Get Big Quick

 

     If you have been involved in the iron game for even a little while, you probably know most of the “get big advice.”  Stuff such as “eat a lot of protein and calories,” “train heavy on the big lifts,” “get plenty of rest and recovery,” and other such “basic” advice can be found in any number of articles, YouTube videos, or Facebook posts.  And most of it is pretty good and fairly sound—I’ve written plenty of such articles covering similar material here on the blog and I will continue to do so.  But in this essay, I want to do something just a little bit different.  Here, I want to look at some various tips, training ideas, and nutritional hacks that are not your run-of-the-mill suggestions.  Most of these are not to be used long-term, but they can be quite useful when utilized over a short period of time, such as one training cycle or even over the course of only a few weeks.

     Before we get started outright, let me add something about the last sentence above.  There are times for moderation.  In fact, most of the training year, you should do things in moderation.  But there are other times—such as when you really want to attack your fat loss or focus on gaining as much muscle as you can as quickly as possible, which is what we’ll be discussing here—when moderation needs to go out the window and you need to “burn the ships.”  The following advice is for such times.

Hard, Heavy, and Frequent

     I’m a fan of high-frequency training.  I’ve written numerous articles and essays on why I believe it to be the most effective form of lifting for the majority of trainees.  But in order for HFT to work over the long haul, either volume or intensity must be greatly reduced so the lifter can put in 3 or more sessions (minimum!) weekly on the same lift or bodypart.  What you generally don’t want to do is combine high frequency with high volume and high intensity.  I write “generally” because, in this case, that’s exactly what I do want you to utilize.

     I recommend a couple of options.  First, you can train your entire body 5 days a week.  Second, you can do a two-way split, training half of your body one day and the other half the next on a 6-on, 1-off split.

     If you go with the first option, then follow a template similar to what you might use on an “easy strength” program but do several more sets so that each day is hard.  You could do, say, squats, bench presses, chins, power cleans, overhead presses, and curls for 5 sets of 3 to5 reps on each exercise on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.  Just take off on Thursday and Saturday.  Utilize a weight on each exercise where the first couple of sets you know you can get the reps you’re shooting for, be it 3, 4, or 5 reps, but the final 2 to 3 sets are tough.

     If you go with the 2^nd option, then do 5 to 7 sets of 5 to 7 reps on each exercise for each day.  If you utilize this split, train more the movement over the muscle.  One day could be squats, power cleans, and overhead presses.  The second day can be bench presses, chins, and barbell curls.  As with the first option, select a weight on each movement where you’re pretty sure you can get all the reps on the first couple of sets, but the final 3 to 5 sets are tough as hell.

     Eat as much food as you can and shoot for 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight every single day.  You will need the extra calories and the extra protein.  Without it, I doubt you’d be able to “survive” a 4-to-6-week training cycle.  But that’s the goal­—stick with it for 4 to 6 weeks.  If you do it as prescribed, and eat the way I have recommended, then you might just be amazed by the results.

     The other key to making this work is to spend a couple to three weeks before starting the program doing very little.  This way, your body will be better prepared to handle all the hard work.

     Also, you may grow even more muscle once you stop the program and return to kinder, “gentler” training program.

Do the Complete Opposite

     In the early to mid ‘90s, my training partner Dusty and I worked out using the “common” bodybuilding style of training where we typically did 3 to 4 exercises per bodypart for 3 to 4 sets each using anywhere from 6 to 12 reps on each exercise.  Then one day, after I read an article by Greg Zulak on high-set, low-rep training—10 to 15 set of 2 to 3 reps—we decided to try that for an arm workout.  We did barbell curls for 15 sets of 3 reps.  The next day, our arms were more sore than they had been in a year or more.  We knew that, at the very least, we had provided a unique stimulus for our arms.  We spent a few weeks training in that manner on all our bodyparts, doing one exercise per muscle for 15 sets of 2 to 3 reps.  Our bodies responded well, I believe, because we did the complete opposite training-wise than anything we had used before that.

     Whatever style of training you typically do, spend a few weeks—at least three, four is probably ideal—doing the complete opposite.  Do you do a one bodypart a week split?  Then switch over to a 3 days a week, full-body workout program for a month.  Do you typically do 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 5 reps on your movements?  Then spend a few weeks utilizing sets with reps of 20 or more.

The Ginger Ale and Cream Weight-Gain Technique

     No matter how you train—even if you don’t use my two suggestions above—you won’t be able to get big quick if you don’t consume enough calories.  A lot of thin lifters don’t have a problem following the training programs, but they do have an issue with eating enough calories each and every day for get-big-quick programs to work.  So, if this is you, then this tip and the ones that follow should help you get in the daily calories needed.

