My research process: I cite research when possible, but I don't blindly follow a study’s conclusions. Not all studies are well designed, so I try to find multiple studies to support claims. I then experiment with findings and compare them against each other.
This page covers what the research says about building muscle. In particular, it covers:
Workout plans to efficiently build muscle, and why they work.
How your muscles grow so you know when to directly measure progress.
The catch is there's a lot you must know. Muscle building is finicky, which is one reason why many people fail to see consistent gains.
The reward is sweet: When you're done, you'll feel confident about bodybuilding—perhaps for the first time. You'll better understand the science and be free of the pseudo-science that may have you doing the wrong things.
This guide contradicts some popular building muscle workout advice. But it backs up its claims. At the bottom, there's an optional Science and FAQ section that explores the rationale behind the recommendations made. Skim these if you have unanswered questions or want proof of this guide's claims.
At the bottom of this page, there's also a cheatsheet recapping everything in this guide—including workout and meal plans—so there's no need to take notes.
The workout plans below are designed to help reduce the rate of hitting early plateaus (where your muscles stop growing).
These plans do this by employing exercises, set volumes and cadence, and exercise order in such a way that you can maximize recovery.
Exercise Plan A: Your first 8 weeks
If your arms are already as muscular as these, you can skip exercise Plan A to start with the intermediate Plan B detailed momentarily.
Otherwise, even if you’ve lifted before, I suggest starting with exercise Plan A.
Plan A entails hitting each muscle group once per workout. It's a starter plan without barbell squats and deadlifts, because these exercises can intimidate beginners from completing their workouts. They're also harder to do at home with just dumbbells. (Barbell squats and deadlifts, however, do become critical in the intermediate plan that you quickly transition to.)
And the point of this ramp-up period is to get you acclimated to working out with as few excuses as possible. I want you to build the habit of working out—so that it sticks.
For your first two months of working out, your inexperienced muscles will grow efficiently even with the lesser stimulus of starter Plan A. In other words, Plan A will start by producing the same results as the more intensive Plan B while requiring less effort and less time.
Eventually Plan A will stop producing size gains for you. When you fail to measure size gains on your arms after a month of working out on Plan A, switch to Plan B. We'll talk about measurement in a bit.
Specifically, gains on Plan A should stall around 8 weeks in if you're properly following all the advice in this handbook. If the stall occurs sooner than 6 weeks, and you're new to building muscle, you may be prematurely plateauing and should refer to the overcoming plateaus section at the bottom of the cheatsheet.
Here's Plan A:
Clicking on an exercise will load a demonstration video.
º 8–10 reps º Stop 1 rep before limit º 3 sets per exercise º 60 min total º Rest 2.5-5 min † Cannot be done with home equipment. These exercises aren't critical, so you can skip them. Do hand gripper exercises on your off days.
📝 Exercise form notes.
The exercises have been chosen according to the criteria laid out here and here.
Notes on Plan A:
Do the three day cycle once per week. Rest at least one day between workout program days, but it appears resting longer isn't necessary. This means you can do Monday-Wednesday-Friday, Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, or Wednesday-Friday-Sunday.
If you happen to skip a day, that's okay! Just pick up from the day you missed when you start working out again.
For your first week on Plan A, do 2 sets of each exercise instead of 3. Your body likely won’t need the extra stimulus yet.
You'll also likely want to take an extra day's break between workout days on your first week or two. Your sore muscles may need the recovery time.
Exercise Plan B: 8 weeks and beyond
By the way, if you're starting to feel like you're being overloaded with information, remember that this page is purposely in-depth because it's a reference guide. Plus I summarize everything for you in the comprehensive cheat sheet at the bottom of this page.
At the 8 week mark, your muscles will likely need greater stress to continue growing. So we change a few things:
We increase the sets per exercise from 3 to 4.
We switch to exercises that allow us to scale to heavier weights.
We focus on specific muscles within each workout.
Since exercise Plan B is more intense, we rest for 4 days between workout day types.
You can do all three workout types on back-to-back days if desired. But you must take 4 days of rest before repeating a day type. For example, you can do Day 1 on Monday, Day 2 on Tuesday, and Day 3 on Wednesday, but you have to wait until Friday to repeat Day 1, Saturday to repeat Day 2, and Sunday to repeat day 3.
There are no exceptions—even if your muscles “feel fine.” If you wind up overworking your muscles, you can lose an entire workout’s worth of size gains. (You can try proving this to yourself if you’re feeling bold and measure closely.)
Here's Plan B. As with Plan A, B exercises are chosen according to the criteria here and here.
Click on an exercise to load a video of how it's performed.
º 8–10 reps º Stop 1 rep before your limit º 4 sets per exercise º 60 min total º Rest 2.5-5 min Note: Exercises with an or option should be alternated between workout days.
📝 Exercise form notes.
The order of exercises and workout days in Plan B is critical. Don't rearrange them or you'll risk not having the strength to complete all your sets.
The exercises are ordered to allow your muscles adequate recovery time so that exhaustion from one exercise doesn’t make it difficult to perform another that reuses a muscle group. (For example, you use your biceps when performing back exercises. So, avoid doing a back exercise right after a bicep exercise.)
One of the unique aspects of this program is how Plan B splits some exercises into two sessions per workout. Meaning, 2 sets of one exercise are performed at the beginning of a workout and the remaining 2 sets are performed at the end. (Read more here.)
Notes for exercise Plan B:
The exercises in Plan B will require gym equipment, so if you've been working out from home, now’s the time to get into the gym. (Or, buy bigger at-home equipment if you have the room, motivation, and money. Something like Tonal might get you partway there if you're short on space.)
You no longer have to do grip exercises if you don't want to. Your grip strength should likely remain strong enough since you'll be using it to lift heavy barbells now.
What comes after Workout Plan B?+
Learn about powerlifting. I would suggest searching Yelp for a “strength gym” in your city. The senior trainers there can push you further than I ever could.
