Next Level Human

Building Muscle: The Art and Science of Training for Hypertrophy- Ep. 252

Jade Teta Episode 252

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Unlock the secrets to a stronger, healthier you as we unveil the transformative power of muscle building. With decades of wisdom at your disposal, you'll be equipped to revolutionize your physical health and embrace the multifaceted benefits of well-sculpted muscles. Beyond mere aesthetics, muscles serve as vital endocrine organs, dispatching myokines that wage war on inflammation. Spanning from gym rookies to seasoned lifters, this episode promises a trove of practical strategies honed over 40 years to sculpt and sustain muscle growth.

Step into the gym with confidence as we dissect the nuts and bolts of effective training. I'll guide you through the trifecta of hypertrophy—mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage—and how they underpin mighty muscle gains. Tailored advice for crafting your routine and the pivotal role of rest and nutrition, with a special mention of creatine's dual benefits for brawn and brain, will arm you with the knowledge to build strength and enhance cognitive function. Our conversation is laden with actionable insights that will elevate your workout game, whether you're grasping a barbell for the first time or seeking to refine your regimen.

As we wrap up our muscle mastery session, I'll walk you through the oft-overlooked principle that sometimes, restraint in the gym is the key to unlocking true growth. We dissect why breathless, breakneck workouts aren't the golden ticket to bulking up, and how embracing heavier, burn-inducing routines with ample rest can propel you toward your goals. Thank you for joining me on this expedition, where the science of exercise meets the art of effective workout design, and together, we pave the way for a stronger, more vibrant existence.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the show everybody. It's Dr Jay Teter here. I'm your host of the Next Level Human Podcast, today's episode. We're gonna stick with the theme over the last couple episodes since the new year, which has been exercise, and I've been highlighting for you my brand new programs Metabolic Male and Metabolic Female. These are metabolic conditioning workouts. These are follow along workouts. They are essentially done with minimal equipment and designed to be done very fast, very conveniently, with nothing but a set of dumbbells in the comfort of your own home, and so I covered those workouts in the last two episodes.

Speaker 1:

This episode we're going to speak to those who are the gym rats, the people who like to go to a gym, the people who are not exercising at home and the people who are a little bit more advanced, and we're also gonna talk about this specifically from the angle of muscle building how to build muscle, what goes into this, what you need to be looking at and how you want to be programming your workouts or probably not programming so much as the tools and techniques and things that research actually shows us as most effective. And, of course, I've got since the age of 11 years old I'm now 50, I've got almost 40 years in basically 40 years in working out to try to build muscle, and I've been able to do that effectively. So I am 5'10, I'm about 220 pounds in my lean body mass, although I have some fat to lose, that is for sure. My lean body mass is close to 180 pounds even at 50 years old, so I have been able to pack on muscle. I do believe, genetically speaking, I am someone who gets fat easily and gets very muscular very easily. But even at 50, it's been something that has been definitely in my wheelhouse and so it's gonna be. This episode is gonna be a little bit of my personal experience, a little bit of research, and we just are gonna take on this idea of what it takes to build muscle and designing workouts to build muscle.

Speaker 1:

Now let's start with the idea of why would we even want to build muscle? Why would you want to focus on muscle building rather than, say, a cardio, respiratory fitness or fat burning and those kinds of things? Why would it be beneficial to just focus on building muscle? Well, the reason why is because muscle tissue is our most biologically active tissue. It is the part of our body that contributes most to our resting energy expenditure and, of course, when we move muscle, that's when it really has its beneficial effects.

Speaker 1:

And muscle, of course, is an endocrine organ. It releases myokines. These are cellular signaling molecules that have some cross talk between the immune system and the adipose tissue and the brain, et cetera. For example these compounds, the immune system uses them. We call them cytokines. Many of these compounds have cross talk with the adipose tissue, which also releases signaling molecules. We call those adipokines and of course, the ones that are released from the muscle we call myokines. So the muscle is an endocrine organ. So the more of that you have, the more you can secrete some of these compounds, things like IL-6, which is, if you're very savvy, this is a cytokine and a myokine and an adipokine. So all of these tissues release this compound and it's largely been viewed as an inflammatory compound.

