The Ultimate Guide to Building Muscle

So, you’ve been searching the internet trying to find the best blueprint on how to build muscle.

Well boy do I have good news for you my friend.

You just stumbled across the ULTIMATE guide to building muscle.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or even more intermediate, this comprehensive guide will give you everything you need to know when it comes to muscle growth.

Everything from workouts to nutrition to recovery to supplements; this guide will teach you everything you need to know.

All I ask of you is for one thing in return: read this article all the way through.

Don’t skip around. Don’t only focus on the parts that seem the most interesting to you on the surface.

Because, if you read the entire thing, you’ll have all the information that you need to start packing on muscle and build the physique of your dreams.

Does that sound good? Alright, let’s dive right on in.

Muscle Growth Ain’t Easy

Before getting into the nitty gritty, I need to preface everything I’m about to say with this: muscle growth is hard and it takes a long time.

While it’s possible to notice fat loss in the mirror month-to-month, muscle gain takes A LOT longer.

I’m living proof of this.

Ya see that guy right there on the left? Yeah, that was me in 2015.

And the guy on the right? That was me last year in 2022.

I know, it’s hard to tell that it’s even the same guy.

Anyway, that’s a 7 YEAR DIFFERENCE between the two pictures.

And in that time I put on ~30lbs of muscle.

Results Don’t Happen Overnight

It took years and years of a lot of hard work, consistency, and patience to build that amount of muscle.

And, before we move on, I want to address the elephant in the room.

I know I’m not the biggest guy in the world. I’m not a bodybuilder.

Because, quite frankly, I don’t want to be.

Given that I grew up as a tall lanky kid, my goal when starting my fitness journey was to build enough muscle to give me more of an athletic physique.

I wanted to be more confident in my own skin, look better in clothes, and have my shirt off by the pool without feeling insecure about how scrawny I was.

So, no, I’m not the biggest guy in the world.

But I will say this: building 30 pounds of muscle is no small feat.

I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to build muscle in the process and I’ve learned even more over the past few years as a personal trainer and online fitness coach.

So, not only have I built a considerable amount of muscle myself, but I’ve also spent a ton of time studying the research on muscle growth and working with real people both in person and online to help them achieve their muscle building goals.

Training is the Main Driver of Muscle Growth

Obviously it goes without saying that training, nutrition, and recovery all play an important role in muscle growth.

But, if you were to ask me, “Dylan, if you HAD to pick one, which is the most important?”

Training. Training is the most important of the three.

Just like nutrition is more important than training for fat loss, training is more important than nutrition for muscle gain.

Again, both training and nutrition are incredibly important for maximizing muscle growth.

But I wanted to set the stage for the rest of the article by saying that training is more important.

Just like you can workout all day long but you won’t lose fat until your nutrition is dialed in, you can have your diet completely dialed in but if you aren’t working hard in your lifting workouts, muscle growth just ain’t gonna happen.

The Ultimate Guide to Building Muscle: Training 101

I’m about to cover everything you need to know about training for muscle growth.

I’ll start with some of the more general topics, and then I’ll get more and more into the specifics as we go on.

ADHERENCE

This is one of if not the most important parts of training for muscle growth.

Yet, it gets overlooked by almost everyone.

At the end of the day, I can give you the best, most science-based hypertrophy training program in the world, but if you don’t stick with it, it doesn’t matter (By the way, hypertrophy is just a fancy way of saying muscle growth, so when I use that word throughout this article, that’s what I’m referring to).

Remember, I said that muscle growth takes a long time. So you need to stick with “the process” long enough to see results.

And the only way to do that is by building (or finding) a program that you enjoy enough to stick with over time.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that enjoyability is a HUGE part of adherence.

Your workouts should be hard, but they should also be fun.

A “less optimal” exercise that you really enjoy will yield better results than a “more optimal” exercise that bores you.

Because you’ll lift heavier and put more intensity into that more enjoyable movement.

INTENSITY

Speaking of lifting heavier and lifting with more intensity, let’s cover that exact topic.

This is one of the two most important training principles for muscle growth (we’ll cover the other one in the next section).