I've also heard good things about Stronglifts 5x5.
For those wanting to get bigger, becoming a powerlifter requires extreme dedication, and it’s outside the scope of this handbook.
It's also worth pointing out, however, that Plan B doesn’t have to end. It’s the workout plan you can use for as long as you see results. Despite what you've heard, the science suggests there is no need to switch up exercises to continue growing. We talk more about that in this FAQ.
At some point, you will notice your rate of muscle gains slowing. (In the next section, we learn how to measure our muscle gains so you can identify when this happens.) Some people will want to stop at this point because they'll consider themselves sufficiently muscular. But they will need to keep going to the gym to maintain it.
Whichever path you take, there’s also a genetic reason why your gains will eventually slow: your muscles can only get so big. Research has shown that the total size you can naturally reach is relative to how large your skeleton is (study).
Are you a broad-shouldered man with thick wrists and ankles? Perhaps expect to get way past the 3” (7.5cm) arm gain if you keep up your workouts. Are you a smaller 5’4” (1.65m) person with narrow hips? Even if you naturally worked out for a decade, you're unlikely to get as muscular as a much larger person could.
Click the plus to show this section.
How to get abs
If you enter your email to receive this guide's summary cheatsheet, there's a "Science of ab workouts" bonus section in it. The cheatsheet is here.
Maintenance workout plan
You can stop Plan A or Plan B whenever you’re happy with your size.
Then, if you simply want to maintain the muscle you’ve already built, this should do the trick:
Do two 35-40 minute workouts per week as per the workout plans below. You’ll only need to do 2 sets per exercise now.
Continue hitting your daily meal calorie targets. (Discussed on the next page.)
Keep taking protein powder on workout days, but you can skip it on non-workout days.
You no longer have to lift heavier weights each workout (but don’t allow heaviness to decrease either).
You no longer have to take creatine and citrulline malate. (We don’t need the edge they provide since we're not trying to get stronger.)
• 8–10 reps • Stop 1 rep before failure • 2 sets per exercise • Rest 2.5-5min • 40min workouts
📝 Exercise form notes.
How heavy to lift every workout
Soon, you'll learn to measure weekly muscle growth. You can use these results to prove to yourself everything I'm claiming is working for you. But before we cover that, let's cover the topic of weight heaviness.
You need a reference point for how heavy you can lift when you first start. To do this, refer to the find your starting weights section from Prep Week.
After that, each time you return to the gym, lift 2.5lbs (1.15 kg) heavier per arm or leg for each exercise. With exercises that are repeated twice weekly, increase by that amount just once per week.
This means if you're doing a single-handed exercise, such as a bicep curl or a trap raise, increase the weight by 2.5lbs on each hand when you return to the gym.
(If you're performing a two-handed or two-legged exercise, such as a benchpress or squat, increase the weight by 5lbs (2.25kg) so that it averages to 2.5lbs per hand/leg.)
If your gym's equipment does not increase in 2.5lbs increments, use magnet weights, which you slap onto dumbbells, barbells, and racks to make them a bit heavier. You want to get the 1.25lbs magnet weight variant in addition to the 2.5lbs weight for when you need to slap a 1.25lbs on each side of a dumbbell for a total of 2.5lbs.
If you're successfully gaining size using 2.5lbs (1.15kg) increments between gym visits, increasing the weight delta further shouldn't produce faster gains. Research suggests your muscles don't grow proportionally to how heavy you lift; they grow by the same fixed amount each time they experience a sufficient volume of proper weight stress they haven't experienced before.
If you feel that the 2.5lbs increment isn't producing consistent gains, either (1) you started at too low of a weight and you still need to find what your real starting weight is or (2) your lack of gains is likely the result of something else. Consult the plateaus section at the bottom of the cheatsheet for help pinpointing the culprit.
Quick note on pulley machines
If you switch an exercise from free weights (dumbbells and barbells) to its pulley machine variant, consider dropping 7.5-10lbs (3.5-4.5kg) when doing the exercise on the pulley.
Pulley exercises do a better job than free weights at keeping tension through an exercise's range of motion, and your muscles may need to ramp up to this new tension profile. Failing to lower the weight during the transition can lead to overworking your muscle, which can cause you to lose a workout's worth of size due to muscle catabolism.
Celebrity bodies
Let's take a break. You've done a lot of reading.
Below is a comparison I put together to compare celebrity superhero physiques. I wanted to know if their sizes were the result of Hollywood magic or if the actors were genuinely large.
Click the image to expand it:
This is not a scientific comparison; I couldn't control for camera angle, distance, and lighting. All I could do was scale their heads to similar sizes and line up their clavicles.
Some of these actors may take steroids and other performance/size-enhancing drugs, so be careful using all of them as natural physique targets. (That doesn't mean they didn't put a ton of hard work in, though. Hear them talk about it.)
Off topic: This year, I got tired of overlong books and bad book summaries. So I made a newsletter that just shares the most interesting highlights from famous books. I distill each book's key lessons into short paragraphs. 50,000 people read it. Subscribe to see the first issue. I only email once per month.
Measuring muscle growth
It’s time to learn how to measure your muscle size gains so you know when you're doing things right and wrong. And a secondary benefit to measuring your growth is staying motivated week to week by verifying we're growing despite the visual changes being too subtle to notice.
This section is the unique result of my year-long experimentation. I have not seen this information shared elsewhere online. Which is strange because what I'm about to say is so easily provable for any beginner taking measurements.
So if I seem over-confident about anything I’m about to say for which I don't have corresponding research to link to, remember that you can prove all of this to yourself by just working out then measuring your muscles the next day. Also, remember that there's a detailed The Science section that dives into the research.
When your muscles grow
For muscles to grow after a workout, you must get enough calories and sleep on the day you worked out. Calories provide energy for new muscle to be built, and it’s in your sleep that your muscles recover.
