HOW DO YOU BUILD LEAN MUSCLE?
Muscle building can only be achieved by respecting certain principles: adapt your diet and adapt your training! We are not all equal. We will all react differently to a particular training program and a particular diet. Get to know your differences so that you can make as few mistakes as possible.
And check that you're on the right track! If you're progressing well, it's because you've found what suits you! If you're no longer making progress, it's time to change your habits. To do this, don't hesitate to take regular measurements: your weight, your arm, leg and chest measurements and also your body fat percentage will give you precise indications of your progress. To build good muscle, you should also rely on a good coach to measure you and make sure you're progressing. Of course, there's no such thing as a miracle coach! It's the 2 of you working together that will ensure your success.
Building muscle is sometimes a long process: a good progression in muscle mass will be around 3 kilos of dry muscle per year. However, you may gain a little more when you're just starting out, or when you've just finished a period of food restriction in order to dry out, or in special circumstances.
GAINING MUSCLE MASS OR BUILDING MUSCLE!
The aim is obviously not to gain weight, but muscle. However, most of the time, an increase in muscle mass is also accompanied by an increase in fat. If this wasn't the case, athletes would be building muscle before a competition.
What everyone wants is to put on as little fat as possible while putting on as much muscle as possible, and this can only be achieved by controlling your progress and keeping your calorie intake slightly above your basal metabolic rate.
This is the number of calories your body needs to meet its needs over the course of a day. As you can see, gaining lean body mass is not easy.
But there are a few rules that can help. Your morphological differences can also guide your progress:
If you're Endomorph, you tend to put on weight very quickly, and even fat. You therefore need to keep any deviations to a minimum and be very careful not to exceed your basal metabolic rate uncontrollably.
If you're a Mesomorph, you gain muscle easily and not too much fat. Even if you don't do any sport, you'll look muscular (yes, I know, that's not fair) and you'll be able to add a few more calories to your muscle-building process, which will remain effective most of the time.
If you're Ectomorph, you'll stay thin, even skinny, whatever you do and you'll find it harder to put on weight whatever you eat. Even deviations will only help you substantially. So you can go very high on calories without worrying about a layer of fat covering your tummy. But be careful: as you get older, you'll stay slim, but you'll risk gaining a belly if you're not too careful.
IS MY BODY TYPE THE ONLY FACTOR IN MUSCLE GAIN?
Of course, if everyone could be assigned to a specific body type, you'd think it would make it easier to progress. Unfortunately, most of us depend on 2 morphological categories. It is very rare to see a perfect mesomorph or ectomorph.
Often an individual will be more mesomorph than endomorph but will also have certain characteristics of this morphological category.
It is therefore illusory to think that building muscle mass will be a walk in the park. It will be more like an obstacle course!
You'll need to pay attention to your diet, which may change from year to year as your body changes too. You'll have to pay attention to your training and look at what benefits you most, but also modify it regularly and adapt your dietary supplements to your progress.
If you take it seriously, you'll learn something that will serve you for the rest of your life: the power to question yourself! Look how many lives a champion like Arnold has lived! Sport, cinema, politics, re-cinema, he's done it all. Each of his careers is the result of questioning himself. And it's in his sport that he has acquired this quality! He knows all about gaining lean mass and controlling his body!
AVOID THE "MIRACLES" OF SOCIAL MEDIA!
t's easy to find miracle-workers on the networks: they'll be able to help you gain lean body mass simply by snapping their fingers! Miracles don't exist!
Some people will even post photos of their lean physique all year round, even though they've only been dry for one month of the year. But for the sake of their image, they'll post photos of their fit bodies all year round.
This will allow them to tell their fans that they are the best athletes, the best coaches, when it's all just window dressing.
It's often because of practices like this that the concept of gaining dry mass is so overused and that people think it's so easy to gain 10 kilos of lean muscle.
Bodybuilding, weight training and power training are synonymous, but if you want visible results, you absolutely must add nutrition to your training. If you don't, you won't be able to put on any dry muscle, and maybe no muscle at all? But if you see that your weights are going up, that your training is becoming more and more intense, even if your muscle volume doesn't change, you're on the way to progress, and it's up to you to adapt it by refining it and trying to gain lean muscle.
We're going to do our best to help you.
