How To Build Muscle (Explained In 5 Levels)

in this video i'm going to explain how to build muscle in five levels of increasing complexity starting with the most basic explanation and getting more detailed as we go now in preparing this video i consulted with a number of different experts including a professor in muscle metabolism an industry leader in the field of biomechanics and an active researcher in the field of strength and conditioning i'm also a pro natural bodybuilder myself and i've been studying the science behind getting jacked for over a decade while coaching people from around the globe and just for fun i'd

like you to comment below which level you got to before you started zoning out or getting lost [Music] all right so building muscle is actually pretty simple all you really need to do is lift weights and eat protein protein of course being the macronutrient found in foods like fish chicken meat dairy beans lentils and protein powders and when you weight train your muscles start to think well if we're going to keep lifting these heavy weights i'd better start to get some bigger muscles to make this easier this is called an adaptive response and it's kind

of like when you play guitar your fingertips start to get harder and grow calluses as an adaptive response to pressing against the strings it hurts at first but then it gets easier as you build the thicker skin layer however lifting weights isn't quite enough on its own to build muscle in order to build something you need building blocks and when it comes to muscle the building blocks are called amino acids which you get by eating protein so when you lift weights you're telling the muscle it needs to get bigger and when you eat protein you're

giving the muscle the building blocks it needs to actually grow [Music] so in reality it's probably not quite good enough to just lift weights and eat protein to get really solid results for example if you're lifting the exact same weight for the exact same reps two years from now that you lifted today that probably won't be good enough to keep the muscle growing sure you'll see some decent growth at the beginning because you've never lifted any weight before but soon enough that weight will no longer be challenging enough to present a sufficient stimulus for your

muscle to continue growing this is why we need to expand the lift weights part to lift weights with an emphasis on progressive overload now the technical definition of progressive overload is the gradual increase of stress on the muscles during weight training but we can simply think of it as just increasing some training parameter over time so from workout to workout you want to add a little bit of weight or add an extra rep using the same weight for example let's say you're trying to grow your biceps rather than doing three sets of 10 reps with

the same weight week after week and month after month it'd be much more effective to do three sets of ten reps in week one three sets of eleven and week two three sets of twelve and week three and then in week four you can go back to ten reps again but this time add a little more weight now at a certain point you may not be able to increase the weight or reps each and every time and that's okay there are still other ways to apply progressive overload such as by adding an extra set with

the same reps and the same weight or even by doing something as simple as controlling the negative a little better or feeling a stronger mind-muscle connection where you more consciously feel the muscle squeezing and stretching as you lift or swapping out for a new exercise and starting that overloading process again also on the nutrition side we can do quite a bit better than just saying eat protein so to be more specific the latest research shows that landing between 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day so about 0.7 to 1

gram per pound is a good target for maximizing muscle gain for example if you weigh 165 pounds or 75 kilos you'd want to be eating somewhere in the range of 120 to 165 grams of protein per day for general muscle building now there may be some advantage in going a bit higher in certain advanced situations but this is a sufficient range for most now if you're very high in body fat the grams per unit body weight approach won't work as well so let's say you're 300 pounds you don't really need 300 grams of protein per

day so in that case i simply prefer to use one gram of protein per centimeter in height because it works independently of body fat percentage so let's say you're five foot nine or about 175 centimeters tall 175 grams of protein would be plenty for you it's not a perfect system but it'll get you in the right ballpark and while there is some evidence to suggest that spacing your protein across three to five meals throughout the day might be more ideal if that suggestion holds true it's certainly much less important than simply hitting a daily protein

target in fact contrary to common belief training is a much more powerful contributor to muscle growth than diet and by quite a long shot so while it is true that a caloric surplus will drive muscle growth more effectively and dietary manipulations like protein timing can have some impact i'm going to focus the remaining levels on maximizing the muscle response through resistance training so focusing on progressive overload is smart but it still leaves a lot to be desired in the gym for example it doesn't tell us how hard we should push it or how many sets

we should do or how many reps we should do or how heavy we should be lifting so next i want to take a quick look at what the research says about the so-called acute training variables factors like effort volume intensity exercise selection and frequency now i think effort is the most fundamental variable for growth because no matter how much you optimize all the other stuff if you aren't pushing it hard enough the muscles simply won't grow at least not optimally now there's currently a raging debate within the scientific community about exactly how hard we should

push each set a relatively small group of experts insist that all sets should be taken all the way to muscular failure defined as an inability to complete another rep despite maximum effort but i'd say that the mainstream scientific consensus is that it isn't necessary to take sets all the way to failure but you do need to be pretty close you shouldn't be leaving more than two or three reps in the tank for most of your sets now of course there are a few exceptions where leaving five or more reps in the tank does make sense

