muscle, period, since he started training, regardless of how long it has been. And now he's in his 30s or 40s and beyond, and he's going to start doing things correctly. He still will experience a bit of a quote-unquote newbie gains phenomenon, but it's not going to be as pronounced as it would have been if he would have

Starting point is 00:29:00 started correctly in his 20s. Okay, so let's say now that your newbie gains are over. Well, first, don't become discouraged. This whole muscle building thing does not have to begin to resemble trench warfare, you know, months of struggle to just advance a couple inches. You just need to change your perspective because where you once measured progress

Starting point is 00:29:23 in terms of pounds on the scale on the bar, you now need to think in grams. Not literally, but you get my point. What I'm saying is once you've made your way into the intermediate phase of weightlifting, second year to the fourth year, generally speaking, the rate of progress doesn't matter as much as simply making progress. And a good rule of thumb is, so long as you're getting stronger on your key lifts, so long as you are improving your whole body strength, you're moving in the right direction. And another important change you're going to have to make is your programming. Chances are what got you to the point of being intermediate lifter is not going to help you get much further.

Starting point is 00:30:09 Now, fortunately, it's not very complicated. It mostly comes down to working harder in the gym for less reward by doing more volume, which you can look at as more hard sets per major muscle group per week while still pushing for progressive overload. So you're still pushing to add weight to the bar over time. It just goes a lot slower or add weight to the dumbbells over time. You also need to become a bit of a stickler about your diet because when you're new, you can get away with grossly overeating when you're lean bulking. But as you become more experienced, all that does is make you fatter faster, which actually gets in the

Starting point is 00:30:45 way of your long-term muscle gain in a number of ways. And similarly, when you're new, you can get away with low calorie, very low calorie, even low protein dieting because you really don't have much muscle to lose and your body is so responsive to the training that you can just override the negative effects of not eating enough food, not eating enough protein. But as you become more advanced, it becomes harder to hold on to your hard-earned muscle when you are cutting, when you're restricting your calories for fat loss. And so you need to be more careful about how low you drop your calories and how much protein you're eating every day. So with those things in mind, I want to share with

Starting point is 00:31:25 you five tips to help you as you move out of your beginner phase. So the first tip is to maintain a moderate calorie surplus of about 10% when you're lean bulking. And this should allow you to gain about one half to 1% of your body weight per month, which is what you should be shooting for as an intermediate weightlifter. If you're not sure, by the way, how to calculate your calories, head over to Legion Athletics and search for TDEE, total daily energy expenditure. And you'll find an article I wrote on this that gives you a calculator to help you out. All right, my second tip is to eat about one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. And you can go a bit lower

Starting point is 00:32:05 than this, maybe around 0.8 grams per pound per day when you are lean bulking if you want to. But a gram per pound of body weight per day is just an easy number to think with. And it's more than enough to ensure you're getting all the benefits of a high protein diet. There's just really no need to eat more than that. Except for when you're an advanced weightlifter who has a lot of muscle and you're lean and you're wanting to get really lean, then an argument can be made for slightly more, maybe 1.2 grams per pound of body weight per day. But for the purposes of just an intermediate weightlifter, just keep your protein around one gram per pound of body weight per day. My next tip is to alternate between lean bulking and cutting

Starting point is 00:32:45 phases until you have gained the size that you want. Now, when you start out, as I had mentioned earlier, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time. You can recomp, but this becomes more and more difficult as you become a more experienced weightlifter and eventually it becomes impossible. And so what you should do instead is if you're a guy and you're over 15% body fat, cut down to about 10% before a lean bulking phase. And if you're a woman over 25% body fat, cut down to about 20% before you lean bulk. Then once you've reached your goal, your 10 or 20% body fat, maintain a moderate calorie surplus, the 10% until you reach about 15% or 25% body fat, men and women.

Starting point is 00:33:31 And then just repeat the process of gaining muscle and losing fat until you have reached the size that you want until you more or less have the physique that you want at your desired body fat percentage, which for most guys is about 10% and for most women is about 20%. Now, you might not be sure how to best determine your body fat percentage. And for that, I have a podcast that you can listen to. If you just search for percentage or body fat in the feed, you'll find it. And I also have an article over at Legion Athletics. If you search for body fat percentage, you will find it. All right. My fourth tip is to emphasize progressive overload in your training above all else. Now, what is progressive overload? Well, it refers to increasing the amount of tension in your

Starting point is 00:34:15 muscles over time, increasing the amount of tension they produce over time. And the most effective way to do that is to increase the amount of weight that you are lifting over time. So adding weight to the bar. So in this way, the key to gaining muscle and strength isn't muscle confusion or doing special exercises, bouncing on a BOSU ball or seeing how much you can sweat on everything all over the gym. It is making your muscles work harder and harder over time. And that is exactly what you do when you force them to handle heavier and heavier weights over time.