When you wake up the morning after a workout, the size growth resulting from the previous day's workout should likely be complete, and you'll need to hit the gym again for those muscles to grow further.
Meaning, if you gain 1/8” (3.2mm) on your arm after a workout, that 1/8” can be measured the next day and should not increase throughout the coming days.
The timing of this cycle might come as a surprise. People often assume that because muscles might remain sore for multiple days, that muscles also grow over the same number of days. According to the measurements I've anecdotally done, that's not the case. Hopefully you can prove this to yourself by taking measurements too.
The fact that muscles mostly grow within a 12 hour post-workout period is why it's so important that you nail your nutrition and sleep regimens on your workout days.
Measuring your muscle growth
We will use the arm we write with as a proxy for the progression of our growth. I've found that arm increases are the easiest to track because the combined minor growth of two muscle groups (biceps and triceps) is easier to measure than one muscle group. It's hard to detect small gains. The arm is also easy to get a fairly consistent size measurement on.
While our arm is not a full representation of how our body is doing—it’s possible that you worked your arms properly but not your other muscles, and vice versa—it's a simple proxy for whether we're eating, sleeping, and lifting right.
That said, once every 6 weeks, measure your shoulders, chest, calf, forearm, legs, and glutes to make sure everything else is growing too. For each muscle, measure its circumference at its thickest point. If one muscle hasn't been growing while others have, consult the plateaus advice at the bottom of the cheatsheet.
To measure your arm, wrap body tape around its thickest part. Measure this exact same part each time you do this. To get an accurate measurement, stand in front of a mirror and follow this:
Timing: Make sure you're measuring the day after a workout that included arm exercises arms. If you're working out on the day you're measuring, measure before the workout. Wait at least 30 minutes after waking up since your arms are likely puffier in the morning.
Step 1 — Flex your arm firmly, but there's no need to flex as hard as you can.
Step 2 — Connect the body tape loop back onto itself then stick your arm through it. Pull the body tape up until it's around the thickest part of your flexed arm. This is likely the top edge of your bicep muscle (where your bicep peaks out the most when flexed).
Step 3 — Unflex your arm. Now let the tape contract around the muscle.
Step 4 — With your arm remaining unflexed, make sure: º The tape is connected tight enough that every part of it is against your skin. º The tape is not too tight that it squeezes any arm fat inward. º The tape crosses your arm horizontally—not on an angle.
Step 5 — Record the measurement with your arm unflexed. I use a pen to mark where I am each week.
The reason we don't measure with a flexed arm is because it's very difficult to always ensure you flex to the same degree each time. If you flex just a tiny bit harder than the last time you measured (and this would be impossible to keep track of), you can skew your measurement by greater than the 1/8” (3.2mm) increment we’re looking for.
Watch this video to see how a measurement is performed:
How big your muscles can get
In your first 3-6 months, you should hopefully see an increase of around 1/8” (3.2mm) in arm size after each workout day that worked both your biceps and triceps. This is enough of a difference to see on a tape measure so long as you’re measuring consistently.
If a workout trains only your biceps or triceps, expect half that growth (1/16" or 1.8mm).
Given how this program's workout plans are structured, a beginner might see about 1” (25mm) per month or 3” (75mm) for each arm after 3 months.That might not sound like a lot, but it is. 2–3” around your arms can be the difference between looking frail or athletic. (Again, here’s the reference for a 2.5” gain.)
Depending on your frame, after 6-12 months, you will begin to see diminishing size returns from working out.
Commit to your workout plan
You now have everything you need to complete a body change. It's time to start.
Open your calendar and create an event set 90 days in the future.
Perhaps invite a friend to the event—someone you respect who you wouldn't want to think of you as a quitter—and ask them to guilt you into your 90 day goal.
Once you've created the event, go through the Prep Week page of this guide.
Then get yourself into the gym. It's just three times a week for 90 days.
Nutrition is critical for these workout plans to be effective. You have to learn how to eat—or the advice on this page will prove useless. So, the next page covers how to eat for building muscle.
What's left on this page is the cheatsheet and the research behind this guide.
Cheatsheet
Below is the cheat sheet for this entire handbook. It's the same as the one on the previous page.
If you enter your email below, the cheat sheet is emailed to you so you can easily reference it in your inbox. I will not send you any other emails.
Check your inbox and respond to the email with "Yes." If you don't get an email, tell me on Twitter: @Julian
Check your inbox and respond to the email with "Yes." If you don't get an email, tell me on Twitter: @Julian
Get ~7 hours of sleep the night before and after workouts.
Lift heavier weights each time you go back to the gym.
Measure your arm size weekly to confirm you're growing.
Workout plans
Starting weights• Choose a weight heaviness that isn’t overly challenging but also isn’t so light that you can barely feel it. Once you've found this weight, do 7 reps then take a 3 minute break before increasing the weight to the next heaviness level. See if you can do 7 reps again. Keep incrementing weight and taking 3 minute breaks until you get to a heaviness you cannot lift the full 7 reps with. When you get to this last level, make a note of the level that came before it. This second-to-last level is your starting weight heaviness.
Workout Plan A (First 8 weeks)• Do each of the three workout days once per week. Rest at least one day between workout days. Resting longer isn't necessary but won't hurt. If you skip a workout, just pick up from the day you last missed.
Workout Plan B (8 weeks and beyond)• Scroll here for exercises. • You can do all three workout types on back-to-back days if desired. But you must take 4 days of rest before repeating a day type. (Resting longer is fine, but isn't necessary.) For example, you can do Day 1 on Monday, Day 2 on Tuesday, and Day 3 on Wednesday, but wait until Friday to repeat Day 1, Saturday to repeat Day 2, and Sunday to repeat day 3. •Recalculate your calorie target since you'll weigh more by this point. • Never rearrange the order of exercises or the workout days.
