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How to Build Muscle—Full Guide
To build muscle, you need to do 3 things: challenge your muscles enough to stimulate growth, eat enough food to fuel that growth, and then recover.
We’ve helped over 10,000 people bulk up over the past 10 years, ranging from everyday people all the way up to college, professional, and Olympic athletes. This is what we live and breathe, all day, every day. It works every time, guaranteed.
But there’s nuance here. Some types of resistance training are better for stimulating muscle growth than others. Some types of food can help you make faster, leaner gains. And you don’t want to eat so much that you get fat.
So, how should you train, eat, and rest to build muscle?
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The 5 Best Upper Chest Exercises (Dumbbell, Barbell & Machine)
The best upper chest exercises are the incline bench press, incline fly, landmine press, chest press machine, and feet-raised push-ups. If you have dumbbells, do an incline dumbbell bench press and incline fly. If you have a barbell, do the incline bench press. If you’re training at a full gym, try the chest press machine.
The research on upper chest exercises is pretty shaky—I’ll cover it in a moment—but pressing on an incline is almost certainly the best way to emphasize your upper chest. The most popular example of that is the incline bench press. Bodybuilders swear by it. Most experts agree with them.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each exercise, along with a tutorial video showing you how to do them.
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What Muscles Does the Incline Bench Press Work?
The incline bench press works the upper chest, front delts, mid-chest, and triceps. You can emphasize your upper and mid-chest muscles by using a shallower incline (e.g. 30 degrees). You can shift more of the work to your front delts by using a steeper incline (e.g. 45 degrees).
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How Long Does a Muscle Pump Last? What About Swelling?
A muscle pump looks impressive for about 30 minutes, then quickly fades over the next 1–3 hours. I surveyed 400 people to double-check. 61% said their pump lasted less than an hour. Only 2% said they could notice a pump two hours later.
But there were also quite a few people who said their pump lasted for 2–3 days. That’s something slightly different. There’s a second effect that keeps your muscles swollen for much, much longer. It explains an interesting lifting myth, too.
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How Many Exercises Should You Do Per Muscle Group?
Doing 2–3 different exercises per muscle group gives you more balanced muscle growth and a lower risk of injury (systematic review). It’s one of the more important parts of building a good workout routine. The catch is that the exercise combinations need to complement one another, which means you either need to learn some biomechanics… or read this article.
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The Best Dumbbell Exercises for Every Muscle
You can build an entire workout routine out of just dumbbell exercises. There’s no real disadvantage to it, either. Dumbbell exercises are almost always just as effective as barbell, cable, and machine exercises. Often, the dumbbell variation is the best.
I broke down the exercises by body part, giving you the best dumbbell exercises for each muscle group. A fully balanced workout routine would have 1–2 exercises from each category, with those exercises spread out over two, three, or four workout days. If you’re new to lifting weights, I recommend starting with a 2–3 day full-body workout routine.
We’ve got a tutorial for every single exercise. Marco does most of them. He’s a strength coach with over 15 years of experience training college, professional, and Olympic athletes. I made a few tutorial videos, too.
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How Many Exercises Should You Do Per Workout?
You should probably do 4–7 exercises per workout, depending on your workout split, experience level, and goals. You need a balanced mix of exercises that target all of the muscles you’re trying to grow, and then you need to split them up over your workouts, ideally training each muscle 2–3 times per week with 10–20 total sets.
- 2–3 full-body workouts: You probably want a squat, hip hinge, press, pull, and a couple of isolation exercises, giving you 4–7 exercises per workout.
- 4-day upper/lower split: The upper-body workout should have at least one pressing and pulling exercise and a couple of isolation exercises, giving you 3–6 exercises per workout.
- 5–6 day splits: You’ve got enough training days that you don’t need very many exercises per workout. Doing 3–5 exercises is plenty.
As a beginner, it helps to do more exercises per workout. You don’t need that many sets per exercise, the weights aren’t heavy enough to be very fatiguing, and you won’t need to rest very long between sets.
If you’re maintaining or cutting, you won’t build much muscle, so you might want to do fewer exercises. You still need to do your compound exercises, but you don’t need as many isolation exercises, and you don’t need as much exercise variety.
If you’re bulking or recomping, you can stimulate more muscle growth by doing more. Instead of doing just one pressing exercise, you might want one exercise for your lower chest, another for your upper chest and shoulders, and then add some triceps extensions.
We’ll go through it step by step, and then I’ll give you some workout routines to try.
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What is Training Volume?
With weight training, training volume is how many hard sets you do per muscle per week. For example, if you do 5 sets of bench presses, 5 sets of push-ups, and 5 sets on the pec deck machine, that’s a weekly training volume of 15 sets for your chest.
The idea of counting hard sets comes from Nathan Jones, and it was popularized by Greg Nuckols in an article on Stronger by Science. It gives you a way to quickly tally up your weekly training volume, and it correlates extremely strongly with muscle growth, making it perfect for building muscle. The definition caught on with bodybuilders and became standard. You’ll even find it in the newer training volume studies (study, study).
If you go digging through older research, you’ll find a second definition: how many pounds you lift per movement pattern per week (sets × reps × weight). For example, if you bench 225 pounds for 5 sets, that’s a training volume of 1,250 pounds. That can be helpful to track sometimes, but it isn’t very good for tracking how much muscle growth you’re stimulating. It’s really useful when trying to figure out how many reps you should do per set, though.
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Are Deadlifts a Back or Leg Exercise? Where Do You Put Them?
Deadlifts work both your legs and back, emphasizing your glutes, hamstrings, lower back, and traps. The muscles in your legs lift the weight, and the muscles in your back stabilize your posture. Both get worked hard enough to stimulate muscle growth.
If you have a long torso, your back will be harder to stabilize, and you might find yourself limited by the strength of your lower back. In that case, deadlifts can stimulate more muscle growth in your lower back than in your legs. You can shift the emphasis back to your legs by switching from conventional deadlifts to sumo or Romanian deadlifts.
If you have a short torso, your back might be fairly easy to stabilize, so the deadlift becomes much more of a leg exercise. Your traps will still need to work quite hard, though. It’s still a great back exercise. You can make it even more of a back exercise by doing snatch-grip or deficit deadlifts.
Let’s talk about where to put the deadlift.
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How to Build a V-Taper Physique (Ideal Shoulder-to-Waist Ratio)
Most research shows that a v-taper body shape is attractive to women, looks impressive to other men, and feels nice to have (full explanation). I’ve confirmed that by surveying thousands of men and women, almost all of whom prefer body shapes that are athletic, muscular, and lean (survey 1, survey 2, survey 3).
Most studies compare the chest measurement against the waist measurement (chest-to-waist ratio). Some studies include the shoulders (shoulder-to-waist ratio). Both mean the same thing. They both show that you’re muscular and lean (study). That seems to be what’s driving the effect. That leads to a common mistake, which I’ll cover in a second.
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How Much Can the Average Man Lift?
How much can the average man lift? There are a few studies we can look at. I also surveyed 600 of our newsletter subscribers, asking them how much they could squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press.
Then, I broke down their answers based on how long they’d been lifting, seeing how long it takes people to reach a given level of strength, and noting where they plateau forever.
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