Common questions

What is the best and most efficient method of building muscle?

In short: lift weights, eat a lot. Be careful: when you first start to exercise, you might notice that you’re hungrier than usual. You must increase the amount of food you eat (your IN) more than just a little, because your newfound habit of exercising will also raise your DCE. Thus, if you increase your DCI only a little, it will just compensate for the increased DCE: your still in a neutral caloric balance! Conclusion: don’t just eat more than you normally would eat a lot more.

I’ve been training to build muscle for almost a year. As you said, I grew hungrier and I ate more, and I gained muscle. However, after some time into my training, my muscle building has come to a stop. What’s going on?

This situation might be related to the training program itself. If you’ve been doing the same work-out for a year, you might want to change the
exercise/set/repetition scheme, according to the principle of variation, which states that your body adapts to weightlifting stress after about 1-2 months. Nonetheless, if your body weight remained stable for the past few months, one thing is certain: you are in a neutral caloric balance. So bump your food intake up a little you might just start to build muscle again. If you don’t (ie. you’re gaining fat), chances are the problem is the way you train.

No matter how hard I train, I don’t think I’m gaining muscle mass. My gym trainers have said that I may be a “hard gainer”. Could this be the reason behind it?

Yes, that could be. The individual response to weight lifting stimulus varies: some people grow easily, some don’t. Still, before you surrender, try to up your food intake. Many “hardgainers” just have very active metabolism, and thus high daily caloric expense. If you’re very lean and can’t seem to put on weight, that may be you. So don’t just up your IN a little: live by these two winning quotes: “If I’m not chewing, I’m not growing” (John Berardi) and “Every day is a long meal”.

I want to burn fat, but there are so many ways. What do you suggest?

In short: do exercise, reduce your food intake. Exercise should increase your DCE, leading to a negative caloric balance. This balance can be made even more negative by reducing your DCI. Be careful tough: a good rate of weight loss to aim for is around 1 to 2 pounds or 1 % of your body weight per week. Anymore than that and you’re at risk of wasting muscle mass, not just fat. Remember,
you want to keep your muscle mass because, over time, more muscle means a higher resting metabolic rate, and thus a higher daily calorie expenditure (DCE).