Column 14 | Mass needs energy

ANSWER

The situation you describe is representative of all athletes who experience something similar at some point: you want to progress, but you don't know exactly what to change, how to train and eat to continue to make progress. With my now over 17 years of experience in bodybuilding, I want to try to help you.

There are two aspects you need to consider for a successful mass phase: nutrition and training, whereby in my opinion nutrition accounts for about 60 percent and training 40 percent - if you leave out all other components such as genetics, determination and so on.

FOOD

Given your body weight and training schedule, you should consume around 3,000 calories to avoid gaining or losing weight. Since your goal is to gain mass, you need to increase this by another 500 calories - this creates the basis for building muscle.

On average, that's 3500 calories per day. If you don't see much weight gain after about two weeks, increase to 3800 to 4000 calories until you see an increase in body weight.

The daily calorie distribution of the nutrients needed for muscle building in the first eight weeks is as follows:

You divide these nutrients into five to six meals: three large meals (morning, lunch and evening) and two to three smaller snacks. The most important meals of the day include breakfast and post-workout nutrition, i.e. the first meal after training. In the morning, for example, you can eat a variant of the ASF (Andreas standard breakfast). You can find more information about this in my column MORE MUSCLES WITHOUT MEAT or under the link RECIPES .

Use supplements for post-workout nutrition because they provide the body with the nutrients it needs quickly and easily, and that's what it's all about after training.

Solid food, on the other hand, is not absorbed quickly enough. And the faster the appropriate nutrients are made available, the more effectively muscle building works, as the muscle cells can absorb the nutrients much better immediately after training than would be the case hours later.

I recommend the following shake based on your body weight:

* particularly suitable for building muscle

With these tips, you should be prepared to make the build-up phase a success in terms of nutrition. Now let's move on to the second important part: training.

THE WORKOUT

Always follow these basic rules when doing your workouts:

Rule 1: max. ten sets for large muscle groups, max. six sets for small
Rule 2: high intensity - until muscle failure
Rule 3: eight to twelve repetitions per set
Rule 4: maximum 60 minutes training duration
Rule 5: slow eccentric movement of one repetition
Rule 6: clean execution without deception

Your idea of ​​a 4-split is exactly right to get the most out of your body. To do this, I recommend the following division of muscle groups:

Monday: Breast
Tuesday: Legs, calves and stomach
Wednesday: Break
Thursday: Shoulders and triceps
Friday: Back and biceps
Saturday: Break
Sunday: Break

For further useful training basics and training information, I can also highly recommend the following article: THE TRAINING BASICS

Basic exercises are highly recommended. However, make sure that you do them first and then move on to isolation exercises.

All too often you see in the gym that bodybuilders do isolation exercises before the compound exercises, which is nonsense because compound exercises require much more strength. This rule is only "broken" when a strong muscle group is to be pre-stressed in favor of a weaker one in order to create muscular balance. Only in this case do isolation exercises at the beginning of the workout make sense - but only with a moderate weight and never to the point of muscle failure.