What is Intensity?

First, let me tell you what intensity is NOT.

Intensity is not how much you’re sweating, how high your heart rate is, how out of breath you are, or how many calories you burn.

Intensity is simply how hard a working set is (not a warm-up set) on a scale from 0-10.

This is known as the RPE scale. It stands for Rating of Perceived Exertion.

Essentially, it’s based on how many more reps you have “left in the tank” once a set is over.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you do a set of chest-supported dumbbell rows.

You get done with your set and you ask yourself how many more reps you could have gotten there if you were really pushed. Obviously, while maintaining good form.

If you feel like you could have gotten four more reps, then that’s an RPE 6 (10 – 4 = 6).

If you feel like you only had one more rep left in the tank, then that’s an RPE 9 (10 – 1 = 9).

I think you get the gist of it.

Intensity just refers to your proximity to failure. And failure just means not being able to do another rep with good form.

Why Does Intensity Matter?

Research on muscle growth shows that it’s really those last ~5 challenging reps before failure where the most muscle is built.

It’s in those really hard reps towards the end of a set where the most mechanical tension is placed on the muscle. And mechanical tension is the primary driver of muscle growth.

For example, if you do a set of ten on lat pulldowns to failure, the first five reps aren’t nearly as stimulating for hypertrophy as the last five reps.

This is why training (close to) failure is crucial for making progress.

You don’t have to go all the way to failure on every set, but staying within about 1-3 reps shy of failure is ideal.

If you get done a set and feel like “Meh, I probably could’ve done seven more reps there”, then you probably need to increase the weight on the next set.

And, before we move on, there’s one more important note to mention here.

Going all the way to failure every once in a while is a smart idea, because it reminds you what it feels like to train really hard.

Which gives you a good gauge of where you are most of the time in terms of your proximity to failure.

If you never really go to that place, you don’t know what it feels like to be close to it.

PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD

While we’re on the topic of training hard, the other most important training principle for hypertrophy is something called progressive overload.

Which sounds WAY more complicated than it actually is. In reality, it’s incredibly simple.

What is Progressive Overload?

Progressive overload just means doing more over time and gradually putting your muscles under more stress as they’ve adapted to what you’ve done previously.

This can come in MANY different forms.

One of the big ones being using better technique over time.

This matters more than you think because 99% of people, including myself, don’t have the best form when they first start lifting.

But, other than that, the two best ways to achieve progressive overload are either lifting more weight and/or doing more reps with the same weight.

I’ll show you an example of what that looks like from my current training program.

As you can see, from week 1 to week 2, I made a conscious effort to either increase the weight or do more reps with the same weight on each exercise in this upper body workout.

This is one of the many reasons why I love using rep ranges.

For example, let’s say you’re doing flat dumbbell bench press for 6-8 reps.

Week 1 you could use 30lbs for 6 reps, week 2 30lbs for 7, and week 3 30lbs for 8.

Now that you’re at the top of the rep range, you can increase the weight to 35 pound dumbbells and go back down to 6 reps for week 4.

This is a strategy called double progression and I love it because it takes all of the pressure off of having to lift more every single week.

As long as you did at least one more rep on at least one set of an exercise, you’re progressing.

If you take nothing else from this section, let it be this: If you’re not making a concerted effort to do more over time, your muscles have no reason to grow.

It doesn’t mean that you have to lift heavier or do more reps every single session.

But when you zoom out and look at your training from a 30,000 foot view, you should be getting stronger over the course of many months and years.

That is a key pillar of muscle growth.

FREQUENCY/TRAINING SPLIT

The question every gym-goer asks when they want to build muscle: “What’s the best workout split?”

And, in case you don’t know, a workout split just refers to how you organize your workouts.

Basically, it’s how often you workout and how often you train each muscle group specifically.

Candidly, I think most people massively overthink this.

To maximize muscle growth, ideally you want to train each muscle group 2x/week.

But, within that, the specific workout split that you choose to follow doesn’t matter nearly as much as you might think.

Training anywhere between 3-6x/week is the general range to fall into, but, in my experience, 4-5x/week is the sweet spot.

