The Briefest “How to Build Muscle” Article You’ll Probably Ever Read
Packing the latest research and 5+ years of experience into 2 minutes
Forget intros, let’s dive right in:
- Sleep 8+ Hours Every Night. By impeding muscle recovery, reducing testosterone, and increasing cortisol, sleep deprivation will wreck your progress. Sleep is KING for building muscle.
- Implement Progressive Overload: Your body builds muscle and strength as adaptations to the increasing demands placed on it — through higher reps, sets, or weights.
- Train Every Muscle Group at Least Twice a Week. Since our muscles recover within 48 to 72 hours, training them twice a week is superior to only once. Workout splits like PPL and UL can help with this.
- Eat At Least 0.8g of Protein per Pound of Your Body Weight Every Day. Protein is the building block of your muscles, bones, and joints. Plus, it’s crucial for tissue repair.
- Track Your Workouts. Remember progressive overload? To achieve it effectively, track your workouts. And every session, aim to beat your past one — even if it’s by a single rep in one set.
- Be in A Calorie Surplus. While it’s possible to build muscle while in a deficit, it won’t be optimal. Find your TDEE, add 250 to 300 calories to it, and make that your daily goal — use MyFitnessPal for tracking.
- Prioritize Compound Lifts, mainly barbell squats, deadlifts, rows, weighted pullups, overhead presses, and bench presses. Thanks to insane loading capability and multi-muscle involvement, they provide the most bang for your buck.
- There’s No “Perfect” Rep Range. The 8–12 “magical” rep range is a myth. Mix up reps — prefer high (12 to 20) reps for isolation exercises and low (4 to 8) reps for compounds.
- Train (Very) Close to Failure. If you’re breezing through your workouts, you’re not training hard enough. When going hard, even a set of bicep curls will get you sweating.
- Perform “Perfect” Reps. To take advantage of all 3 major muscle-building mechanisms, use perfect reps — explode the positive, pause at peak contraction, and control the negative.
- The Only 3 Supplements Worth Considering. Supplements aren’t magical, they just supplement your diet, sleep, and workouts. Even then, only caffeine, creatine, and whey protein have ample research backing and are worth using.
- Be Patient. As a natural lifter, gaining muscle is an excruciatingly slow process. So stay put — enjoy your workouts, keep snapping pictures, and let the results automatically follow.
Edit 1: One of the most legit fitness YouTubers on the planet Geoffrey Verity Schofield turned this article into a video. Go check it out as he has quite a few valuable points to add.