Speaker 1:

But what we know is that under the conditions of exercise, il-6 actually tends to be anti-inflammatory because it comes along with IL-6, unopposed by TNF-alpha and IL-1, which are other inflammatory cytokines. With exercise, it seems, il-6 is released by itself in very high quantities, which triggers an anti-inflammatory chemical called IL-10. So that's just for you biochemical nerds, because oftentimes when people hear IL-6, they go well, that's an inflammatory compound. Not in the context of exercise. So muscle releases IL-6,. Muscle releases IL-15, which I like to call the Arnold signaling molecule, as in Arnold Schwarzenegger the bodybuilder, because it actually helps build muscle and burn fat. It also releases IL-8, which helps to increase blood vessels, and a whole host of a bunch of other myokines as well, and so muscle is very powerful. In this way, it can become our own pharmacology, our own anti-inflammatory pharmacology. This is one of the reasons that we want to gain muscle.

Speaker 1:

Now let's get one myth out of the way here, and that myth is the fact that if you add a bunch of muscle on your body, you're automatically gonna be burning a ton more calories at rest. This is really not true. It's an old myth that is slow to die. What the research suggests is that you burn about six calories per pound of resting muscle Some research says as much as 30, but you also burn about three calories three to six calories of calories from fat, and so you're not getting much of an advantage. You're not just gonna be able to add on a bunch of muscle and then just be burning up all this fat. It's not really how it works, but where it does provide benefit is when you start moving that muscle around, the more muscle you have and the more you move that muscle, the more calories you can burn through exercise et cetera, and so having extra muscle is highly beneficial.

Speaker 1:

And, of course, I don't know that most people would need or want to have as much muscle as someone like myself or many bodybuilders. Certainly, I don't think it's a good idea to try to strip muscle off the body, but I'm not so sure that you need to be walking around looking like a bodybuilder either, and I'm not so sure that all that extra muscle it can get in the way of some of the athletic stuff. Like, for example, I'm very strong, I can definitely handle myself in the gym, but if you go, take me out to do a jog, I'm gonna die within three minutes to five minutes, like I'm just not very efficient, and that's what having a lot of mass on your body tends to do to a lot of people. All of that being said, those of you who want to gain muscle definitely want to listen to what I have to say here, because it's rather confusing. So, in terms of if you look out in the blogosphere, in the podcast world and on social media et cetera, there's a lot of confusion here and especially, there's a lot of confusion when you talk about my workouts.

Speaker 1:

I have become most popular, selling millions of workouts in terms of metabolic conditioning. Follow along metabolic conditioning workouts using rest-based training, and so will those help you build muscle? Certainly they can help, and for beginners they can be very effective at building muscle, but that's not what their major benefit is. Their major benefit is that they burn fat, help maintain muscle for most people, maybe even help build muscle for those who are beginners, but they're very efficient. They don't overly stress or tax the body and they can really help people who really just don't love exercise and or want something super efficient to help get all of the attributes that you might hope to get from exercise, like fitness, fat loss and form or muscle gain.

Speaker 1:

What we're going to talk about now is what's more specific. So if you're trying to gain muscle, you want to begin to move away from. Believe it or not, if muscle gain is your primary concern, you probably want to start moving away from exercises, exercise that combines cardiovascular elements to it, in other words, with some of the metabolic conditioning workouts, workouts like CrossFit, things like that. If you're an elite lifter and getting a lot of volume, you certainly will gain some muscle in those workouts. I mean, obviously, if you look at some of the elite CrossFit athletes, they have an awful lot of muscle on their body and look fantastic and are heavily, heavily muscled and very lean. But for most people, adding in breathless workouts along with resistance training what we might call lifting weights faster not faster in terms of lifting speed, but faster in terms of shorter rest periods this can have a slight negative impact on gaining muscle for many people, and so, if muscle gain is your primary concern, you want to move away from breathless-based workouts and move further towards burning and heavy-type workouts.

