Muscle-Building Tips and Advice for the Natural Bodybuilder In my last essay on how to gain mass fast, I mentioned that the secret just might be getting stronger on a handful of exercises. (This essay, I suppose, is just an extension of that last one.) In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m right. If you’re a natural bodybuilder, then the one thing more important than any other is to get strong on a dozen or so exercises, with your strength-focus in roughly the 5 to 10 rep range. One approach is to achieve this is to focus on movements over muscles . In other words, instead of going to the gym and “obliterating” or “destroying” (why do bodybuilders always seem to use military-sounding jargon for a lot of their training) your quad muscles with endless sets of leg extensions, leg presses, and machine whatever, how about just trying to get stronger on the squat? Same goes for the...
I received a question the other day via email. It was succinct and to the point—and, when first received, I thought a bit generic. “What’s the easiest way to gain mass fast?” I get quite a bit of questions, and they are usually more in depth. Most of them, truth be told, are the opposite of this question. I find that a good many lifters have too many questions, usually because they overthink things too much or they are somehow searching for the “perfect” workout program (which doesn’t exist, by the way). In the case of this questioner, I responded with a small litany of “the usual” advice for someone in need of quick mass gains: full-body workouts, compound movements, high-frequency training, the “big 4,” plenty of calories, lots of protein… yada, yada, yada. Then last night, while I was watching one of those cozy little British murder mysteries on PBS and trying my absolute best to not...