Have you ever wondered how some people at the gym get so massive? It’s pretty easy when you know how, and it all falls down to 4 simple key mass building essentials.
#1 Eat Like an Animal.
If you want to get big, you’re going to have to eat big. Waking up to a small bowl of cornflakes won’t do anything.
A typical breakfast for me is 4 scrambled eggs, 1 protein shake, a banana and a big bowl of porridge washed down with a large glass of water.
By consuming more calories than your body naturally burns, and lifting hard – your body uses those additional calories and nutrients to rebuild the torn muscle fibers which occur when lifting heavy weights.
This doesn’t mean you can excuse yourself and go rushing off to McDonalds. No, you want good clean calories like those found in basic, down to earth type foods; for example:
Potatoes, Brown Rice, Oatmeal are all great examples of quality carbohydrates with very little sugar and fat.
#2 Train like an Animal
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Rome certainly wasn’t built in 10 years by people sitting around doing nothing.
This mentality also applies to the gym. When you get to the gym you want to hit it hard, train sensibly, but hard.
No one ever got big by lifting small weights, and the only way you’re going to grow is by challenging your body to lift heavy weights.
This doesn’t mean I want you to go and recklessly grab the 80lb dumbbells and start bench pressing. No, you need to focus on good clean reps with strict, safe lifting form to hit that “muscle building zone” you achieve when lifting weights which push you physically, but at the same time you feel comfortable doing.
#3 Get the right supplements!
Look through any bodybuilding or fitness magazine and you’ll see dozens of different supplements all promising you the perfect physic in just a few weeks.
Unfortunately (and thankfully at the same time) it isn’t that easy. Many of the bodybuilding supplements you’ll see in magazines can be a huge waste of money, and just variations of some of the other supplements a few pages back.
The most important supplement when it comes to building muscle mass is protein.
Your target should be to get most of your daily protein intake from protein rich foods such as steak, tuna, chicken, fish and eggs; and what protein you can’t get from foods needs to be made up with supplements.
When it comes to packing on mass, you should be aiming to ingest roughly 1 to 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight each day.
So if you’re 150lbs, then you should be aiming for at least 150 grams of protein, but ideally you want to consume about 300 grams of protein a day.
When it comes to which protein supplement to spend your hard earned money on, any sensible person should tell you to get some Whey Protein.
There are many reasons for this, first of all; Whey Protein is the best form of protein around (a close second is egg protein), it is absorbed extremely fast by the body, and is also the richest known source of naturally occurring branched chain amino acids (building blocks of muscle).
We’ll go into more depth on Whey Protein in later articles, but let’s move onto the final muscle mass building tip, number 4.
#4 Sleep like an animal!
Don’t every underestimate the importance of sleep when it comes to gaining mass. After living heavy in the gym, your body needs time to heal and repair the torn muscle fibres, making them bigger and stronger. Most of your body’s healing and growth occurs when you’re sleeping.
They say the average person needs roughly 8 hours sleep, but the average person isn’t a bodybuilding, and certainly isn’t interested in getting huge – so I would highly recommend more than 8 hours sleep if you can.
#5 Join a Bodybuilding Focused Community
An often overlooked part of bodybuilding is staying motivated throughout weeks, months and years of training, it’s important to keep that motivation and enthusiasm growing in order to keep consistency in your training.
This is why joining a community such as a bodybuilding forum is such a good idea, as talking to fellow bodybuilding enthusiasts keeps you motivated and keen to acheive new goals. What’s more, whenever you hit a plateu in your training and gains, you will have plenty of help available to you in order to continue your journey.
Conclusion
And there we have it, the top 4 most important tips on gaining mass and getting big.
Whilst we’ve only skimmed over the surface (we’ll look at some of the above in greater depth soon in another bodybuilding lair article), the above 4 bodybuilding tips are the most important factors in packing on mass no matter whether you’re new to the gym, or have been training for more years than you care to remember.
On closing, i’ll leave you with one of my all time faverioute quotes from the man himself:
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