Speaker 1:

Let me explain. I have a feedback system. I oftentimes teach about the biofeedback sensations of exercise, and I call this the Bs and the Hs breathless, burning, heavy and heat, or hot and sweaty. The breathless effect is all about the idea that when you make yourself breathless and you start to get breathless in a workout, research actually shows that the aerobic-anerobic tipping point happens right around the point where you no longer can speak, and so what happens is, aerobically, you max out your aerobic metabolism, or your aerobic metabolism rather and you become more anaerobic, and this is where you begin to become breathless, and this is highly correlated with the catecholamines, adrenaline or epinephrine, which dilates the lungs, increases heart rate, also has some fat burning potential, and so many people just think well, if I don't get breathless in a workout, I'm not getting a good workout. Well, breathless workouts are important more important for fitness and fat loss, though and they can interfere a little bit with muscle gain. So there's breathlessness that's one of the bees and then there's burning. Burning this has to do with activating your muscles in a way that also maxes out their ability to do work with oxygen. So it's also going from an aerobic state more to an anaerobic state, and for you uh, for you science nerds we can go through the mechanism really quickly. So what actually ends up happening?

Speaker 1:

A lot of people think that burn is coming from lactic acid. It's not. Actually, lactic acid is buffering against the burn. That burn is actually coming from proton buildup in the muscles, making the muscles more acidic. Actually, lactate Graves one of those protons becoming lactic acid. Buffering against that burns helping you push a little bit harder, but you do produce a lot of lactic acid when your muscles start to burn. And lactic acid is correlated with human growth hormone. Actually, in rat studies. They've actually shown that Lactic acid acts as a signaling molecule. They actually have a receptor for lactic acid and that it is highly correlated and probably releasing human growth hormone in humans. And so the burning sensation is associated with human growth hormone and that does have some anabolic Muscle-growing potential when it is around with Testosterone. And so, yes, you want burning, but you probably don't want too much breathless.

Speaker 1:

Then of course, there's the two H's one being hot, getting hot and sweaty, burning a lot of calories. Again, this is more for fat burning, more about sort of this catecholamines, sympathetic activation. Actually, the sweating response is a sympathetic Response in the same way that releasing adrenaline from breathlessness is a sympathetic response. The mechanisms are slightly different. Sweating has to do with the settle choline, not Not necessarily epinephrine, but it's correlated with epinephrine release. And so Breathless and hot, getting very hot and sweaty and getting breathless, is what most people think about when they think about a good workout, and those are more geared towards fitness. Once again, and fat loss, burning which we already covered and heavy Are the two things that you want to think about when you're trying to gain muscle.

Speaker 1:

Heavy meaning attention on the muscle, strain through the muscle, through the muscle and through the joints. And so when we think about the bees and the H's breathless, burning, heavy and heat, metabolic conditioning workouts, like the workouts I've talked about with metabolic female and metabolic male, and you know some of the other workouts that many of you have done that I've created, like metabolic prime and metabolic renewal and metabolic aftershock All these workouts try to get all the bees in the ages. They try to be efficient and get all of the bees in the ages breathless, burning, heavy and heat. The problem with that is, if you're trying to gain muscle, there will be some interference there. You'll gain some muscle, perhaps if you're a beginner, but it is not as effective if you just focused on the burning and the heavy straining effect and so when you are going for the heavy and the burn, you don't want to go for the breathless and the heat if you're trying to gain muscle. So what does this mean?

Speaker 1:

In practice? It means taking much longer rests between Sets, whereas in the typical rest based training approach that you all might be used to, for me Is that you push until you can't, rest until you can. Usually those rest periods are pretty short, on the range of 10 seconds to a minute perhaps in these very short workouts, when you're trying to build muscle, you want your rest period to be longer, three to five times longer. So you want, you know, a three minute up to a five minute rest period, taking plenty of time between Between, you know, sets. This is especially true when you're going for the heavy component, the straining component, of muscle gain, and so the rest Periods are much longer when you're training for hypertrophy and there are some Very nifty tricks you can use that that kind of violate this rule that we'll cover here in just a minute but in general, when you're going for the heavy effect, a straining effect, you want extra rest period.