Maintenance Plan (when you're done growing)• You don't have to keep lifting heavier weights • Stop taking creatine and citrulline malate, but still take protein on workout days. • You must continue hitting your calorie targets.
How to work out
Warmups and cardio• Stretching before working out and performing light warmup sets are unnecessary unless you have prior injuries or are still learning proper form for an exercise. • Don't do more than 30 minutes of intense cardio (e.g. running, swimming, high-speed cycling) on workout days. You can do intense cardio on non-workout days so long as it's not running/biking after a leg workout and not swimming after a bicep, back, or shoulders workout. Those muscles will need time to recover.
Form• Refer to the exercise videos for proper form. • Start with your non-dominant side for one-handed/one-legged exercises. • Throughout the lifting and lowering motions, squeeze the target muscle and make sure it’s the one doing the work. • Resist the lowering portion of any exercise so that you feel the burn on the way down too; don’t let gravity do all the lowering work for you. • Breathe out when you’re contracting the muscle (the hard part), such as pushing a barbell or lifting a dumbbell, and breath in for the opposite direction. You may be unable to complete all your reps if you fail to properly and consistently breathe.
Reps and rest time• Do 8 to 10 reps on each exercise. This means it’s okay if you vary between 8, 9, or 10 reps on each set. Do as much as you can, but stop one rep before failure. • Big, two-hand movements like chest exercises should take around 2.5s in each direction (raising and lowering). Small, one-handed movements like bicep curls should take around 1.5s in each direction. The exact timing isn’t critical. • Rest as long as you need to between sets (typically 3–5 minutes). You want your muscle to feel fully recovered. At minimum, wait until your heartbeat calms.
Supplements
Every day (at any time of day)•Creatine (for men): Take 1 scoop (5g) at the same time you take your protein. • Protein (whey or rice): Multiply 0.60 times your current bodyweight in lbs (or 1.32 times your bodyweight in kg) to get the total grams of protein you need to supplement from your protein powder. Break this total amount into 2 separate servings (e.g. a morning smoothie and an evening oatmeal and protein mix).
Before your workout•Citrulline malate: Take 4 scoops (8g/0.28oz) 60 minutes before working out. It is sour so take it like a shot with just a tiny bit of water.
Food
Calories• Eat as much food as is required to reach your daily target. If this is a workout day, remember to eat 300 calories more than your non-workout day target. If you have difficulty reaching your calorie target, try making a few high-calorie smoothies per day each packed with oil, oatmeal, fruit, and everything else you can throw in it. º Try to get the majority of your calories from these healthy core foods: black beans, lentils, quinoa, oatmeal, and Soylent. Rice is also acceptable, although it isn’t particularly healthy. Keep your kitchen stocked with core foods at all times: • 1 can of black beans: 350 calories • 1 can of lentils: 350 calories • 1 cup of cooked quinoa: 220 calories • 1 cup of cooked white or brown rice: 200 calories • 1/4 bag of Soylent powder: 500 calories • 1 packet of plain instant oatmeal: 125 calories
Familiarize yourself with how many calories are in your common non-core meals so you can avoid overeating. Below are conservative numbers:• A small meal (cup of rice, vegetables, fruit) is 200 calories. • A medium meal (small bowl of chicken, rice, vegetables, sauce) is 500 calories. • A large meal (8oz steak, potatoes, salad with dressing, beer) is 900 calories.
Meals• You don’t need to eat unhealthy starchy foods like pasta and bread for the purposes of "workout energy." Eating healthy will give you just as much energy. • Eat your normal 3 meals per day. Try timing food before and after workouts.
Liquids• Try to drink 2 cups of water (or a healthy alternative) at every meal. This isn’t a requirement for building a muscle; it’s a health suggestion. • Be mindful of calories you drink: fruit juices, creamed coffees, and alcohol are appreciable sources of calories that you must count toward your calorie targets.
Overcoming plateaus
If you’re not getting stronger• Use magnet weights (get 1.25lbs and 2.5lbs) to increase weight by 2.5lbs if you can’t go up by 5lbs. • Try resting much longer between sets. This won't impact your gains and will allow you to finish all your sets and reps (which is critical). • Sleep ~7 hours the night before a workout. • Sleep ~7 hours the night of a workout. • If you’re on Plan B, don't re-arrange the exercise order. • Try resting an extra day between workout day types. • Watch exercise videos to verify your form is correct. • If you can't progress on chest exercises, try adding more weight to your front shoulder raises. Your shoulders need to be strong to work your chest. • If you can't progress on bicep/tricep exercises, try adding more weight to your forearm exercises. They need to be strong to work the rest of the arm. •Breathe out when contracting your muscle and breathe in when uncontracting. • Have a friend lightly assist by pushing the weight when you're lifting.
If you’re getting stronger but not bigger• Don't increase weight by more than the normal increment that's been producing gains for you, or you might overwork your muscle and cause it to shrink. • Don’t do more sets than dictated by your workout plan or you’ll overwork your muscles and cause them to shrink. • Rewatch the arm measurement video to check that you’re measuring correctly. • Remember to take your measurement at least 30min after waking up on the morning after working out. • Try eating 300 calories above your workout day calorie target. • Sleep longer than usual on the night after a workout. • If you’re still on Plan A after ~8 weeks, try switching to Plan B now. • If you’re already several months into Plan B, you might be nearing a plateau where it’ll take months instead of weeks to continue getting larger.
The science of working out (optional)
This guide contradicts some of the popular workout advice. But, it tries to back up its claims. Below, I explore the science behind my recommendations.
If you have suggestions or criticisms, please do reach out. I love hearing about any mistakes I've made, and I want to make sure this guide is kept up to date.
Warming up+
There are two types of warmups: stretching and lightweight sets.
Research suggests neither is necessary: there is no need for stretching before weightlifting (study). Pre-workout stretching can actually decrease weightlifting performance (article—see bottom for sources) and the evidence for its help with injury prevention is mixed (study, study). Don’t get angry at me! I’m just the messenger! Another warmup that provides no performance benefit is a light starting set before lifting your normal weights (study).