Because it gives you enough opportunities to train each muscle 2x/week while still providing 2-3 solid rest days.

And, yes, you need to be taking rest days away from intense exercise. They’re NOT optional.

Here are two of my favorite workout splits for muscle growth that you can follow:

• For 4x/week:
  • Day 1: Upper Body A
  • Day 2: Lower Body & Abs A
  • Day 3: Upper Body B
  • Day 4: Lower Body & Abs B

For this split you’d ideally have a rest day in between the first two workouts and the second two.

• For 5x/week:
  • Day 1: Push (Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps)
  • Day 2: Pull (Back & Biceps)
  • Day 3: Legs & Abs A
  • Day 4: Upper Body
  • Day 5 Legs & Abs B

For this split you’d ideally have a rest day in between Legs & Abs A and Upper Body.

EXERCISE SELECTION

This is another topic around training that most people overthink.

There’s a lot of talk on social media nowadays saying that you have to be very particular about what exercises you choose in a muscle building program.

The idea is that you want all of your exercises to be as “stable” as possible so that you’re able to target individual muscles more effectively.

Because the more stable an exercise is, the easier it is to take a specific muscle to failure.

Basically, a lot of these “optimal” content creators as they’re called say that you should be using *mostly* machines in the gym because they’re the most stable.

And while there’s a lot of truth to that, you don’t have to ONLY use machines in a muscle building program.

Not every exercise that you do has to be ultra-stable.

Meaning, even though a leg press is more stable than a barbell back squat, getting stronger over time on squats will surely grow your legs.

Personally, I like a nice balance of both free weights and machines because it keeps things a bit more interesting.

What That Looks Like in Practice

For example, here’s what a leg workout for muscle growth might look like (I’ll even throw in a form video of Bulgarian split squats here below):

1. Bulgarian Split Squats 3×8
2. DB RDL 3×8
3. Smith Machine Hip Thrust 3×10
4. Leg Extensions 3×15
5. Leg Curls 3×15
6. Kneeling Cable Crunches 3×15
7. Calf Raises 3×15

Notice how there’s some machines and some free weights?

At the end of the day, it’s important to pick good, basic tried and true exercises that people have used to decades.

But, and this is really important. Enjoyment matters too.

I guarantee you that you’ll train WAY harder and push closer to failure on exercises that you actually like than ones that you’re doing just because they’re “optimal”.

Remember, you gotta have fun in your training because muscle growth takes A WHILE.

And actually looking forward to your gym sessions makes you enjoy the process more.

And, the more you enjoy the process, the more you adhere to the plan.

And the more you adhere to the plan, the better your results will be.

SETS

Now that we’ve covered adherence, intensity, progressive overload, training frequency/workout splits, and exercise selection, we can get a little deeper into the specifics of how many sets and reps to do.

Let’s start with sets.

There’s a common misconception that more is always better.

The idea is that the more sets you do in your workouts as a whole, the better your results will be.

But, in reality, that’s just not the case.

Here’s why.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that intensity and training close to failure is crucial for muscle growth?

Well, the more sets you do on an exercise, the harder it is to continue bringing that level of intensity to each set.

Here’s What I Mean

Let’s say you’re doing leg press.

What’s more practical: bringing a high level of intensity to 2 sets or 4 sets?

Obviously 2 sets.

If you’re always doing 4 sets on every exercise, chances are it’s a bit overkill and you’d benefit from doing 2-3 sets per exercise while making them super high quality.

If you’re training each muscle group 2x/week and doing roughly 5-8 exercises per workout, 2-3 sets of each exercise should be plenty to elicit muscle growth.

Especially when you’re just starting out.

Get in the habit of making more out of fewer sets to maximize results so you don’t have to be in the gym for 2+ hours every session.

Because that gets mentally draining as well.

REPS

Here’s another super common question: “What’s the best rep range for muscle growth? Is it 8-10? Is it 10-12? What is it?”

On *most* of your exercises you want to be in roughly the 6-15 rep range.

I know that’s a very broad range, so I’ll break it down even further.

