Have you been a scrawny git your whole life? Or just never looked like anything special, with a bunch of chub? Perhaps you were athletic when you were younger but it faded away? Well look no further, ‘cuz this is the bite-sized post to get you all strong and handsome.
Heh. Bite-sized. Fitting, as that’s what we’re gonna talk about first.
Something that irks me to no end is comics about fit people eating some tiny salad or a barebones sandwich. While that’s probably a decent crash diet for someone who just wants to shed fat, it’s absolutely awful for building muscle. Get that picture out of your head right now. Calisthenics and weightlifting inflicts low level damage to your muscles, but without the necessary feedstock for your body’s over-repair mechanisms, you’ll stay scrawny.
You may have heard of the term “bulking” thrown around. Essentially, you eat an excess of calories of whatever your body is using up. Don’t reach for the half-gallon tub of vanilla ice just yet though. You also need to make sure you’re getting a fair bit of protein, more precisely, about a gram of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. So if you’re 150 lbs with a bit of pudge, that’d be roughly 110-120g protein per day. Your new best friends are Eggs, Milk, Rice, Meat and Cheese. Just make sure you hang out with Rice the same day as the others, or else your porcelain throne will never be white again.
“But wait,” I hear you say, “won’t eating more calories than I burn make me fat?” Well, yes. It’s a necessary part of building muscle quickly. This segues neatly to the next part, cutting.
Not the severely depressed kind, though I suspect after months of blissful bulking you won’t be particularly happy about it. Y’see, what you want to do is improve yourself in stealth mode, and then in the months running up to summer when you wanna show off your sweet bod, you go on a keto diet.
The keto diet is the weightlifter’s secret weapon. How it works is, you start to eat just enough to cover your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). If you’re not sure what yours is, just Google ‘TDEE calculator’. Don’t forget to keep up your protein intake, but eviscerate as many carbohydrates from your diet as possible, aiming for under 25g a day. What this does is, your body goes into a particular kind of starvation mode, where it switches from burning carbs to ketones. The ketone energy source is produced by your body breaking down fat reserves. Those dudes you see going for bodybuilding competitions? They had pudgy guts just a couple months ago, but they went on a keto diet and their body just ate up all the fat.
If this is your first time counting calories and macros and you’re a bit lost on how to plan your meals, I heartily recommend eatthismuch.com. I used it a lot early on, and I was surprised at how few calories I was eating. Thanks to that site I figured out how to fix that issue.
Moving on…
Before I say anything else, I gotta drill one thing in your head: Form. Never compromise on your exercise form. Don’t get cocky and try to lift more weight than usual while compromising on your form. Imagine the muted sound of one of your bones snapping. Traumatized yet? Good.
If you’re looking for a good set of videos showing you how to do exercises correctly, searching up Mark Rippetoe is a good first stop. For bodyweight exercises I’ve found that Antranik and Global Bodyweight Training on YouTube are decent too.
For someone starting out with weights, you’ll want something simple. A routine like Stronglifts 5x5 or Reg Park’s beginner routine alongside a solid diet will have you gaining muscle very rapidly, and you’ll get go from skinnyfat to ottermode in just a few months (assuming you don’t keep missing days). General rule of thumb is do a bunch of sets of various exercises one day, then have a rest day while your body’s repair mechanisms kick in, and then get back at it the next day with a different repertoire of exercises. A days, B days, X rest days, and on some routines, C days.
But if you’re not much of a fan of going to a gym or just don’t have the spare dosh for it, then bodyweight exercises are an excellent way of getting ripped too. What you shouldn’t do, is follow Patrick Bateman’s lead and just keep increasing the amount of reps. That’s great for endurance, but for building muscle volume (hypertrophy) you want to do about 12 reps a set, and once that becomes easy for whatever exercise you’re doing, you move up to the next hardest version. For example, going from push-ups to decline push-ups. If you’re the reading type, I strongly recommend Convict Conditioning, a book written for, well, prisoners that don’t have access to equipment but wanna get strong.
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“I’m a chick and I want to get fit, but I don’t want to look like Zarya. Should I still follow this guide?”
Absolutely. You’d need to work on progressively increasing your weight and your food intake for quite a few years in order to look like an Olympic weightlifter, so don’t worry about it. You can get an excellent squat butt with this routine and keep yer womanly curves. The only change I would recommend is to eat slightly less in the calories department unless you do a lot of cardio like cycling or whatever.
“A few years ago I tried lifting for like a year and I made almost no gains, am I doomed?”
No, unless you’re diagnosed with some muscle-wasting disorder the problem is almost certainly not your genetics conspiring to keep you scrawny. Almost invariably the issue is diet. People think they eat a lot more than they do, or their diet is wildly inconsistent from day to day. Try eating 2800 kcal daily while exercising regularly, do that for a month, and I guarantee you will see results.
“Do I need to snort ten pounds of steroids in order to get as buff as my bara porn comics?”
No, but it will require years of consistent diligence with your exercise and diet. You will have built up like 85% of your max natural muscle mass within two years, and it takes progressively longer to lift that extra 10 lbs as you go on. But trust me, after two years your bod would be so fine that it’d give those blushing bara porn artists massive nosebleeds. A PSA on this too, don’t go for steroids regardless. Fucking with your hormones is bad news for your health.
“Can I mix up bodyweight and weightlifting exercises in my routine?”
Sure can. I have a bit of a screwy back so I do Ab Ripper X instead of deadlifts. Works a treat.
“It’s hard keeping to this schedule. Do I need to stick to it?”
Red here, this is my first post. Hope it was informative. Stay tuned for Blue’s upcoming post.
Now go out there and blind the haters with your burgeoning sculpted radiance.
Happy lifting!