Speaker 1:

Think about it if you're doing a 10 rep max on squats, let's say, or on bench press, or on shoulder press, or on bent over rows or something like that, that is an incredibly difficult set to do. A 10 rep max. By the way, in case you aren't familiar with that terminology, a 10 rep max is a weight that you can do 10 times, but not 11, which basically means Right around rep 7, 8, 9 and 10, it starts getting very hard, so that that last rep, that 10th rep, is very difficult and you do want to make sure you use very good form and Move your body through full ranges of motion for the most part when you're gaining muscle. But there are some Variations on that rule, which we'll cover here in just a minute. So one of the rules that you want to think about is heavy weights, full range of motion, long rest periods and, if you can imagine, if you do a true 10 rep max set, there's no way you're gonna be able to get back in and do another 10 rep max set in only a minute. You're gonna require much, much longer. So you can do this rest based style as well, which is, again, push until you can't, rest until you can, but you know you're not taking enough rest if you're no longer able to complete that 10 rep max. And so that is an important aspect of this. Just to understand that for many people, when you're training for hypertrophy or muscle growth, if they're not used to this kind of training, it kind of feels different for them because they're used to being breathless and they're not used to this straining effect or this burning effect or this pump effect where the muscle feels swollen.

Speaker 1:

Let's just briefly go through what research says are some of the three major factors that have to do with gaining muscle or at least providing the stimulus to gain muscle. Two of them we've already kind of gone over, and they also do take into account roughly the third one. But in research the things that help gain muscle are gonna be mechanical tension and load, mechanical strain through the muscles. We know that this is a signal for the muscle to grow. We also know that metabolic fatigue or metabolic activity in the muscle, which is indicated by the burn and the pump, the swelling of the muscle and the burning in the muscle. This also is highly correlated with hypertrophy. Let's cover the mechanisms of these real quick.

Speaker 1:

When the muscle is under strain and the tension in the ligaments and tendons register that load, that is a feedback system, mainly for testosterone, mainly for testosterone production, which is known as one of the most potent anabolic hormones. Now, when you get the burn, that is associated with this myokine release and this lactic acid release that we talked about. That also triggers human growth hormone. So when you get burning, you get this sort of myokine things like IL-15 that can help burn fat and build muscle, but also things like human growth hormone, which can really make testosterone more potent. So this burning effect as you feel this burning in your muscles, this is triggering human growth hormone, is triggering these anabolic myokines and this is the metabolic stress. This is this burning effect, this pump effect, because you also will feel the muscle start to swell. This is a really good indication that you're getting some of this myokine human growth hormone response. And, of course, the mechanical tension effect that we know helps build muscle is an indication you're getting this testosterone response.

Speaker 1:

And there is one more element that is critical, and all three of these elements, by the way, independently, have been shown to be factors in gaining muscle. The next one is mechanical damage or muscle damage, little micro tears in the muscle. And so this damage is associated mostly with heavy weights done through full ranges of motion in the eccentric portion of the movement. Let me say that again heavy weights, full range of motion in the eccentric portions of the movements. For those of you who are not well-versed in exercise nomenclature and vocabulary, eccentric just means the lowering portion of the movement. So if I'm doing a pushup, when I press away from the ground, that's the concentric, that's the concentric contraction. When I lower myself back down to the floor, that's the eccentric contraction. And so to get this mechanical damage or this muscle damage effect. A focus on eccentrics is very important. This is why you'll oftentimes see bodybuilders, people who are really after muscle growth. They will focus on the eccentric portion of the moves a little bit longer than the concentric portions of the moves, so you might see them at a lifting speed of one second on the push out, but maybe three to four to five seconds on the way down, and this works very, very well for gaining muscle.