for recovery especially when training primarily for strength but as a general rule most of your sets should be pretty close to failure so you do need to push it hard maybe harder than you think up next volume technically refers to the amount of work you do and this was historically calculated as the number of sets times the number of reps times the amount of load but as of 2015 most practitioners began to think of volume simply as the number of hard sets you do now over the last few years it's become a popular meme to

think of volume as the quote primary driver of hypertrophy and if i ever said this i no longer think it's the case rather than more volume leading to more growth what we instead see is a sort of inverted utrend where more volume leads to more growth only up to a point past which further increases don't do anything extra and then at a certain point adding more volume seems to be counterproductive so there's this volume sweet spot which seems to be a bit different for everyone and i find a lot of people are already doing more

volume than they really need and would probably benefit more by reducing their volume and focusing more on effort and execution but the main point is that you should experiment and figure out what dose of volume gives you the best balance of gains and recovery still based on what we know from the current science something around 10 to 20 sets per body part per week seems to be a good range for most people and most muscles so for example if you're running an upper lower split that has you in the gym four days a week your

chest volume might look something like this with six hard sets for your chest on monday and six hard sets for your chest on thursday totaling 12 hard sets for the week okay next we need to cover intensity which despite its popular conflation with effort technically refers to how heavy the weight is you can either lift heavy weights for low reps or light weights for high reps but what's the best for muscle growth well it turns out that as long as you're taking sets sufficiently close to failure you can maximize hypertrophy using high reps or low

reps or a combination of both research has shown that reps as low as 3 and reps as high as 30 all cause similar muscle growth however there does seem to be a limit to how light you can go new data shows that when you lift weights lighter than 20 of your one rep max you do see significantly less growth but the average rep count subjects got with that load was 67 revs not a very practical way to train regardless so the traditional 6-12 rep zone is kind of a myth in the sense that research shows

you can go well outside that range and still grow fine as long as you're training close to muscular failure still i think there is some value in that 6 to 12 range because once you start dipping down below 6 reps you can risk unnecessary strain on your joints and it can be practically more difficult to accumulate enough volume and the more often you go above 12 reps the more you risk just burning yourself out as higher rep sets are harder to recover from so for practical purposes i suggest splitting it up like this with the

majority of your sets coming in that 6 to 12 or maybe 15 zone while having smaller chunks dedicated to lower reps for continued strength progression and higher reps for stimulative variety now i think exercise selection and execution is just as much an art as it is a science sure i do tend to favor multi-joint compound movements like squats presses and rows in my own training because they give you more hypertrophic bang for your buck by activating large amounts of muscle mass while promoting more efficient total body strength gain while i definitely think mastering these basic

compound movements is important single joint isolation exercises certainly have their place especially when it comes to targeting smaller muscles like the biceps rear delts side delts and abs which can be overpowered if you focus on compound lifts exclusively luckily when it comes to muscle growth there are no mandatory exercises and so after mastering the basics it's once again important to experiment with different movements and movement variations to figure out what works best for you and your body's mechanics now when it comes to frequency it seems like most people have flipped from thinking that you should

only train each body part once a week on a split that looks something like this otherwise you're going to over train and melt your muscle away to these days most people thinking that if you train on a bro split like this you're never going to make any gains at all because science in reality the latest research actually shows that frequency in and of itself likely plays a relatively minor role in muscle growth and the latest studies show similar results between hitting a body part once a week and three plus times per week however i still

generally recommend hitting a muscle at least twice a week and i do prefer splits like upper lower and full body over the traditional body part split because they typically allow for more volume per week and higher quality volumes per workout still as long as you've got all the other variables in place are recovering properly and being consistent over time this is an area of programming that probably deserves less of the spotlight than it tends to get and then there are other training variables like rest periods lifting tempo and advanced intensity techniques that make up a

relatively smaller piece of the puzzle and rather than go into detail on these i'll just link a few videos on them down below [Music] okay so with progressive overload and the main acute training variables in mind at this point i'd like to get a bit more granular and take a closer look at what's actually driving muscle growth physiologically so in 2010 dr brad schoenfeld published a landmark paper with over 500 citations that introduced the three factor model of muscle hypertrophy this model proposed that there are three main things driving muscle growth mechanical tension muscle damage

and metabolic stress now the very short version is that mechanical tension is the type of force that tries to stretch a muscle fiber one way to visualize this is like a tug of war as each side pulls tension is generated in the rope so you can think of it like not only are the people pulling on the rope but the rope is also pulling back on the people similar in the muscle where tension is passively created when the muscle is stretched and tension is actively created during contraction when actin molecules are pulled by myosin heads

