We got a comment last week on one of our clients. This client said he gained 7kg of muscle in 3 months, something that isn’t impossible but is at the upper end of the clients we’ve trained. The commenter seemed to not believe that our client could do this and said even advanced people can’t do that. My answer would be, of course – they can’t do it because they’re already advanced.
Here’s how we get those kinds of results:
1. maximize beginner gains. Beginners can make the fastest progress out of anyone simply because they haven’t trained before. We get a lot of beginners because we TEACH people how to work out and Formosa Fitness has become known as a place to learn this stuff. Trained properly, beginner’s muscles can respond very fast and they can gain muscle weight rapidly. More advanced people struggle with that because most of the easy gains have already been made.
2. We use whole body lifts instead of isolation exercises. Beginners need whole body lifts, not tons of isolation exercises. Bodybuilders used to know this stuff. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, whole body routines were done 3 days a week, often for 2-3 hours a day. But modern bodybuilders switched to a ton of isolation exercises as the sport got more professional. The problem is, beginners don’t do well with isolation because they haven’t built up the whole body yet. Whole body exercises build muscle all over body instead of breaking the body into pieces. Isolation work often skips important stabilizing muscles in between the isolation exercises.
3. We emphasize leg training. Gaining muscle weight quickly isn’t hard to do when you heavily train the biggest muscles in the body – the hamstrings, glutes, quads, and the back. I trained in mainstream gyms for many years. What does your typical guy looking for muscle gain do? Bench press, bicep curls, and front raises. These muscles are all tiny compared to the hamstrings, glutes, etc. Being completely ignored by most people, these muscles groups respond very quickly to training and since they’re the biggest muscles on the body, they gain size rapidly.
4. Training legs and the whole body causes the entire body to grow through increased protein synthesis. It creates an anabolic environment. When guys want bigger arms, I ask them about their deadlift. That surprises them, but if you want the body to grow, then you have to force it to do so. Training large muscle groups forces the body to improve protein synthesis (your ability to digest and absord protein), which benefits all the muscles of the body. Training biceps doesn’t force the entire body to change since the muscles are so small that the body doesn’t have to improve protein synthesis.
5. We stress eating protein and fat, which goes against what nearly everyone else says to do. If you want to stay skinny and look like everyone else, then keep doing what they do. If you want to be better than that, then stop listening to them! Nearly every guy that wants muscle is not eating enough protein and fat. Some of our clients struggle with this too, but after training correctly but eating inccorectly for a while, they usually agree to try it our way and then the gains come. But in order to get the gains, you have to turn off the normal fitness chatter. That’s hard to do for some people.
Once all these elements are in place, rapid muscle gain isn’t hard to achieve. This isn’t the only way to train but we’ve found it works pretty fast for most of our clients and the results speak for themselves.