Speaker 1:

And so what would a workout like this hypertrophy type of workout look like for a beginner? Well, for beginners, the best approach is three to four, I would say three full body workouts per week using an eight to 12 repetition, which is technically a 10 rep max. You can't get eight reps, you've gone too heavy. If you get more than 12, you've gone too light. Sweet spot is 10.

Speaker 1:

Full body movements meaning things like squats, bench press, shoulder press, bent over row, right. Four full body compound movements, those kinds of movements, and let's just say that's the workout right. So you do bench press five sets of eight to 12 reps. You do shoulder press five sets of eight to 12 reps. You do squat five sets of eight to 12 reps. You do bent over row. Five sets of eight to 12 repetitions, full body moves, compound moves. That's your whole workout.

Speaker 1:

Now also think about between each of those sets you're taking three to five minutes rest. And so what a lot of people don't realize. This is a much longer workout. You take much longer rest and the workout is much longer. It can take up to 60 to 90 minutes, for some people up to two hours.

Speaker 1:

When I was young, I certainly was famous for staying in the gym even longer than that, but it's a very different type of workout. You're not breathless, but you are repeatedly repeating repeatedly, what's the word I'm trying to say here? You're repeatedly subjecting your muscles to burning and to strain and to mechanical damage through these sets, and so that's what the workout might look like. And then you repeat that workout Not every day, but every other day. So it's a Monday, Wednesday, friday or a Tuesday, thursday, saturday, and those days off, if you're a beginner, are very important because that's where you are going to grow. Plug my computer in real quick, because I'm gonna lose you guys if I don't. There we go. So that's one way that you can look at this.

Speaker 1:

If you're a beginner and I just gave you that, that's a great way to start. Can you use machines? Certainly you can Try to go with the big, big machines leg press right, a chest press, a back row, a shoulder press and you can use machines on this if you're a beginner. But this is the way to do this and of course You're not gonna be breathless in this to the same degree. But you will feel that burning effect, that strain effect and and that pump effect. And then of course, one of the things you'll notice that's much different about this style of training is the delayed onset, muscle soreness, the Dom's. Now you don't need to have Dom's, you don't need to have soreness After the workout for it to be effective. In fact, it would probably be counterproductive to constantly be sore, but a little soreness is expected, especially for beginners.

Speaker 1:

Now, after you do about 12 weeks of that style of training, now you can move into what we might call a, a sort of, you know, four-day, you know sort of routine where it's upper on Monday, lower on Tuesday, wednesday, off. We call this a four-day split, by the way. So it's upper Monday, lower, tuesday, wednesday, off, and then you repeat that Thursday, upper, friday, lower, and then now Saturday and Sunday off. So that's four days per week and when you do this is the same type of thing. But now you're doing all upper on one day and all lower on the other day.

Speaker 1:

So this workout on Monday, the upper workout, might look like chest press, bent over row, shoulder press, bicep, curl, tricep, extension right and once again three to five sets of eight to twelve reps of all those exercises. On the leg day it might look like squat, stiff leg deadlift, leg extension, leg curl, walking lunge, let's say, and again, three to five sets, eight to twelve repetitions on that. Now you can imagine that is a lot, a lot of volume. So most people will do just fine with that three-day split. But then you can move to a four-day split and if you're very advanced and you want to get into bodybuilding and all that kind of Stuff, then you can move to body part splits where you're doing five days to six days of training a week and splitting up your body Into parts.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, you're gonna do chest and back on Monday, legs on Tuesday, shoulders and arms and maybe core right on Wednesday, and then take a day off on Thursday and then repeat that again on Friday, saturday and Sunday and so and there's many different, many different ways to do that. If you're doing a five-day split, that's the most popular one. It would be chest and back Monday, legs Tuesday, shoulders, arms, core Wednesday, and then Thursday you go back to Chest and back right and then on Friday you go back and you repeat the legs and then you pick up. You take Saturday, sunday off, you pick up on Monday with the shoulders, arms and core, and so this is getting more into a bodybuilding type of routine. But once again, this is three to five sets, eight to twelve repetitions, and this is going to be the beginning of you and your muscle building a routine. Now, how would you start this if you're a complete beginner? Well, I suggest 12 weeks up to six months, even right, of a three-day split, and then 12 weeks up to six months of the four-day split, and then, after you've got anywhere from six months to a year Under your belt and you can start moving to body part training if you're really really wanting to maximize Muscle gain.

