Maybe you’ve always been the skinny guy and can’t gain weight to save your life. Maybe you’re a bigger guy and you’d rather have broad shoulders than a broad waistline. Maybe you’re a female, and you’ve realized that lifting weights with the right diet will give you that “toned” look that everybody is after. Maybe you just want to be stronger and faster.
No matter who you are or what your starting point is, I want to help get you where you want to go.
Building muscle is something I’ve been obsessed with since high school (okay, not obsessed, but it’s where the majority of my fitness research and experience has taken me). I’m not where I want to be yet in terms of strength and size, but I’m well on my way and I’ve definitely had a little bit of success over the past few years. If you’re looking to start building muscle, getting bigger, and becoming stronger, these are the things you need to do:
Lift heavy things
Eat a diet based on your goals
Rest
We have an entire course (The Nerd Fitness Academy) with bosses, leveling systems, quests, workouts, and a supportive community that virtually holds your hand through your next 12-18 months, but I’ll dig into the important stuff below too.
Lift Heavy Things
If you are going to build muscle, you’re going to need to lift heavy things. This means you’ll need a gym with a great free-weight section. Body weight exercises can be fantastic for weight loss and keeping the muscle you already have, but if you’re serious about weight training you’ll need a gym with a squat rack, bench, barbells, and a spot to do pull ups, chin ups, and dips to be most efficient.
Got access to a decent gym? Good, now we can started.
Because we’re looking to create functional strength and size, we’ll be doing lots of full-body routines with compound exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once. They’re more efficient, they create solid growth and stimulation, and they will keep you safe. Why is that?
Well, when you spend all of your time doing stupid isolation exercises on weight machines (ugh), you’re only working those specific muscles and not working any of your stabilizer muscles (because the machine is doing all of the stabilization work). On the other hand, when you do compound exercises like barbell squats, you work pretty much EVERY muscle in your body, setting yourself up to be strong and injury free.