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How Long Do You Build Muscle After Working Out?
When you lift weights, you stimulate muscle growth. How long after your workout does that stimulus last? And how long does it take for your muscles and tendons to recover? If you can balance those two factors, you’ll know how often to train each muscle.
This is especially important if you’re bulking. You need to make sure your body is primed for muscle growth before you shovel down all those extra calories.
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How to Do Giant Sets
Giant sets are one of the best methods for gaining both muscle size and strength. They aren’t better than straight sets or supersets, but they are more efficient, allowing you to stimulate more muscle growth in a given amount of time.
Giant sets are also great for your overall health and conditioning. Because you aren’t resting very long between each set, your cardiovascular system is getting a hearty workout, too. And because each individual muscle is still getting plenty of rest before being worked again, giant sets are still great for gaining muscle size and strength.
So, what are giant sets? And what’s the best way to program them?
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How to Gain Weight With A Fast Metabolism
Skinny people often have a few traits dragging their weight down: thin bones, narrow frames, small stomachs, meagre appetites, and fast metabolisms. In this article, we’ll focus on that very last piece of the puzzle: how to gain weight with a raging metabolism. This is something we know all too well. I’ve lived it. So have Marco and Cassandra. And so have the 10,000 clients we’ve coached through it.
It’s not quite as simple as people often assume, though. Your trouble gaining weight probably has less to do with having a “fast” metabolism and more to do with having an “adaptive” metabolism. As in, the more food you eat, the more your metabolism revs up, and the more calories you burn. This is what the term “hardgainer” refers to. I think it’s also why some skinny people are dubbed “non-responders” when they first start lifting weights.
So, how can you gain muscle, strength, and weight with a fast metabolism? Let’s dive in.
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What’s Progressive Overload & How Should You Do It?
Progressive overload is one of the foundational principles of both strength training and hypertrophy training. When you lift a challenging amount of weight, you provoke muscle growth, making your muscles stronger. To continue challenging your growing muscles, you’ll need to lift gradually heavier weights.
- To get stronger, lift more weight.
- To lift more weight, get stronger.
It’s one of those chicken-and-egg riddles, but both chicken and eggs are good for building muscle, so that’s perfectly fine. Speaking of which, you also need to progressively overload your calories to continue building muscle.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to use progressive overload to stimulate muscle growth with your workouts and fuel muscle growth with your diet.
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Muscle Size vs Strength: Is Gaining Muscle Mass Good for Gaining Strength?
Many people start weight training because they want to improve their appearance. They focus on building bigger muscles. Hypertrophy training. Bodybuilding. And that’s great. Building bigger muscles can make us look bigger, stronger, and healthier.
But how well does that extra muscle size translate to our strength? What if we follow a bodybuilding routine that’s designed purely to build muscle mass? Will that make us strong? Or will it make us big but weak?
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Is High-Intensity Training (HIT) Good for Building Muscle?
High-intensity training (HIT) proposes that we can gain muscle size and strength faster and more efficiently if we keep our workouts short, infrequent, and brutally intense. It’s not the most popular way to build muscle, but it’s had a loyal following for the past 50 years and shows no signs of giving up.
During these past 50 years, though, thousands of muscle-building studies have been published, and many of them have looked into the principles that define HIT. So, how many sets should we do per exercise? How often should we be training? Should we lift to failure?
Most of all, is HIT good for building muscle?
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How to Build Bigger Biceps
Our biceps aren’t big muscles. They’re a mere fraction of the size of our quads, glutes, shoulders, and chests. But they’re disproportionately prominent. Building bigger biceps can make us look much stronger. And with good reason. Our biceps play a large role in our general strength.
There’s an old strength training adage, though, telling us that all we need to build bigger biceps is to get stronger at compound lifts—at chin-ups and rows. That’s not quite the case, and perhaps that’s why most people’s biceps lag behind. We don’t train them directly enough, hard enough, or often enough.
So, what’s the best way to build bigger biceps?
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How Sedentariness Affects Muscle Growth & Fat Loss (Even for People Who Exercise)
It’s fairly well established that if you spend most of your time being sedentary (aka sitting), then you’ll burn fewer calories, and you may find yourself getting out of shape, gaining weight, and losing muscle over time. Perhaps that’s why so many people who work desk jobs complain of being “skinny-fat.”
The solution to sedentariness is typically thought to be doing exercise, and that’s true. Exercise is the best way to specifically address these issues:
- The best way to improve your cardiovascular fitness is to do cardio.
- The best ways to gain/maintain muscle are to lift weights or do callisthenics.
The other obvious piece to this puzzle is getting your calorie intake right. If you’re eating more calories than you’re burning, you’ll gain weight. Or, if you’re eating fewer calories than you’re burning, you’ll lose weight.
- Lifting weights while eating in a calorie surplus (bulking) is the best way to gain muscle.
- Lifting weights while eating in a calorie deficit (cutting) is the best way to lose fat while maintaining your muscle.
So you might imagine that by doing cardio, lifting weights, and keeping your calories under control, you can maintain good health and body composition. And that’s true. But even when we control for all of that, sedentariness is still a factor.
Even for people who regularly exercise, eat well, and eat the correct amount, spending too much time sitting still has a negative impact on our body composition.
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The P-Ratio: How Body-Fat Percentage Affects Muscle Growth & Fat Gain
There’s a common rule of thumb that we should get lean before we bulk, and then stop bulking once we reach around 20% body fat. The idea is that as we get leaner, our insulin sensitivity improves, allowing us to make leaner muscle gains. And then as we bulk up, our body fat percentage gradually rises, our insulin sensitivity falls, and we begin to gain proportionally more fat.
But new evidence calls this idea into question. Two researchers, Greg Nuckols, MA, and Eric Trexler, PhD, have been conducting hypertrophy research to see which body-fat percentages tend to yield the leanest muscle growth. I spoke with them, and they shared their early results and recommendations, which are already creating waves among the top experts.
So, does having a higher body fat percentage make it harder to build muscle leanly?
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The Best Barbell Exercises for Building Muscle
The best barbell exercises, without a doubt, are the 5 big compound lifts: the squat, bench press, deadlift, overhead press, and chin-up. These exercises will give you around 2/3rds of your overall muscle growth. In fact, you could build a muscular physique by getting strong at just these 5 exercises.
However, the big barbell exercises aren’t good at everything. They’re great for building muscle in our torsos but relatively poor for building muscle in our limbs. The bench press can work all the muscle fibres in your chest but only some of the muscle heads in your triceps. Chin-ups can work all the big pulling muscles in your back but only some of the muscle heads in your biceps. That’s why we need smaller barbell exercises to train our smaller muscles.
If we combine the big barbell exercises with the smaller ones, you can fully develop every muscle in your body. Here’s how to do that.
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