Speaker 1:

Now, again, you want to take into account All of these different elements, and there is one more thing you can begin to do as an advanced way of starting to build muscle, where you can finish these workouts off right with finishers, and the point of finishers is that, course, with these three to five sets of eight to twelve reps, you're getting the mechanical stress, the tension, the heavyweight. You are also Getting some of this muscle damage where you're going through full range of motion and focusing on the eccentric contractions, but you might not be getting the burning effect as much because you're taking pretty long rests between lifting bouts and so a Finisher would be where at the end of your workout for maybe five minutes, you do something like a super set. So you would do, let's say, ten, uh, 10 rows, followed by 10 push-ups and, without any rest at all, go back to rows 10 reps, 10 reps, 10 reps, 10 reps, going back and forth between these two muscle groups for five minutes, and what's going to happen is you're going to get an immense burn in your muscles. You are going to get a little bit breathless here and you are going to get a huge pump, and the idea here is going for the pump and the burn to give us a little bit more of that burning effect with the heavy straining effect that you got earlier in the workout, and finishers like that can be really beneficial. Of course, you'll see many advanced bodybuilders who have developed a really impressive muscular physique. Their muscles need a little bit more stimulus than the rest of us to get the responses that they want, because, of course, the muscles adapt and you have to continue progressing in difficulty, and so I'm not going to cover this in this particular podcast. But this is where things like super sets and drop sets and these kinds of things and attention reps and all these different types of protocols that sometimes you'll see advanced lifters doing come in.

Speaker 1:

These are not necessary for most people who are beginning their journey of wanting to build muscle. In fact, I would argue that you want to start with a good base. Start with the three workouts a week, three days split of full body workouts, three to five sets, eight to 12 reps. Do that three to six months, then add in the four day split, do that three to six months, then go to the body part splits, do that for a while and then you'll probably have a base. Meanwhile. This is going to be a year to a year and a half later. Now you're going to have a base where you can really start benefiting from drop sets and super sets and burnouts and these kinds of things.

Speaker 1:

Not saying that beginners can't benefit from this, but I don't know that they're that necessary until you really begin to progress, and so I wanted to have this discussion about how to build muscle, because really, muscle is all about maximizing your metabolic potential. It has a ton of benefits it is anti-inflammatory, it is an endocrine organ and a lot of people are just confused on how to build muscle, and so I wanted you to get some education around this and I'm hoping this helps. So let's do some review to wrap up this particular podcast. The first idea we covered is this idea that when you're doing very fast paced, breathless type of workouts, you are interfering with muscle building a little bit, and for beginners, they might be able to build some muscle with those workouts, but for most people who've been working out for a while, these workouts that get more breathless and hot and that's their focus they're not great at building muscle. The workouts that do more burning and heavy, they're better at building muscle, and the more you could take a longer rest, the more you can push that burn and that heavy effect. In fact, that's what's required to go that heavy.

Speaker 1:

As we talked about, no one's going to be able to do a 10 rep max, take 30 seconds, breathe and then do another true 10 rep max. You'll have to drastically reduce your weight and now we're leaning more towards a breathless effect. We're not that when we're trying to build muscle. So you're going to have to wrap your head around the idea that there's going to be a lot of time in the gym where you're kind of meandering around. It's going to feel very different than what you're used to. At first you're going to feel like this isn't a workout. If you're someone who's used to getting breathless, that's not the point. We're trying to build muscle, we're not trying to build fitness, and so, well, obviously muscle is a degree of fitness, but fitness by itself. We're not training to run a marathon, we're training to build muscle, and that requires a different approach. Now, once you get used to this, it's every bit is hard, just in a very different way. You'll figure this out very quickly. If you try to do a 10 rep max on squats, you'll see that you're going to get breathless anyway and you're going to need to take quite a long period of time to rest three to five minutes before you are able to exert that same force again.