There are a few exceptions, however:
You’re new to an exercise and you need to discover your safe range of motion when performing it—like in the first couple weeks of this program.
You have injuries. (Addressing them is beyond the scope of this handbook, and I cannot say how much of the advice in this handbook applies to you.)
You are a powerlifter (an advanced weightlifter who focuses on increasing strength) handling dangerously heavy weights.
Click the plus to show this section.
Rest times+
The fitness expression “no pain no gain” is misleading. The only “pain” you should encounter is from lifting weights that are a bit too heavy for your comfort. Beyond that, overworking your muscles through high volume or low rest is counter-constructive.
As you’ll see from your weekly measurements, when a muscle is stressed by a workout, it appears to only grow by a fixed amount for the next ~12 hours. So if you do more reps or sets than this program calls for, you should experience no further gains per workout, and you’ll endure unnecessarily longer recovery times that will keep you out of the gym.
Want to prove this to yourself? Using the technique outlined earlier on this page, measure yourself the morning after a workout containing 50% more sets than this program calls for. So long as you’re doing everything else right, you’ll see no increase in gains over the previous workout.
It’s not only very high volume that needlessly overworks muscles, but also very short rest times between sets. Research suggests at least 2 minutes of rest between sets (study), and it appears you can go much longer than that without it affecting your gains. I repeat: Contrary to popular belief, your gains shouldn't be reduced by taking, say, a long-ish 5 minute break between sets instead of the more common 2 minutes (study, study, study).
Even though it’s more painful to do a second set within a short amount of time (such as 1.5 minutes), the increased pain does not mean you’re exhausting the muscle better for the purposes of growing bigger. It might just mean you’re rushing yourself and you're mistaking discomfort for progress.
In Plan B, we exploit the fact that long rest times are acceptable by doing 2 sets of bicep curls at the start of the workout and the remaining 2 sets at the end of the workout. I call these split sets. They help us retain the bicep strength needed to complete every rep with proper form. If we don't complete all reps, we don't grow.
Note that ample rest time also applies to unilateral (one-handed or one-legged) exercises where one side of the body is worked at a time. The bicep curl is a good example: It’s commonly performed with one arm completing all 8–10 reps before switching arms and repeating. But consider taking a short break between arm changes so your heartbeat can return to normal.
Personally, heartbeat is how I determine rest times: I wait for my heartbeat to return to normal and for my muscles to feel “energetic” enough that I'm confident I can do another full set with proper form.
Resting also applies to the time between workout sessions. Don’t do all three of your weekly sessions back-to-back. Your muscles need ~48-72 hours to recover (study, study). So even if you "feel" you could repeat Day 1 of your workout plan within 48 hours, you’re being mislead by your body. They might not feel sore while sitting at your computer, but if you go the gym and do a set, you'll feel a strange discomfort.
Click the plus to show this section.
Reps+
When working out for muscle size (as opposed to strength), use a weight that’s light enough to do a set of at least 8 reps with and heavy enough that you can't easily do more than 10 reps (study, study).
This range of 8 to 10 reps means it should be fine if you stop at 8, 9, or 10 in any set. In short, go as high as you can while stopping one rep short of the maximum you feel you could do.
Stopping one rep short of exhaustion is the best kept secret in weightlifting: It shouldn't decrease your rate of gains and it increases your recovery time between sets so that you can complete all your reps (study, study).
It will take a couple weeks of working out to begin recognizing when you have the capacity to do just one more rep in a set. Until then, focus on staying within the 8–10 rep range: do 10 when you have high stamina and 8 when you don't.
According to some studies, women will build muscle faster by choosing a heaviness that lets them get closer to 10 reps rather than 8. So, if you’re a woman lifting a weight that’s too heavy to complete 10 reps with, perhaps go lighter. According to studies, this is because women have muscle fiber distribution that responds better when stimulated with higher reps (study, study, article).
Click the plus to show this section.
Sets+
For size gains, research suggests the optimal number of sets is between 3 and 6 (study, study). This is how many sets you should do for each muscle targeted by a workout.
Plan A of this program consists of 3 sets per exercise. In Plan A, no muscle group is directly hit by more than one exercise per workout. This means if you do the bench press in a given workout, you won't also do another chest exercise in that workout. Three sets of one exercise should be enough to trigger a muscle's per-workout growth limit for the first 8 weeks. More sets would likely increase recovery time without increasing growth rate.
At the 8 week mark, you switch to Plan B, which builds on top of Plan A in part by advancing to 4 sets per exercise. This becomes necessary to continue stimulating your more developed muscles. 4 sets is in accordance with both the bodybuilding research (study) and decades of best practice. I have also anecdotally found no evidence that doing more than 4 sets is advantageous when employing the 8 to 10 rep range, which is the range that maximizes muscle size gains (study, study).
The potential implication of 4 sets being optimal is that doing, say, two chest exercises in one workout where the combined number of sets across both exercises exceeds 4 is overkill. Yet most workout plans found on the web instruct you to do 3–4 sets of 8–10 reps for the bench press (which directly works your chest) followed by 3 sets of the butterfly (which also directly works your chest)! This of course sums to 6+ sets that all target the same muscle, which is above the 3 or 4 sets recommended above.
These potentially misguided workouts are likely the result of either:
The people designing them have unscientifically copy-pasted them together. Their suggestions are neither based on research nor experimentation that have been compared to alternative workout plans.
The people designing them are on performance enhancers and their recommendations are indeed maximally effective for their artificially enhanced states, but they don't realize that it would be overkill for non-steroid users. I'm not even kidding.
I repeat: Contrary to popular belief, 4 sets of 10 reps at the heaviest weight you can lift should be all you need to maximally trigger muscle size growth in a workout. (As always, you can verify this for yourself by measuring your arm growth after a workout.)