Ideally, each of your workouts will look something like this:

• You’ll start off with 1-2 heavier compound exercises in the 6-8 rep range (squats, shoulder press, deadlifts, etc)
• Then you’ll move on to 2-3 accessory exercises in the 8-12 rep range (lat pulldowns, leg press, lunges, etc)
• Then you’ll finish with 1-3 isolation exercises in the 10-15 rep range (curls, leg extensions, shoulder raises, etc)

As you can clearly see, the heavier compound exercises done towards the beginning of the workout should be a bit lower rep so you can move more weight.

Then, as the workout progresses, the reps go up and the weight comes down a bit.

A Huge Caveat

What I’m about to say is a really important concept for you to understand.

Even as the reps increase throughout the workout, the weight shouldn’t be super light.

Meaning, you shouldn’t be using these pink dumbbells here below just because it’s a higher rep set (obviously what you lift is relative to your strength level, but you get the gist of what I’m saying).

It’s just lighter compared to what you did earlier in the workout.

Because, well, it has to be.

As the number of reps goes up, the weight inherently has to get lighter.

But, even in higher rep ranges like the 12-15 rep range, the weight should be challenging enough to where the last 1-3 reps of the set feel VERY hard.

That never changes regardless of the rep range.

REST TIMES IN BETWEEN SETS

Similar to how different rep ranges correspond to different kinds of exercises, it’s the same with rest times.

First, I’ll say this: As a general rule of thumb, the longer you rest in between sets the better.

Because, during those pivotal rest periods in between sets, something called ATP (the energy source your body uses during heavy lifting) gets replenished.

This, along with resting your central nervous system in between sets, allows you to be as strong as possible on your next set.

If you barely rest in between sets, say for like 30 seconds, you’re simply selling yourself short in terms of how much you can lift on the next set.

Here are some general guidelines to follow:

• 2-4 mins for compound exercises at the beginning of the workout
• 2-3 mins for accessory exercises in the middle of the workout
• 90 secs – 2 mins for isolation exercises at the end of the workout

And, if you’re thinking right now, “Dude, those rest times are wayyyy too long. That’ll have me in the gym for 2+ hours! Who has the time for that?!”

Hold your horses there pal.

That’s not necessarily true.

Remember, like we touched on earlier, you don’t need to be doing copious amounts of exercises and sets.

Lift heavier and make the most out of fewer exercises and sets and trust me you’ll need those longer rest times.

And you still won’t be in the gym forever because you won’t be doing 69 sets per workout.

WHAT ABOUT CARDIO?

So far I’ve talked a ton about exercise, but I’ve only mentioned weight lifting.

So, that begs the question: where does cardio come into play?

And, more specifically, let’s tackle a huge topic of discussion around cardio and muscle gain: “Does cardio kill your gains? Does it prevent muscle growth??”

Candidly, this actually isn’t a ridiculous question to ask.

Because research has shown that, at a cellular level, there can be some interference between cardio and muscle gain.

But, that’s not a reason NOT to do cardio.

Because, whether or not cardio actually interferes with muscle growth depends on a number of factors.

But there are three in particular that are the most pressing.

First is frequency.

The more often you do moderate-higher intensity forms of cardio, the more it tends to interfere.

The second is duration.

The longer each moderate-high intensity cardio sessions lasts, the more it tends to interfere with muscle growth.

And the third is the type of cardio you’re doing.

A higher impact form of cardio like running with interfere more will muscle growth than a lower impact form of cardio like swimming or cycling or walking on an incline on the treadmill.

How To Incorporate It

I need to make myself ABUNDANTLY clear here.

Those three factors that I just mentioned are NOT valid reasons to avoid cardio altogether while in a muscle building phase.

You still need to take care of your heart health.

In my opinion, going into a dedicated muscle building phase should never result in you sacrificing your overall health.

So, here’s the compromise:

• Make sure to get *at least* 7,500 steps daily even while in a calorie surplus. You might have to increase your calories a bit to stay in a surplus with the additional calorie burn, but, in my opinion, it’s well worth it. Because the steps will allow you to maintain heart health during your muscle building phase.

Other than steps, I think incorporating high intensity forms of cardio during a muscle building phase is completely unnecessary.