and as of now tension remains absolutely undisputed as the primary driver of hypertrophy within the scientific community at large next muscle damage is basically exactly what it sounds like physical damage to the muscle like micro tears and other cellular disruptions and you can observe this under a microscope where you see that the normal pattern and muscle can be seriously disrupted after training now some believe that this type of damage is at least partly responsible for the delayed onset muscle soreness that you can feel in the days following training although the soreness phenomenon is no doubt

caused by a number of factors and still isn't fully understood still for years many people have just assumed that getting sore should be the goal of training since soreness comes from muscle damage and muscle damage causes muscle growth but the latest science shows that that first claim is questionable and the second claim is most likely not true of course the most common sense way to think about this is that running a marathon would cause tons of muscle damage but wouldn't do anything good for muscle growth in fact a review paper from lack origin colleagues pointed

out that if anything damage in this context would seem to decrease muscle growth and even in a weight training context damage doesn't seem to be doing much good the study from domison colleagues argued that damage doesn't even correlate with hypertrophy over the long run as shown in the figure here early on in a training program you see a huge amount of damage this could be why you get so sore when starting a new routine and while there is an associated early spike in muscle protein synthesis the vast majority of that synthesis is directed toward repairing

damaged muscle tissue rather than building new muscle tissue from scratch and it's only after that damage decreases that muscle protein synthesis is directed toward new muscle hypertrophy and while folks playing devil's advocate could argue well studies show that eccentric training causes more muscle damage and studies also show that eccentric training causes more muscle growth i would simply respond that correlation doesn't imply causation and it seems more likely to me that the extra growth that you see from eccentric overloading could simply be coming from the fact that you can simply overload the muscle more heavily during

an eccentric contraction causing more tension in the muscle now i should say that if we're being really honest we don't actually understand muscle damage all that well even the methods of simply measuring muscle damage have been contested by prominent researchers so the bottom line is that any theory that uses muscle damage to explain muscle growth is speculative at best and unfeasible at worst but what about metabolic stress well metabolic stress refers to the accumulation of metabolites like lactate and hydrogen ions and the muscle hypoxia that often follows weight training and it's often associated with the

massive skin tearing pumps that you get from high rep workouts so if muscle damage and its ensuing soreness is unlikely to be driving muscle growth surely the pump in its associated metabolic stress must be doing something i mean even arnold seemed to recognize this the greatest feeling you can get in a gym or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the pump your muscles get a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode any minute you know it's really tight it's like somebody blowing air into into your muscle it

just blows up and it feels different it feels fantastic and well while the pump does feel good and certainly can make training more enjoyable and perhaps even provide some feedback that you're actually hitting the muscle that you're trying to target it most likely isn't driving hypertrophy because there are just too many examples of where the relationship between metabolic stress and muscle growth breaks down shorter rest periods cause more metabolic stress but significantly less muscle growth than longer rest periods note that there's a footnote in the description box about this partial range of motion causes more

metabolic stress but often less muscle growth and full range of motion training all the way to failure causes more metabolic stress but it best results in equal muscle growth to stopping a few reps shy of failure and blood flow restriction training causes tons of metabolic stress but doesn't enhance hypertrophy on its own and doesn't even work in conjunction with training unless the training methods are highly suboptimal and even in this case it still seems to point back to tension when i spoke with one of the authors of this popular blood flow restriction study he pointed

out that any benefit seems to be tension related would you argue that the impact of bfr essentially leads back to just creating more tension in the muscle like do you think it still goes back to tension yeah it's like it's just bfr is it's like cheating 20 reps extra in a sense it's it's the same effect you just it just happens earlier so consensus is converging on tension and perhaps tension alone as being the primary driver of muscle growth and so it should be the primary goal of our training to maximize tension above anything else

so how do we do that well the practical application is actually quite simple we need to apply progressive tension increases to the muscle itself this means we need to lift with good consistent technique while using the acute training variables and progressive overload to push the level of intramuscular tension up over time also paying attention to things like the mind muscle connection at least on certain exercises and eccentric control should also help as those aspects of lifting have been shown to increase intramuscular tension okay so we know that mechanical tension is the main thing driving muscle

growth but what happens next how do we get from a mechanical stimulus like tension to a biochemical signal that commands the muscle to grow well dr tromlin explained this to me in terms of blocks of dominoes he said that when one thing gets activated it passes on the signal to the next thing and the next thing and so on but if you're smart you don't just build one chain of dominoes you build out all these side chains so that they fall in a bunch of different directions and it's the same thing with muscle growth there

isn't just one pathway with one outcome but rather many different interconnected pathways with many different downstream effects so with that in mind let's start at the top all right so we lift a weight heavy enough that it creates active mechanical tension within the muscle this is called the stimulus the stimulus is sensed by mechanosensors which sort of feel that the muscle is being pulled into tension and pass that signal on now based on the latest research it isn't perfectly clear exactly which molecules are doing this sensing but the top candidates include customers which are collections