If you avoid overworking your muscles, your recovery times are shorter, and you avoid the risk of re-training muscles before they’ve recovered.
Out of all the myth busting I’ve done in this handbook, I know that "no more than 4 direct exercises per muscle" is the most difficult to digest for experienced weightlifters who’ve been doing otherwise. So I've written a detailed reasoning in the FAQ further down this page.
However, there are two important distinctions that should clear up your disbelief:
Indirect targeting: It’s acceptable if a muscle is both indirectly targeted and directly targeted in a workout for more than 4 sets total. For example, if you work your triceps through a bench press then later do a tricep extension exercise, that's fine because the bench press only in part works your tricep—to nowhere near the extent that the isolated extension does.
So as long as you’re not directly exercising the same muscle for more than 4 combined sets, post-workout recovery times won’t be too compromised.
Muscle group sub-isolation: When it comes to chest exercises, for example, it’s acceptable to do 4 sets of one exercise that exclusively works lower chest and 4 sets of a second exercise that exclusively works upper chest. (The upper and lower portions of your chest are different muscles.)
However, keep in mind that most chest exercises work both the upper and lower chest and therefore it can be difficult to achieve total isolation.
Here’s a counter-example: Because of the way triceps are built, any exercise that puts an emphasis on one of the two smaller tricep heads should still place the majority of the emphasis on the longest tricep head. So if in the same workout you do two different tricep exercises that each emphasizes a different secondary head with 3–4 sets, the longest head will get overworked.
You don’t have to wrap your head around all the implications above if you're following this program’s exercises. To the extent reasonable, they take all this into consideration.
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Exercise form+
Note: To see how each exercise is performed, click its name in the exercise lists.
If you're committing to spending 2.5 hours in the gym every week, be smart and use your time efficiently: use proper form for every single rep. Failing to do so can result in injury, under-training intended muscles, and/or not getting bigger after your workouts.
The goal of weightlifting is not to move a weight from point A to point B. The goal is to maximally stress the muscle that is most responsible for moving a weight from point A to point B. The way you do that is by contracting that muscle throughout an exercise's motion to remind yourself that it should be doing most of the lifting.
Don't let unintended muscles do so much of the lifting that your intended muscles don’t feel the majority of the load. That might defeat the purpose of the exercise. (It should be obvious what the intended muscle is for each exercise. If not, ask a professional trainer to guide you.)
Another mistake beginners make is not completing their full range of motion. For example, on a bicep curl, they won't bring a dumbbell up to where their forearm touches their bicep. But if you don’t start at the lowest point in a motion and push all the way through to the end, you’re not making best use of the exercise to exhaust your muscle. Sooner or later you’ll likely stop getting stronger on that exercise.
So, to recap, two pointers: (1) lift using an exercise's intended muscle and (2) lift fully.
Now let’s cover the best practices of form:
Grip: Firmly squeeze the handle or the bar you're gripping onto when lifting. Many people find that this helps complete their final reps by increasing their concentration and focusing their strength.
One-sided exercises: Start any one-handed or one-legged exercise with your non-dominant side, which is the side you don’t write with. Every muscle on this side of your body is at risk of being weaker than the other, so it’s smart to have your weakest side dictate the maximum reps you can perform. (Needless to say, don't do more reps on one side of your body than the other.)
Two-handed exercises: When an exercise requires that you push or pull with both hands or legs, distribute the force evenly across both sides of your body. Otherwise, over time, one side will get stronger than the other.
Lowering a weight: When you lower a weight back into its starting position, do not let gravity do the work; don't let the weight drop without your muscles resisting the force. Slowly fight the resistance by keeping your muscle contracted. Not only has extensive research shown that going slowly through in this direction leads to faster muscle gains (study), but you can hurt your joints if you suddenly drop heavy weight.
Timing: Don’t lift weights really fast (e.g. 0.5 seconds in each direction, study) or really slowly (e.g. 10 seconds in each direction, study). However, whether you lift closer to 2 seconds or 6 seconds shouldn't make a critical difference to your gains (study). My rule of thumb is to complete an exercise as fast I can while (1) maintaining good form and (2) not feeling like I’m going to yank a muscle. For me, this averages out to lower-body exercises or compound exercises like the bench/military press being 2.5s lifting and 2.5s lowering. For smaller isolated exercises, like the bicep curl and tricep extension, I spend 1.5s lifting and 1.5s lowering.
Locking joints: You never want to extend your joints (e.g. elbow, knee, shoulder) so far that you stress them. Whenever something feels wrong—such as a pressure that stings—stop and consult a trainer. I don't recommend only using this guide and skipping professional consultation.
Breathing: Breathe out when you’re contracting/lifting and breathe in when you’re un-contracting/releasing. Exercises begin with a contracting motion, so take a breath before starting any set.
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Switching up exercises+
Consider this: The biggest bodybuilders and the strongest powerlifters work their chest and legs using the same exercises (bench press and squats) every week. They don’t often switch off the bench press for several months. There’s no need to because it's great at exhausting the chest thanks to consistent tension and wide range of motion.
The other muscles in your body aren't different. Muscles appear to have no intelligent awareness of how they’re being worked. So a change in "angle" is misleading. What a new angle actually does is introduce variation in these three exercise factors:
Consistent tension: Do you feel heaviness throughout the entire motion, or is the beginning or ending of the movement much easier to complete? The more consistent the tension, the better the exercise will exhaust and grow your muscle.
Full range of motion: Does the exercise allow you to fully contract your muscle, or are you constrained to a portion of the contraction due to the way your limbs are positioned? The fuller the range of motion, the better the exercise (study).
Safety and comfort: Is this exercise putting a disproportionate amount of stress on your joints due to your body position when lifting? Joint pain is not acceptable when weightlifting.