Not only can it interfere with muscle growth, but it also be very taxing on the body and have a high recovery demand.

And you want that recovery to be allocated toward recovering from your weight lifting workouts, not high intensity cardio sessions.

One of the great things about steps is that they have a VERY low recovery demand.

So you can include walking in your routine alongside weight lifting without sacrificing your ability to recover.

The Ultimate Guide to Building Muscle: Nutrition 101

Now that we have all of the basic training information handled, it’s time to dive into everything you need to know about nutrition for building muscle.

And, again, just because training is the most important doesn’t mean that nutrition should be thrown out the window.

It’s still a very important piece of the muscle building pie (no pun intended).

In reality, I could write an entire article just on nutrition for muscle gain alone.

But, in this one, just like I did with the training section, I’ll highlight the basics and what I believe to be the “big rocks” that you need to emphasize in your diet to optimize muscle growth.

An Important Reminder

Before we get into everything you need to know about calories, protein, meal timing, etc I need to say this.

Everything I’m about to discuss is operating under the assumption that you’re already *relatively* lean and that, as a result, you’re prioritizing muscle growth right now in your fitness journey.

And, when I say relatively lean, I mean around 10-15% body fat for men and around 18-24% body fat for women.

Most people don’t know their exact body fat percentage (I don’t know mine either by the way), so you can use these pictures below as a general gauge of what yours might be.

If your body fat is higher than the numbers I just mentioned, it would behoove you (probably the first time I’ve used that word) to prioritize fat loss, get leaner, then go into a dedicated muscle building phase.

If you have weight to lose and/or fat loss is your main goal, go read some of my weight loss related articles to learn more about nutrition specifically to lose body fat.

CALORIES

Calories are king for weight loss.

While training is king for muscle growth, calories are not very far behind.

Ideally, to maximize muscle growth, you want to be in a small-to-moderate calorie surplus.

Ideally around 300-500 calories above your calorie maintenance.

I’ll explain why.

Muscle growth is what’s called a signal-dependent process.

Which is just a fancy way of saying that muscle growth gets optimized when your body is in an environment conducive to, well, muscle growth.

When you pair that environment (calorie surplus, adequate protein, and high quality sleep) with effective strength training you build muscle over time.

When you eat slightly above your calorie maintenance (the amount of calories needed to maintain your weight), you’re giving your body more than what it needs to operate on a daily basis.

Which makes it feel comfortable added new muscle tissue.

Because adding muscle isn’t really needed for survival.

So your body is only going to be willing to pack on new muscle if it’s getting an adequate amount of calories.

Because, at that point, everything else for survival is already taken care of (organ function, digestion, reproductive system, etc).

Anyway, all of that was an unnecessarily long way of saying that, if you want to optimize muscle growth, you do NOT want to be in a calorie deficit.

Because, if you are, your body is not going to want to allocate its resources to the “extracurricular” process of building muscle.

Calculating Calories for Muscle Growth

To figure out how many calories you need to eat, you first need to know what your calorie maintenance is.

The easiest way to figure it out is by googling “TDEE calculator” and using some of the first free calculators that pop up.

My recommendation is to spend a few minutes filling out a few of the calculators that pop up and average out the numbers they give you.

For example, if you use three calculators and one says your calorie maintenance is 2,600, another says it’s 2,530, and another says it’s 2,480, just average them out.

In this example, when you do that you get 2,537.

This is NOT a perfect number, but it gives you a VERY rough idea of around where your calorie maintenance is.

In this example let’s just use round numbers and say your maintenance is around 2,500 calories.

To optimize muscle growth, you’d want your calorie range to be around 2,800 – 3,000/day.

That puts you in the 300-500 calorie surplus that I mentioned.

Key note here: a surplus above that is way too much and has no additional benefit for muscle growth – it only leads to excess fat gain.

When in a muscle building phase, I recommend gaining no more than 1-2 pounds per month because anything more than that just means you’re putting on excess body fat.

Remember, muscle growth happens SLOWLY.

PROTEIN

Ah, protein.

Such a hot topic when it comes to muscle growth.