of proteins that sit in the muscle fiber membrane and are responsible for holding muscle fibers together and transferring force between muscle fibers during contraction there's also titan which as a fun fact is actually the largest protein we've ever discovered in humans and because it runs parallel to the muscle fiber itself could theoretically be responsible for sensing mechanical changes like stretching but probably only at long muscle lengths and then there's filaments which bind to the famous actin proteins that slide during contraction making them a really good candidate for sensing tension and for the record i read

through the latest paper on all this sensing stuff from 2018 and i'll just say this area of research is not well understood yet to quote the authors directly conclusively identifying major hypertrophy stimuli and their sensors is one of the big remaining questions in exercise physiology still we can paint the rest of the picture with a broad brush for now from the mechanosensors a signal gets sent to a beast mode molecule called mtor which is a major regulator of cellular growth in general not just in muscle tissue it's also implicated in many cancers because of its

responsibility in making tissues bigger from there mtor goes to the nucleus and tells the dna machinery to produce a messenger rna strand which you can think of as a set of blueprints for building new muscle those blueprints are sent to a ribosome which is like a muscle protein building factory that manufactures a string of amino acids based on the blueprint from the mrna in a process known as translation and this step is what we're actually talking about when we say muscle protein synthesis now through this translation process many different proteins will be synthesized some of

which will be the big contractile proteins that make us more jacked others will be more ribosomal proteins or mtor proteins themselves so anabolic growth potential remains high in the future now if this rate of synthesis exceeds the rate of breakdown protein balance is said to be positive and in that case new contractile proteins are incorporated into muscle fibers resulting in what's called myofibrillar hypertrophy leading to increased muscle size overall but all of that is really just one string of dominoes there's also this other path that's triggered by amino acids in the protein we eat in

this case amino acids are transported inside the cell and the amino acid leucine also activates mtor for the record we seem to need about 3 grams of leucine to stimulate mtor which can be found in about 20 to 25 grams of high quality protein although some research has shown greater anabolic responses with higher protein doses so it may be possible to crank mtor activity higher with more leucine but regardless it's important to realize that the stimulative impact of leucine is much shorter than the stimulative impact of weight training and so for maximum mtor stimulation you

need both training and leucine with leucine essentially complementing the stimulative effects of weightlifting then the other eight essential amino acids there's nine in total when you include leucine make their way to the ribosome where they're used as the fundamental building blocks for creating new muscle now another pathway that i'll briefly mention is that of testosterone now even though modifying testosterone within the natural range plays a relatively minor role in muscle growth when you inject high-dose testosterone the hormone crosses the muscle cell membrane and either binds to an androgen receptor directly or is converted to dht

which then binds to the androgen receptor and then that complex enters the nucleus and tells the dna to start cranking out more blueprints turning up that muscle protein synthetic process even more now if i were actually discussing muscle growth with an expert there are a lot of other things i'd want to discuss i'd want to at least mention sarcoplasmic hypertrophy so far we've been focusing on myofibrillar hypertrophy so the growth of actual contractile tissue but there's some new solid evidence supporting so-called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which is the growth of all the other stuff inside the muscle

fiber like glycogen organelles and other non-contractile proteins then i might speculate that higher rep and higher volume training might bias the muscle towards sarcoplasmic growth but then the expert depending on how open they are to guesswork might shut that down for lacking evidence i'd also definitely want to talk about myonuclear addition the idea that all this muscle protein synthetic stuff still seems to be limited by the number of nuclei or command centers that you have in your muscle cells to begin with and so when satellite cells that surround the muscle cell like satellites donate their

nuclei that could theoretically allow the muscle cell to crank out more new muscle protein and build more muscle but then the expert might push back that that theory is actually pretty speculative and we can't even rightly assume that nuclei are in fact limiting factors for hypertrophy until we get more science in our hands and then a curious bystander might ask why does any of this matter anyway what's the point of this level of research maybe the expert would respond by saying something like knowledge having value for its own sake or maybe they point out a

few of its many medical applications such as in understanding sarcopenia or muscular dystrophy or maybe they'd say that they're trying to figure all this stuff out just in case there's a new pathway that can actually feed back into training recommendations or maybe we'll be able to use this research to develop an exercise pill someday that creates the same cellular effect as weight training without having to spend nearly as much time in the gym a sort of steroid without side effects that could start development 50 years down the road but since i'm getting well over my

own head at this point i think i'm gonna leave it there for this one if you guys made it this far please let me know by commenting i'm ready for level six and i'll see if i can make that happen in another video as new research comes in as always don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you guys all here in the next one