If you're already using a safe exercise with the widest range of motion and most consistent tension, I don't see a need to switch off it. There are a couple reasons why you could, though:
If the exercise is failing to work complementary muscle groups you care about. For example, your upper back and triceps each consist of multiple muscles. These smaller muscles benefit more from specific exercises.
If you're an advanced weightlifter who is looking to vary the distribution of stress on your muscle fibers. This is a needless complication for beginners.
If you're hitting a plateau and want to "switch things up," take a look at the plateau advice at the bottom of the cheat sheet.
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Compound, isolated, and pulley exercises+
Plan A’s exercises are chosen to:
Be possible with home gym equipment (if you choose to go that route).
Not be complex or intimidating for beginners.
Not be uncomfortable or unreasonably unsafe to perform.
If you've lifted weights before, you might think Plan A’s exercises (e.g. chest flies and goblet squats) are “non-hardcore” and ineffective, but that would be bodybuilding folklore clouding your judgment. The plans' chosen exercises should work for everyone when heavy enough weights are lifted.
You don’t “need to hit the rack squats and bench press” to “trigger growth hormone” that’ll “jumpstart your gains” (study).
This isn’t to say we won’t be doing the bench press and bar squat exercises (“compound exercises”). We do them in Plan B, and they're very important. They involve supporting muscles, which builds whole-body stability when lifting heavy weights (study). Stability is important for injury prevention when doing intensive labor or playing sports.
Additionally, compound exercises work complementary muscles that you might not be targeting directly through isolation exercises.
But compound exercises aren’t the only exercises worth doing. For one, they don’t necessarily hit muscles proportionately: Just doing bench presses, which works your shoulders and triceps in addition to your chest, will not maximally develop your three tricep or three shoulder heads. These heads could be directly targeted with isolation exercises.
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Cardio+
If you regularly do cardio, you need to schedule it around your weightlifting sessions.
I couldn't find much research on how intensive cardio (aerobic exercise) impedes weightlifting. (We’re defining "intensive cardio" as over 30 minutes of high-speed running, biking, swimming, etc.) Based on the research available, I suggest abstaining from intensive cardio on workout days. It can conflict with your muscle gains (study) by competing with your body’s repair mechanisms, and it complicates calorie requirements because you’ll be burning extra calories you must account for.
(If you insist on intensive cardio on workout days, I suggest doing it before weightlifting and track the calories you’re burning to get that much more from your meals that day.)
If you want to be lightly active on workout days, that’s fine. Going for an hour-long walk won't conflict with weightlifting, and it's a smart thing to do. In fact, research says taking two brisk 20 minute walks per day will extend your lifespan if you're currently living a sedentary lifestyle. A well-publicized study concluded that activity equal to a brisk 20 minute walk per day reduces your chances of dying from unnatural causes by up to 30% (study).
So here’s the conclusion: Don’t worry about light cardio being conflicting, but do worry about intensive cardio. Schedule the latter on non-workout days and follow these two rules:
Avoid intensive lower-body cardio (e.g. running, biking) after a workout day that worked legs. Legs should need a couple days to recover before their next workout session.
Similarly, avoid upper-body cardio (e.g. swimming) after a workout day that worked your bicep, back, or shoulders.
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FAQ
Does all this advice equally apply to women?+
Yes, unless otherwise noted. Specifically, the research suggests (1) women can avoid creatine and (2) women should do their best to aim for 10 reps instead of 8 or 9 reps given their different muscle fiber distribution. You can read more about this in the Reps section.
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What should I do when I lose muscle?+
If you’ve only lost one or two weeks worth of gains, I suggest you continue as normal: keep trying to lift heavier than you did in your last workout. If you can’t lift heavier, go back to the weight level from your last workout. You'll need to retrace your weight levels until you begin newly gaining size again; you shouldn't regain the size you lost by re-traversing.
This is because, over the course of just a couple weeks, we likely lose size quicker than we lose strength given the way muscle growth is a function of two different means: neurological and cellular. The terms I'm using here makes it sound like a redundancy, but it's a simplification (study).
Alternatively, if you’ve fallen off the wagon and lost a significant amount of strength and size by running a calorie deficit for an extended period of time or not going to the gym for a few months, re-traversing previous weight levels should regain your muscle size in lock step with the weight levels you originally used to grow them. Hopefully.
In either case, I haven't found evidence that a muscle regrows faster than it originally grew. This means if you run an extreme calorie deficit for two days, which could potentially result in the loss of two workouts' worth of size gains, it could take you two workouts plus the rest days between to regain the size. That's a span of 5 days to make up for 2!
Geek note: My testing suggests that our muscles respond more negatively to calorie deficits than a lack of exercise: you might lose muscle in a single day just by failing to eat 50% of your daily calorie target. On the other hand, I've found you can skip workouts for ~2.5 weeks without noticeably losing size.
If any of these claims seem questionable to you, you can easily prove all this to yourself by taking your regular muscle measurements after running a deficit.
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Why is so much workout advice wrong?+
Here are the likely reasons why much of the popular workout advice is wrong:
Scientific studies are often misinterpreted. For example, it is common for studies to suggest that “protein synthesis” is elevated from specific protein timing and dosing regimens. But here’s the thing: After a fairly low ceiling is hit, higher protein synthesis rates don’t actually lead to increased muscle gains (study). Bloggers and magazine writers often fail to realize the distinction, and they conflate “protein synthesis” with “muscle gains” to give you wrong advice.
Not that many weightlifting studies have been conducted. Weightlifting seemingly isn’t of huge interest to academia. With a shortage of research, bodybuilders may resort to unscientific hunches to conclude what's best.
If you eat a lot and workout for years, you may slowly get bigger as you gradually lift heavier weights—even if you’re not following a proven, well-structured program. But taking 5 years to get where you should have in 1 is not a good place to be sharing advice from. Yet this describes the majority of people giving advice.