Starting point is 00:34:51 Okay, my fifth and final tip is one that I saved for last intentionally because it is less important than the others. And that is consider taking some supplements that increase muscle gain. And of course, supplements do not build great physiques. Dedication to proper training and nutrition does. And unfortunately, the workout supplement industry is plagued by pseudoscience, ridiculous hype, misleading advertising, ridiculous products full of junk ingredients, underdosing, and on and on. But there are safe natural substances that have been scientifically proven to deliver benefits such as increased strength, muscle endurance and growth, more fat loss, and so forth.

Starting point is 00:35:33 So the purpose is here. I just want to quickly tell you about a few that are going to help you build muscle and gain strength faster and are suitable for newbies as well. You don't have to be an intermediate or an advanced weightlifter to use them. The first one is creatine. Probably heard about that. It's a natural substance that's found in the body and foods like red meat, and it helps you gain muscle faster. It helps you gain strength faster. It improves anaerobic endurance. It reduces muscle damage and soreness after exercise. It's relatively inexpensive. It's safe. Five grams of creatine monohydrate per day is all you need. And that's also what you'll find in my post-workout supplement recharge, by the way, which you can head over to legionathletics.com if you want to check it out.

Starting point is 00:36:15 The next supplement that you should consider taking is protein powder, and not because protein powder inherently helps you gain muscle faster, but considering how much protein you need to eat to maximize muscle gain, protein powder definitely helps. Yes, you can do it from whole food only, but it gets a little bit impractical. And so protein supplements are a nice option. And personally, I take a plant protein supplement. I take my own. It's called Thrive. I take sometimes a casein just to mix it up. Simply not that casein is any better or any worse. It just has a different mouthfeel.

Starting point is 00:36:53 It has a different flavor profile. And also, of course, I'll use whey. I usually use whey before and after my workouts. And after my workouts, I'll take a scoop of whey before my workout, a scoop of whey after with a scoop of my plant protein, because I like the combination. And specifically, if you're wondering which whey I use, again, I use my own, it's called Whey Plus. Again, you can learn about my stuff over at legionathletics.com. And casein, I will sometimes use in the place of whey if I feel like it, really. And now casein also is particularly good for taking before you go to bed because it's a

Starting point is 00:37:30 slow digesting protein. And a number of studies have shown that if you have a serving of slow digesting protein before you go to bed, it can help with muscle gain over time. And that's not because sleeping is catabolic or that your body can't go for eight or nine hours or however long before your final meal and your next meal, you know, your final meal of the night and your first meal of the next day. That's not the case. But if your body doesn't have amino acids that you've provided with food, your body's muscle building machinery can't work. It just sits there idly waiting for your next feeding. So by having a slow burning protein that slowly over the course of, in the case of casein, over the course of four to six hours provides your body with those amino acids, your body is able to continue building muscle while you sleep. Now, casein is not your only option for that. My personal preference is Icelandic yogurt, skier, not because it's fancy or makes me sound fancy,

Starting point is 00:38:32 but because I like it more than Greek yogurt. But if you're not really a yogurt person, then casein is a good option. You can just have a scoop of casein before you go to bed and that's it. You're good to go. And as far as specific casein products go, I like Micellar casein. It is a type of casein. It's the highest quality casein and that's what I sell and use myself personally. And my product's called Casein Plus. And again, you can learn about it over at legionathletics.com. Okay. One other supplement that I recommend you consider is a pre-workout drink. And not only because it can get you fired up and get you kind of energized to do your workouts, because of course, any effective

Starting point is 00:39:13 pre-workout is going to have an effective dose of caffeine, but because if it is well-formulated, it can provide you with other things that can improve your workout performance and directly enhance your muscle gain, like citrulline, beta-alanine, betaine, and alpha-GPC, which you will find in my pre-workout supplement called Pulse. And I won't go into the details of each of those ingredients here, but in each case, they either enhance your workout performance, which means of course, the better you do in your workouts, the more progress you're going to make over time or directly enhance muscle gain. And again, it's called Pulse. You can learn about it over at legionathletics.com. All right. Well, that's a wrap on newbie gains. You now know

Starting point is 00:39:58 what to expect during your beginner phase. You know what mistakes to avoid. You know why newbie gains eventually end. And you know, broadly speaking, what to do in your intermediate phase, the major changes you have to make, the things you have to pay the most attention to, to keep making progress. And I hope I've also given you realistic and encouraging expectations in terms of what you can accomplish both as a beginner and beyond. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider checking out my VIP one-on-one coaching service where we can help you get in the best shape of your life. My team and I have helped people of all ages, circumstances, and needs. So no matter how complicated or maybe even hopeless you might

Starting point is 00:41:01 think your situation is, we will figure it out and we will get you results. Every diet and every training program is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements and other products and the list of benefits goes on and on. So to learn more, head over to www.legionathletics.com slash coaching. That's legionathletics.com slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call. I should also mention that there is usually a wait list and new slots do fill up very quickly. So do not wait. If this sounds even remotely interesting to you, go ahead and schedule your call now. Again, that URL is legionathletics.com slash coaching.

Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Everything You Should Know About Newbie Gains, According to Science

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