Speaker 1:

Just as review again, we talked about the idea that the things you want to think about in terms of what the research says about building muscle, you want to think about metabolic stress, this burning and pump effect that you get in your muscles, this swollen effect and this burning effect. This is the metabolic stress that is correlated with human growth hormone and myokines and lactic acid. So you want to get some of that. You also want to get this straining tension effect. This is where the heavy weights come in and you also want to get this mechanical damage effect, damaging micro tears in the muscle as well. This is where this full range of motion and this eccentric focus comes in. So those are all very important.

Speaker 1:

Then, of course, you want to understand where you are in your journey in terms of building muscle. Best place to go is start with a three day split, three days per week, full body movements, three to five sets of eight to 12 repetitions. Once you have 12 to 24 months or three to six months under your belt, from that point You're going to basically move to the four-day split. You're gonna do that for 12 weeks to 24 weeks or three to six months, and then you can move to body part training and then you may wanna start adding in things like burnout sets and those kinds of things. Now, just a few things here to add, and then we'll end.

Speaker 1:

Is what about nutrition? Well, one of the things that is important here is just like you cannot lose fat without a calorie deficit, you're not gonna be able to build muscle without calorie excess. So, for many people who are hard gainers, one of the reasons why they're not able to build muscle is because they're simply not eating enough calories, and so a lot of people will focus on protein. Well, protein, yes, but calories first, right, just like when you're trying to lose weight calories first, protein next. Now, of course, if you add in protein, one of the interesting things about this if you're trying to gain muscle and you're eating a lot more protein, you don't realize the calories. Well, protein is appetite suppressing, so you may end up in a position where you're simply not eating enough calories, and so make sure you're eating enough calories. How many calories? Well, I like just to take 20 times your body weight in pounds. This is probably where, roughly, you wanna be if you're really really going after muscle building. For some people, perhaps more. That's really all you have to worry about is just be aware. It's not protein, it's calories. So excess protein without enough calories, you're probably not gonna be able to gain the muscle you want. So you want protein with calories or calories with protein. However you look at it In terms of supplements, the only one that I would really say besides a good quality weight protein supplement or something like that is one of the best studied nutrients on the market, which is creatine.

Speaker 1:

Creatine is probably something that anyone who's trying to build muscle may want to consider. The other thing about creatine is it's just fantastic for the whole body, including the brain. How do you dose that? Three grams daily, three grams daily of creatine. This is why a lot of people get creatine powder, so they don't have to take a lot of pills, because three grams can be a lot. Some people like to go up to five grams per day. Some people like to do a loading dose of creatine of 20 grams for three to seven days.

Speaker 1:

I just like three to five grams per day, and you'll get some really nice benefits from that, and so I'm gonna stop right here, but I'm hoping this gives those of you who are kind of like hey look, I wanna get into the gym world. I've heard about the benefit of gaining muscle. I've never really been educated on gaining muscle and how to do that in the gym and how to do that with my workouts. Hopefully now you understand that not all workouts are equal when it comes to gaining muscle and that these breathless workouts and these workouts that are using all these different implements what I like to call circus workouts and stuff like that, are really not what you wanna be focusing on. You wanna be doing the same workouts over and over and over again. You wanna be doing three to five sets of eight to 12 reps and you wanna be progressing the weight you're using as you get stronger.

Speaker 1:

These are, to some people, much more boring workouts. They're not as fun for some people, but they are much more effective, and so it's just a whole different way of looking at it. Hopefully that will solve some of your confusion around, maybe why you're not gaining the muscle that you want, because it is a very different approach. All right, thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast. I hope you've been enjoying the last three episodes where it's all about exercise. We'll get back to some of the mind stuff and the metabolism stuff in the next episodes, but I appreciate you as always and I will see you at the next episode.