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Why are there so many protein myths?+
Some protein myths are rooted in research misinterpretation. “Protein synthesis” hasn’t actually been shown to lead to greater muscle mass gains once your body’s low synthesis threshold is reached (study). Conflating synthesis with size gain is what leads to all the protein myths on the web.
Three research suggestions that can be misleading:
There’s suggestive research that eating more protein later in the day leads to greater muscle mass gains than bulking up on protein in the morning (article).
Taking 30g of protein before your workout (study) can maximize protein synthesis because your blood flow is elevated after a workout and this is when it can make best use of the ingested protein (study).
Protein synthesis is maximized when it’s taken in smaller 30g servings (study, study).
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Why is [exercise] missing from the workout plans?+
Consider the following:
Workouts only last so long, so we can’t fit every exercise into the plans.
Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that using multiple exercises to repeatedly hit the same muscle in a single workout is unnecessary. This is discussed here. So we only need to choose one bicep or tricep exercise per workout.
The exercises that made the cut for Plan A are those that can be performed with a dumbbell (which limits our exercise possibilities but not at the expense of size gains) and have good range of motion. The exercises chosen for Plan B are those that allow us to scale to heavy weights without our grip being a limiting factor.
Contrary to popular belief, I can't find any conclusive research showing that Smith machine and barbell exercises builds muscle faster than dumbbells. If you can link directly to a legitimate study that says otherwise, contact me. Consequently, we leave out these compound exercises from Plan A so that we don’t needlessly intimidate beginner weightlifters with workout equipment that’s very sensitive to correct form. (Plan B does introduce these compound exercises, at which point they are needed to safely and uniformly increase the weight we can lift.)
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Should I eat a specific macronutrient ratio?+
The energy—or calories—in your meals and drinks come from three nutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Each plays a critical role in your body. You probably should not avoid one unless a doctor told you to.
Thankfully, there isn't a strict ratio of nutrients we must adhere to for maximizing muscle gains (study). So follow the global dietary guidelines. Those numbers are:
For protein, we’ve actually already covered how much you should get when weightlifting. As a reminder, multiply 0.60 times your pre-breakfast bodyweight in lbs (or 1.32 times your bodyweight in kg) to get the total grams of either whey or rice protein (your choice) you need to supplement. The label on your protein container will tell you how many grams are in one of its scoops. Each gram of protein is 4 calories. So 80g of protein per day is 320 calories you get from protein.
Around 50% of your calories should come from carbohydrates.
Around 30% of your calories should come from fat.
To learn how many calories you’re getting from each nutrient in a given food, read its nutritional label or search MyFitnessPal.
Again, these nutrient ratios shouldn't affect workout gains, so don’t worry about applying this rubric to your meal selection. I’m just listing this for the curious.
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Why is it ineffective to do more than 4 sets?+
This answer is a continuation of a discussion from the Setssection.
Most workout plans found on the web instruct people to lift more than 4 sets per targeted muscle group, so the breakdown I'm about to share will be hard for some to swallow. Accepting it means admitting that they've wasted a lot of time in the gym. But they can prove everything I'm saying to themselves by taking—you guessed it—their regular muscle measurements!
First, consider how it's rarely possible to do more than 5 sets of 8-10 reps on an exercise if you're lifting as heavy as you can (which you're supposed to in order to grow). You can test this for yourself the next time you go to the gym.
Second, consider my earlier note on how hitting muscles from "new angles" is a misleading statement: meaning, you don't have to use multiple exercises to target a muscle in the same workout if the first exercise already had a wide range of motion and provided consistent tension. For example, a barbell bench press followed by a dumbbell bench press is probably like doing the barbell bench press twice.
Now, because it’s not possible for us to do more than 5 sets yet we're considering two same-muscle exercises in a single workout, we must lower how much weight we lift on the second exercise to accommodate. The implication here is that you're actually lifting sub-optimal heaviness on your second exercise; you're lifting below what is required for your muscles to experience a new level of stimulus, which is required for growth.
To repeat, doing two exercises that hit the exact same muscle is effectively the same thing as doing 4 sets on an exercise then dropping its weight by 10-20lbs (4.5-9kg) and doing another 4 sets on the same exercise. But the research suggests that more than 4 sets is not productive for maximizing muscle size.
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What if the weights in my gym aren't heavy enough?+
For Plan B, which requires a pulley machine, you want to choose a gym that has a pulley machine that reaches around 200 lbs (90 kg). If you can't find one, a 100 lbs (45 kg) machine is workable if, when an exercise calls for a two-handed pulley movement, you consider turning it into a one-handed exercise with each side of your body worked independently. This will double the effective pulley weight available to you.
(By the way, if you have a lot of money to spare, you can get away with skipping the gym and buy one of these for your home. You'll have to switch up exercises a bit.)
If you eventually max out a pulley movement, time to switch fully over to barbells. When you start getting very high up in weight, I recommend having someone spot you. A lack of supervision can be dangerous. If you're at the point where you're lifting very heavy weights, see a professional trainer who can assist you in pushing yourself further.
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Should I do supersets?+
Supersetting is when you alternate between sets of two different exercises so that you finish both around the same time. For example, you could do one set of bicep curls followed by one set of tricep extensions then repeat this 3–4 times in total depending on how many sets your workout plan calls for.
Supersets should provide no benefit other than reducing your gym time. If you do them, make sure you're still taking your normal rest time between sets. Otherwise, an elevated heart rate or unrecovered muscles prevent you from completing your reps.
You can get away with supersetting on Plan A, but Plan B’s exercises are deliberately ordered so that muscles used in multiple exercises have enough time to recover. So do not superset on Plan B. I would rather you play it safe—even if there are a couple opportunities for you to do it.
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I have an unanswered question.+
It's hard for me to offer support. It takes up a lot of time, and I want to focus on writing my next handbook so I can teach you more stuff. I suggest chatting with an expert trainer at a local strength training gym.
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Next page — Workout diet
How to eat so your workouts are effective. It truly matters.