Is it true that you need to down protein shakes 69 times a day and carry around a Tupperware of chicken breast wherever you go to make gains?

No, not at all.

Protein Guidlines

As a general range to fall into, you want to eat anywhere between around 0.7-1 gram of protein per pound of body weight.

For example, if you currently weigh 170lbs and want to build muscle, you’d want to eat anywhere between 120-170g of protein per day.

Again, yes, that’s a big range.

If you want to stay on the higher side of that range that’s great, but don’t hyper-obsess about hitting your exact protein intake on the dot every single day.

Consistency always trumps perfection.

What matters most is your total daily protein intake. Protein timing doesn’t matter *as much* as a lot of people think.

Although, we’ll touch more on meal timing in a bit.

I do recommend spacing out your protein intake a bit, just to make eating protein in general a lot easier.

Having to get 100+ grams of protein in at a single meal can be very uncomfortable.

Click here for 3 tips on how to get more protein in your diet.

Depending on your preferences and your overall protein target, eating anywhere between 20-50g of protein per meal is usually the sweet spot for most people.

Here’s a quick pro tip: Try your best to get at least 20-30 grams of protein in each day at breakfast.

It makes working towards your daily protein target SO MUCH EASIER so you’re not having to play catch up at night.

CARBS AND FATS

Similar to fat loss, when to comes to muscle growth, as long as your calories and protein are in check, the specific ratio of carbs and fats in your diet doesn’t matter a ton.

As in, you don’t HAVE to track carbs and fats if you don’t want to.

Although, I will say this.

In a calorie surplus it’s easier for dietary fat to be stored as body fat than it is for carbohydrates to be stored as body fat.

So it’s worth at least paying attention to how much dietary fat you’re eating.

Because, if you’re downing peanut butter all day long to get your calories in, your fat intake will shoot through the roof.

Not to mention that a high dietary fat intake can mess with digestion.

Calculating Your Macros

If you’re tracking your calories on a free app like MyFitnessPal and you want to have a dietary fat intake to aim for, I recommend anywhere between 0.3-0.5x your body weight in pounds.

You can decide where you want to fall in that range.

Let’s run through a hypothetical situation here.

Let’s use the example we already started earlier and say you currently weigh 170lbs.

• 170lbs X 0.4 = 68g of fat per day

So, let’s do a quick recap.

So far you’re aiming for 3,000 calories, 150g of protein (around the middle of the protein range we talked about), and 68g of fat.

So, where does that leave carbs?

Well, it’s simple. You fill in the rest of your calories with carbs.

Here’s the simple math on how that works.

There are:

• 4 cals in a gram of protein
• 4 cals in a gram of carbs
• 9 cals in a gram of fat

So:

• 150g of protein x 4 = 600 cals worth of protein
• 68g of fat x 9 = 612 cals worth of fat

Stay with me here. Now we’re at a total of 1,212 calories.

Now we just subtract that total from our overall calorie goal to find out what our carb intake should be.

• 3,000 – 1,212 = 1,788
• 1,788/4 (4 cals in a gram of carbs) = 447g of carbs (let’s round up to 450g)

So, for this specific example, our calories and macros are as follows:

• calories: 3,000
• fat: 68g
• carbs: 450g
• protein: 150g

Again, you could just track calories and protein (that’s what I’ve mainly done personally and with most of my online coaching clients).

But, if you want to track calories and all three macros, you now know how to set that up.

MEAL TIMING

Meal timing isn’t something that you need to put a ton of thought into – calories and protein being in check is WAY more important.

But, with that said, pre and post workout nutrition can have a big impact on training performance so it’s worth looking at.

Pre-Workout Nutrition

The goal is to have as much energy for your workouts as possible, right?

This is where carbs come into play.

When you eat carbs, they get broken down into glucose that enters your bloodstream and gets shuttled into your muscle cells via insulin to be stored as glycogen.

So, just by eating a decent amount of carbs throughout the day, you’re “filling up” your glycogen stores to be used as energy in your workouts.

That said, it can’t hurt to have some pre-workout carbs to “top off” your glycogen stores and have additional carbs shuttling into the muscles you’re about to train.

