How to Build Muscle as a Beginner

May 28

If you’re anything like me, you have a desire to build an aesthetic physique. To become a Chad who has spent years building muscle and fine tuning his body. I started this journey when I was 14. With almost a decade of training, lifting, running, and coaching, I’m going to share with you the most important tips to get started in the gym and make great strides to being the ultimate alpha male.

Concepts to Understand:

Progressive Overload:

The only way to get strong, build muscle, or do both is by using progressive overload. So what does that mean? The only way to make progress is to slowly make things harder. For example, if you start at 45lbs X 5 reps on the Bench Press, you want to make it harder using at least one quantifiable metric. The next time you bench press, you could increase your reps to 6-7 or you could increase the weight to 50lbs. Both changes send a message to your nervous system that the body needs to adapt to the bench press. The exercise must progressively get harder over time to stimulate muscle growth. If the volume or intenstity stays constant, your body will not get stronger because it is already capable of doing the current amount of weight and reps.

TLDR:

Make your exercises harder over time.
Change atleast on quantifiable variable per session. (Easiest to start with is either reps or weight)
- Reps
- Weight
- Time spent Resting
- Time Under Tension
- Tempo

Calories in - Calories Out:

The body must have excess calories to fuel new muscle growth. You must consume more calories than you expend through daily activities, walking, exercise, and sports. If you burn more calories than you consume, your body won’t be able to build muscle as sustaining regular bodily functions is prioritized.

THIS DOES NOT APPLY IF YOU ARE OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE:

Emphasize the Compounds:

When you are first starting out, it’s very important to maximize the muscle building stimulus of each movement. Compound Lifts accomplish this, usually stimulating over the half the body with one exercise. As a beginner, spending time to practice the technique and get strong at each compound lift will pay multitude of long term benefits. You will build 65-80% of your base physique and strength using the following 6 exercises.

Examples of compound movements:

Back Squats
Deadlifts
Bench Press
Overhead Press
Bent Over Row
Pullups

Volume and Intensity:

There are two popular schools of training. Volume training emphasizes high repetitions with lighter weight. Intensity training emphasizes lower repititions with a much heavier load. Most people stick to one or the other. What they don’t realize is that an optimal weight training program for overall muscle growth and strength will use both Volume AND Intensity based training. Volume training could have sets ranging from 12-15 reps or all the way up to 30 reps. Intensity training is usually less than 8 reps and most common in the 3-6 rep range.

The Program:

Now that you’ve learned some of the basic principles that will lead to long term gym success, here is my optimal beginner program. NOTE: Most exercises start at 3 sets. Once every two weeks(IF YOU FEEL STRONG ENOUGH) you make increase your working sets by 1. By week Four, you could theoretically be doing 5 working sets per exercise.

4 Days per Week

Lower:

Back Squat 3x5
RDL 3x10
Bulgarian Split Squat 3x8

Upper:

Bench Press: 3x5
Bent Over Row:3x10
Dumbbell Overhead Press: 3x10-12
Pullups: 3x Failure (If you can’t do pullups, use a band for assistance)

Rest