     When Vince Gironda had a skinny bodybuilder who had trouble eating enough food to gain weight, he had an interesting nutritional technique.  Between meals, he had these bodybuilders consume a drink of equal parts ginger ale and heavy cream.  A quart of heavy cream has over 3,000 calories!  So you can see how easy it would be to consume quite a bit of calories over the course of a day.  6 ounces of heavy cream has around 600 calories, so if you had 3 drinks a day consisting of 6oz cream and 6oz of ginger ale, your calories will quickly skyrocket.  But there’s more to it than that.  The ginger ale helps to soothe the stomach, as ginger is always good for an upset stomach, making the high number of calories from the cream easier to digest.  Also, the drink is made up entirely of fat from the cream and simple carbs from the soda.  And if I know one thing from living in the Deep South of Alabama, when folks combine simple sugars with a lot of saturated fat, they gain weight!  Point is, if you’re having trouble packing on the pounds, drink 3 ginger ale-and-cream sodas between 3 meals, and make the meals heavy on carbs, fat, and protein.  Which kinda, sorta brings us around to my next tip…

Eat a LOT of Carbs

     Carbs get a bad rap sometimes in the bodybuilding, strength-training community.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  If you need to get lean, which is, let’s admit, quite a few of the folks that take up lifting in the first place, then you do need to stay away from carbs, especially simple ones.  But if you need to gain weight, then the opposite is true.  If you’re going to get big quick, carbs are a necessity.

     Get-big diets for bodybuilders have always contained plenty of carbohydrates.  They have done so since the so-called “silver era” of bodybuilding, starting in the late ‘30s, when lifters began consuming a gallon of milk a day along with meals loaded with starches.  A gallon of milk alone has around 125 grams of carbohydrates (depending on the brand or type of milk).  When you combine that with plenty of breads, pastas, potatoes, and rice, you will gain weight.

     Don’t skimp out on the fat and protein, either.  Eating a lot of all of the macronutrients together is as sure-fire of a way to get big quick as anything else!

Get Big with Slim Fast

     In high school, I had an occasional workout partner whose brother was a bit, well, how should I put it, rotund.  He decided that he was going to lose weight by using that bastion of ‘90s weight-loss supplement drinks known as Slim Fast.  If you’re not familiar with how Slim Fast worked, you were supposed to follow the Slim Fast diet, which consisted of replacing your breakfast and lunch meals with a Slim Fast shake, then for dinner, you just ate whatever you wanted, within reason.

     After a few weeks on the diet, he complained to us that it just wasn’t working.  In fact, he said that it had done the opposite.  He actually gained 10 pounds.  Then came the revelation.  We asked him what he was putting in the shake.  “Oh, just some milk, ice cream, maybe a banana or two, and sometimes some chocolate syrup.”  I tried to keep from laughing.  My friend, however, couldn’t stop laughing at his brother’s new diet.  Turns out, Slim Fast can be quite handy at quick weight gain.

     I’m not telling you to go out and buy a tub of Slim Fast in order to repeat my friend’s brother’s stupidity.  I am saying, however, that, if you have trouble eating, you can gain weight by replacing those meals with some homemade get-big protein milkshakes.  I’ve written about these before in other posts, but here are a couple weight-gain shakes that can easily help you pack on the pounds.  I originally wrote about these over 30 years ago in the pages of IronMan magazine in an article entitled “Raw Mass: Your Guide to Getting Huge and Strong.”  Here they are:

The Strawberry Bomber

16 ounces milk

½ cup nonfat milk powder

½ cup fresh strawberries

½ cup vanilla ice cream

Vanilla Protein Drink

16 ounces milk

2 eggs

½ cup nonfat milk powder

1 banana

½ cup vanilla ice cream

     Both of these easy-to-make drinks have around 80 grams of protein and between 1,000 to 1,100 calories.  They’re good examples of the sort of mass-gaining shakes you can create even if you’re on a limited budget or simply don’t have time to make one of your meals.  If you have trouble getting them down at first, then simply split the drinks in half.  Drink ½ of the shake, and wait a couple of hours, and have the other half—an easy

replacement for two meals.

Final Thoughts

     If you have trouble packing on the mass and need a get-big quick scheme, then try some of my tips here.  Combine one of the workout tips with one of the nutrition tips and go at it—moderation be damned—for 4 to 6 weeks.  Your weight-gaining problems ought to be a thing of the past.