ESPECIALLY if you work out first thing in the morning.

For that reason, you have two main options for pre-workout nutrition:

Option 1: Small Pre-Workout Snack

Have a small, lower calorie pre-workout snack ~30 minutes before training where you’re eating a quick digesting carb that’s lower in fat and fiber.

This allows those carbs to be easily shuttled into your muscles by the time you get going with your workout.

A few examples of this kind of pre-workout snack:

• a banana with 1 scoop of a whey protein powder on the side
• a serving of cereal by itself OR with nonfat milk or a whey protein shake
• a simple sugar like candy (gummy bears, Rice Krispies Treats, etc)
  • If you want to have pre-workout carbs every time you train, I’d opt for the piece of fruit or even the cereal over the candy most of the time

Option 2: A Larger Pre-Workout Meal 60-120 Minutes Pre-Workout

This option would involve eating more of an actual full meal pre-workout.

With this kind of meal, it isn’t just about the carbs; It’s also about the protein.

Because, since protein takes several hours to digest and releases amino acids into the bloodstream gradually over that time, this meal will fuel our “protein needs” for the next several hours.

But, you still want to keep fats on the lower side because you don’t want to feel sluggish for your workout.

This kind of meal should have less than 20g of fat. Ideally closer to 10g.

A few examples of this kind of pre-workout meal:

• bowl of oatmeal with a sliced banana and 1/2 tbsp of peanut butter and a protein shake on the side (or mixed into the oatmeal)
• 4oz of 93/7 ground turkey and 1-2 cups of cooked white rice with a low calorie sauce on top (Frank’s Red Hot is one of my favorites)

The bigger the meal, the better it is to have it 1 1/2-2 hours pre-workout rather than 30-60 minutes pre-workout.

Post-Workout Nutrition

The million dollar question surrounding post-workout nutrition: “Is the anabolic window real? Do I have to have a protein shake within 30 minutes of finishing my workout or else I’ll lose all my gains??!”

The notion that you *need* to have 20-30 grams of protein immediately post workout is largely a myth.

In fact, this was pretty much debunked in 2013 in the pretty groundbreaking paper “Nutrient timing revisited: is there a post exercise anabolic window?”

In the paper, Aragon and Schoenfeld argued that nutrient timing doesn’t matter *as much* as people once thought.

That said, there was a key caveat here that they mentioned.

In the article they write, “pre- and post-exercise meals should not be separated by more than approximately 3-4 hours, given a typical resistance training bout lasting 45-90 minutes.”

The only exception being that if you’re eating a larger pre-workout meal that has protein AND other nutrients like fat, carbs, and fiber, then you don’t need to have protein for another 5-6 hours.

The bottom line is this: if you had a pre-workout meal with call it at least 20-25g of protein, you really don’t need to worry about having protein again for roughly another 3-5 hours.

Which means you don’t have to slam a protein shake immediately after the last set of your workout.

However, if you train fasted, that means you didn’t get any protein in pre-workout.

Which means you should make it a priority to get at the very least 20g of protein in as quickly as you can post-workout (obviously within reason).

But, remember, when it comes to protein the MOST important variable is how many total grams you eat in a day.

Why Having Protein Post-Workout is Helpful for Muscle Growth

Whether you train fasted, have a big pre-workout meal, or anything in-between, I think it makes sense to have protein within about ~90 minutes of finishing your workout.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Having something like a protein shake post-workout makes hitting your overall protein goal for the day a lot easier
• Depending on how much you eat in one sitting, protein might take anywhere between ~3-5 hours to fully digest. So, let’s say you ate a chicken and rice meal 2 hours before training that had 40g of protein. Then you lifted for an hour. Now, at the end of your workout, it’s been 3 hours since your last protein feeding. So it probably makes sense to have protein again to get more amino acids circulating in your bloodstream to spike muscle protein synthesis (the process of repairing and building new muscle).

A general rule of thumb on pre and post workout nutrition: Having protein pre-workout makes having protein post-workout *less* important because once your workout is over it’s still digesting.

