The 3 Non-Negotiables of Building Muscle
I’ve had this same conversation with 4 people in the past 2 days. It must be the time of year where people realize there are only 2 months left in 2024 and their body composition isn’t much different than it was at the start of the year. Even though they have been consistently strength training 2-3 days per week all year. And i’ve told them all the same thing “training properly is one part of the equation, the other part is fueling properly, and the foundation supporting it all is consistency.” Here are the Three Non-Negotiables of Building Muscle:
Provide adequate stress and rest.
Eat Enough Calories
Eat Enough Protein
*And do it with ruthless consistency (more on this topic in a full article soon)
Adequate Stress & Rest
Your muscles need to be given a reason to repair, rebuild, and grow. They need to be stressed. By “adequate” I mean enough stress to encourage that process, you should feel a little sore the next day or two, but it shouldn’t be debilitating. They then need to be given adequate rest in order to repair, rebuild, and grow. The “adequate” amount is different for everyone, mainly depending on training experience and other stress you are accumulating in life.
Since the amount of total training volume needed to elicit muscle growth is different by person, lets focus on the quality of your training session. Hypertrophy occurs when we train at or near failure in the 6-15 rep range or a time under tension of 40-70 seconds. Yes there are studies to support hypertrophy outside these general rep and time ranges, but the vast majority of humans will make plenty of progress staying in those ranges. So if you are doing a dumbbell bench press and you stop at 12 reps, but failure would have been 18 then you aren’t working close enough to failure to elicit the stress to encourage muscle growth. If in the next set you bumped up 10 pounds, stopped at 12 with failure being at 14, then you nailed the stress range just about right. You want to train each set within 1-3 reps of failure and occasionally going to complete failure (with a spotter present).
In order to give the body time to repair, rebuild, and grow you’ll want to wait roughly 48-72 hours before stressing those muscles in the same way. Newer athletes may recover quicker with more experience athletes needing longer to recover based on the amount of volume they were able to handle.
If you have been training in way that is providing adequate stress and rest with consistency (6+months), but still not seeing results then its’ time to take a closer look at your nutrition.
Eat Enough Calories
Building muscle is an expensive process, metabolically speaking. While it doesn’t require a calorie surplus to build muscle, it is easier to build muscle when you are in a surplus.. If you are in a caloric deficit your body is less likely to use its precious energy reserves to build muscle. So you need to eat enough to encourage the body to repair, rebuild, and grow muscle. “Enough” is different for everyone. Your caloric needs depend on your body composition, your activity level, age, and a number of other potential factors. With my athletes I used body composition to set their calorie goals, but here is a simple calculation that can get you pretty close if you are training 4-6 days per week: Current Body Weight x 15 = Starting Calorie Surplus. Or if you know your maintainence calories then 5-10% above that should be all you need to encourage muscle growth.
Now look back on your past week. Can you say you consistently (at least 6 out of 7 days) hit that number. How about in the last 4 weeks (at least 24 days) ? If you’re not sure then it might be time to start tracking or setting a meal plan that makes it easy to know how much you are eating every day.
Eat Enough Protein
Eating in a surplus and getting enough protein usually go hand in hand. You are usually doing both or neither. Protein is the building block of muscle, if you’re not getting enough then its going to be harder to repair, rebuild, and grown more muscle. How much should you be eating? Scientific recommendation range from 1.6 - 2.4 grams per kilograms of bodyweight. I’m currently in a hypertrophy phase and hitting the upper range of those recommendations. I started at 196 pounds, so I hit around 200 grams of protein per day (+/- 10g). With all my athletes we aim for a minimum number of grams that is equal to their lean body mass. And when we are in a muscle building focused phase we will up that number to support the increased demands.
Those are the 3 non-negotiables. You need to train CONSISTENTLY with enough volume and intensity, and have that work be supported with enough calories and protein to encourage muscle growth. Looking for help on how to do all 3 consistently? Shoot me an email: alex@evergreen-performance.com. Always happy to help!
Cheers - Al