Column 19 | Muscle building tips

ANSWER

Four kilos of weight gain in three years is very little. The fault lies with your training and/or your diet. Even if you say that you eat well, such an assessment is subjective.

I receive requests for advice every day, and almost all athletes think that they eat enough, healthily and in a targeted manner. It usually turns out that they eat two rolls, three slices of smoked ham and a cup of coffee for breakfast, for example. It goes without saying that this has nothing to do with a performance-oriented diet and will therefore be unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, you haven't given me any precise information about what you currently eat and how you train. So I can only answer your question in very general terms. Nevertheless, this will definitely help you. Below I want to give you a few tips about nutrition and training.

FOOD

I recommend that you keep a food diary. If you have a goal but don't know where you are, how are you going to reach your goal? A food diary will help you with this. It will also show you what you need to change to get closer to your goal. Secondly, I recommend that you get a household scale so that you know exactly how much of a certain food you are eating. And thirdly, get a blender so that you can easily and quickly prepare shakes for in-between meals.

Based on your body weight, stick to the following values ​​per day (on average):

Now it becomes clear why a food diary is important. Because only then can you know how much you need to eat to reach these values. I recommend the PENDULUM DIET to maintain your metabolism and thus ensure a constant increase in muscle mass. More information on NUTRITION can also be found in the corresponding section on this page. When it comes to nutritional supplements, it's all about taking the right supplements at the right time. The first meal after training is the most important meal of the day. Based on your current body weight, it should look like this:

THE WORKOUT

In practice, it is often seen that most athletes train too much and too often, following the motto "more brings more". However, training only serves to provide stimulation.

Instead, the recovery phase is there to help a muscle grow. The shorter the training, the better. A workout should therefore never last longer than 60 minutes and should not include too many sets: a maximum of ten sets for large muscle groups and six sets for small ones.

Make sure to train cleanly and without momentum to only stress the muscle being trained and avoid injury. An explosive positive movement on the repetition followed by a slow negative movement is the best and fastest way to stimulate the muscle and its growth.

Although the exercises should be changed regularly, there is no rule for this. Sometimes it makes sense to change exercises after just four weeks - especially if they cause pain. Sometimes, however, it makes sense to continue with exercises for a longer period of time - precisely when sufficient success can still be achieved with them.

However, always remember to do heavy training in a rep range of eight to twelve to build maximum muscle mass.