That said, the longer it’s been since you’ve had protein, the more important it is to get some more in your body sooner rather than later.

The Ultimate Guide to Building Muscle: Recovery 101

I’d be remiss if I were to write an entire article on muscle growth without mentioning one of the most important components of all of this that gets overlooked by way too many people: sleep.

What you have to understand about muscle growth is that you don’t actually build muscle while you’re lifting weights.

In fact, when you lift, muscle damages occurs by way of these little micro-tears in your muscle fibers (don’t worry, it’s 100% normal and sounds way scarier than it actually is).

Anyway, because you’re creating this muscle damage in the gym, you have to recover from that damage at some point or else muscle growth won’t happen.

And sleep is when so much of that recovery happens.

Here’s how it works.

Stress, Recovery, Adaptation

Every time you lift weights, you’re putting your muscles under a stressor (i.e. the heavy lifting that you’re doing).

Then, when you consistently get *at least* 7 hours of high-quality sleep, you’re putting your body in the environment necessary to recover from that stressor.

Then, and only then, after sleep is taken care of can the adaptation occur.

And that’s the part you really care about – the adaptation IS muscle growth.

But here’s the kicker with all of this.

Both the stressor and the recovery need to take place for the adaptation to occur.

Meaning, if you lift weights but don’t get enough sleep, only half of the equation is accounted for, so results won’t be as good.

On the other hand, if you get great sleep but you never lift weights, once again only half of the equation for muscle growth is being accounted for.

I think you get the point.

You need both factors to be working in tandem for the adaptation (muscle growth) to occur.

If one of them is thrown off, the whole thing is thrown off.

This is why you can’t just be the guy or girl working your tail off in the gym while not getting good sleep.

The more you sacrifice sleep, the more you sacrifice muscle growth.

What About Supplements?

Notice how I’ve written an entire, in-depth article on muscle growth while barely touching on the topic of supplements?

And there’s a very deliberate reason for that.

99% of your results will come from hard work in the gym, quality nutrition, and sufficient sleep.

You don’t *need* supplements. At all.

In fact, most supplements on the market are probably a waste of money.

You’d be better off putting that money toward a gym membership, groceries, or hiring a coach.

And, given that this article is already long enough as it is, I won’t dive into the specifics on every single supplement on the market.

I will however briefly mention the handful of supplements that are worth buying if you want to.

A Few of the Best

Again, none of these are necessary, but if you have the disposable income these are a few of your best options:

• Whey Protein Powder: I already touched on this earlier, but having a good protein powder on hand can make hitting your daily protein target much easier. Most protein powders have around 20-30g of protein per scoop, so having 1-2 scoops/day can be a helpful tool in your muscle building toolbox.
• Creatine Monohydrate: Without getting too much into the science on this, creatine helps regenerate ATP (our muscle’s energy source) in-between sets. Which can potentially help you squeeze out a couple more reps especially in the 5-10 rep range. It’s one of the most studied, proven supplements on the market and has decades of research to support its efficacy. 5g/day is enough to fully saturate your muscle cells for the best effect.
• Pre-Workout: I personally use a pre-workout supplement most of the time, mainly for the caffeine. Although, I make sure to buy pre-workouts that are relatively lower in caffeine (around 100ish mg) because I’m mindful of my overall caffeine intake for the day. Yes, there are other ingredients in most pre-workouts that can have performance benefits (beta alanine, L-citrulline, etc). That said, having a cup of coffee pre-workout is enough for most people just to get the energy-boosting benefits of caffeine.

Wrapping Things Up

Phew! There ya have it! That was a long article!

I realize that I just threw A TON of information at you at once, but I hope you got a lot out of this and now have a better understanding of exactly how to build muscle.

Feel free to continue coming back to this article multiple times to refer to the specifics around training, nutrition, recovery, etc.

It’s okay if you weren’t able to digest everything all at once!

And, if after reading this you feel like all the information is too daunting for you and you’d like to have someone to take all of the guesswork out of the equation, you can apply to my 1:1 online coaching program right here.

Other than that, feel free to reach out to me with any questions and we’ll chat soon!

-Dylan