In part 1 of this blog, I discussed the changes in my eating habits that had to take place to gain muscle on a vegan diet. Part 2 will focus on the training program I used. Before we go any further, I feel the need to explain something to the novices who might read this.
There are definitely people out there who trained differently than I do, and saw good progress. I'm not saying this is the only way to go, but I am saying that this is effective for anyone. There are other training methods that work for certain people who are either genetic outliers or using performance-enhancing drugs, but those methods won't work nearly as well for natural lifters who aren't freaks. Just like my previous post, if you are on steroids none of what I say here really applies to you. Also, this is written with novices in mind. Programming for a novice is completely different from programming for an intermediate or advanced lifter; the programs will not look even remotely similar. DO NOT try to jump straight into some ridiculously high-volume 6-days-per-week split you found on some bodybuilding forum. The only people that notably benefit from programs like that are guys who have either been lifting for years, or are on steroids. You'll make some progress, but not nearly as much as you would following a novice program. It's simply not appropriate for a novice. I'll explain why when we get into the details of the programs I've used.
I want to make sure whoever is reading this understands something:
If you follow a good weight training program and eat at a calorie surplus, you
can expect to gain about a pound of muscle per week. Any weight you gain in
addition to that is going to be pretty much all fat. Yes, it is slow.
But there are no healthy shortcuts.
So first, we need to understand what we're trying to achieve, and the most efficient way to achieve it. If your goal is to get bigger and stronger, pretty much all of the good novice programs you find will have some important similarities:
1. A focus, almost exclusively, on compound movements. A compound movement is one that involves movement of multiple joints at the same time. If a program doesn't include squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, chin-ups, etc., it's probably not worthwhile. A bit of isolation (direct arm work, ab work, etc.) is fine, but shouldn't be the focus. Nobody gets really big just doing isolation. If you do some curls and tricep extensions in addition to compounds, you are going to grow. If all you do is curls and tricep extensions, you probably won't, and if you do the progress will be way slower than it should and you'll look pretty weird with big arms and not much else.
2. 3 or 4 workouts per week, with each muscle group being worked around twice per week. Novices can recover from workouts quickly, and novice programs take advantage of that. Whatever compound movements are included in a program will probably be done every other workout, which means every 3 or 4 days. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have an "A" workout and a "B" workout that you alternate between over and over. No, you can't stick to this forever, because you'll eventually need to give each muscle group more rest between workouts. That's why advanced lifters work out more often with more isolation; they're only working each muscle once per week with more volume rather than every 3 or 4 days in order to allow it to recover.
3. Moderate volume. Programs that call for a bajillion sets of 12 on each movement are inappropriate for novices, especially if strength training is the goal. This ties into the previous point. Novices benefit from training muscle groups frequently with moderate volume because it's the easiest way to make progress, especially when it comes to strength. Advanced lifters only do higher volume and lower frequency workouts because they HAVE to, not because they want to. Their progress is slow. Yours doesn't have to be in the early going, so milk your noob gains as much as possible while you can.
4. Linear Progression. Novices can increase the weight they're using or the amount of repetition they're doing in each movement very quickly. You should be able to add weight or a repetition to an exercise every day you do it in the early stages of your training. If you're not progressing one way or the other, you will not grow. Advanced lifters need to progress on either periodization or linearly on a weekly, sometimes even monthly, basis, because their progress is going to be slower. Again, milk your noob gains. Try your best to make daily progress. If you have microplates available to you (1 or 1.25 pounds), those are great for upper body lifts like the bench press and overhead press. They'll allow you to make small progress every single day you train without having to add 5 pounds at a time, which will become very difficult very quickly. For squats and deadlifts, you should be able to add 5 pounds at a time pretty easily for a while.
If a program fulfills those 4 requirements, it's probably fine. I did Starting Strength for the first 3 months, then switched to Greyskull, which I'm still doing for now. After a few more months, I'll probably need to switch to an intermediate program, and it's going to be one of Jim Wendler's 5/3/1 variants called Boring But Big.
Another important thing to keep in mind when trying to gain weight is cardio. No, doing a moderate amount of cardio is not going to instantly kill your progress and make you look like you have an eating disorder. But you do need to keep it within reason. If you're running several miles at a time, several times per week, it will affect your progress. But doing cardio in the right amount on your days off from lifting will actually help you; the better your cardio is, the better your blood flow is. Better blood flow and good food = more nutrient-rich blood getting to your muscles to help them recover. You just need to make sure that you're taking in enough calories to still be at a surplus considering how many you burn doing cardio. Just like I said in my previous post about diet, don't guess; count everything. Try to use a calorie calculator that tells you how much you're burning in your cardio sessions, and a bulking calculator that tells you how many calories you need at your weight to be at a surplus.
The last, but not any less important, thing I want to stress is this: once you pick a program, stick to it as written. Seriously, don't mess with it. If you change anything, you are no longer doing the program and only have yourself to blame when your progress is not nearly as good as it should have been. Guys like Mark Rippetoe and Jim Wendler have decades of experience in weight training. You do not know better than them, so stop fucking with their programs.
I hope this has been helpful to whoever took the time to read both posts. Good luck.
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