I have been asked literally hundreds of times by skinny guys and self-proclaimed “hardgainers” what my “secret” is when it comes to packing on the pounds.  I must confess that I find that extremely flattering, considering there are plenty of guys out there ten thousand times bigger than me.  But I’m not going to self-deprecate here; I believe I have as much of a right to give advice as anyone, because I’ve learned quite a few things first-hand while packing 40 pounds of muscle onto my own toothpick frame, and I know that these guys find it easier to identify with me than the mass monster at their local gym.  I commend them for that -seeking advice and picking appropriate role models is a skill I was never very good at.  I guess I’ll always be a little pissed off that I’ll never be Marcus Rhul, but I think I’m in good company there.

Let’s start with the fact that there are no “secrets” when it comes to building muscle.  If that’s not what you were expecting to hear from me, then perhaps it’s best we just get it over with and rip that bandage off right up front.  I’m going to do my best not to blow smoke up your ass about having some elusive “secret” that has only been privy to Navy Seals and MMA elites.  Frankly, that kind of marketing hype pisses me off, and just makes the people touting it sound like con artists.

Pretty much everything we know today, and everything the glossy magazine ads call a “breakthrough” in bodybuilding science, derives from the same two fundamental principles -two inescapable truths about the human body that you must come to terms with if you are to have any success at all in forcing yours to grow more muscle.  To anyone with a high school understanding of human anatomy, they are not secrets, and they are as follows:

1. All muscle growth is controlled by anabolic hormones.
2. The human body doesn’t increase anabolic hormone production without a very good reason.

You can wrack your brain for months trying to dissect all the staples of bodybuilding -how much weight to lift, how often to lift it, how to inflict the right amount of micro-trauma, how to maximize recuperation, how much protein to consume, what kind, what supplements to take, how much water to drink, etc- but every single one of those questions (in fact, every single thing you do in bodybuilding) is rooted in, and serves to satisfy these two inescapable truths.  At the end of the day, it’s all about the hormones.  The hormones are in charge.

Now this may sound extraordinarily patronizing, but I point it out because when people ask “what’s your secret”, what they’re really asking is “How do I get the most effective hormonal response from the smallest possible stimulus?”  They may not even know these are the two controls they are trying to affect, and they may not articulate it that way when asked, but in the long run, every quest for the ideal combination of diet, strength training, and rest is an attempt to get the most #1 for the least #2.

So, while I want you to be skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered the “secret” of packing on the pounds, I also don’t want you to instantly assume they’re full of it.  What they mean -and have every right to be proud of- is that they discovered what works for them.  Like it or not, there are hard, quantifiable reasons why some people can eat two crappy meals a day and explode with lean mass, while others have to cram food down their throats ’round the clock just to gain two pounds a month.  And while all the multitudinous variations between individuals certainly make finding common ground difficult, it is not a complete waste of time.  There are certain fundamentals that apply equally to everyone; they just don’t sound very sexy, and (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) they are far from “secrets”.

When I speak of our bodies needing a “very good reason” to increase anabolic hormone production, that’s not hyperbole.  Muscle is very expensive stuff, metabolically speaking.  It requires complex blood supply and nervous system support, and it burns energy our bodies would rather store for times of famine.  Thanks to our overly frugal evolutionary hard-wiring, our bodies are content to provide and sustain exactly as much muscle as is needed to carry our sustenance from the grocery store to our mouths and not one ounce more.  So if you want to get all swole and jacked up with all kinds of aesthetically cool muscle mass and definition, you’re going to have to convince your tightwad hormonal axis to cough up the goods.

Sweet!  So how do I do it?

Since the very first homo sapiens stood upright, the most compelling reason our bodies have ever accepted for increasing muscle size and strength is neurological and muscular overload.  Put another way: asking more from your muscles and nervous system than they are presently capable of.  Pretty simple really.  If you repeatedly ask your body to perform what it cannot, over time, it will adapt itself to the task.  And all that adaptation is driven by hormones.  Fortunately, it takes a lot less neurological and muscular overload than you might think to get those hormones dancing.

And the good news is that while our hormonal accountants are relative tightwads when it comes to coughing up the stimulus, they also have a tendency to overreact and overcompensate when they finally get the message.  It is not uncommon for guys to reap HUGE immediate growth results when they first start working out seriously -a phenomenon known amongst the ranks as “beginner’s gains”.  But the real trick is to keep those hormonal accountants overcompensating once they start.

[box style="warning"]Patience, Grasshopper.

Progressively overloading a muscle through strength training is the most effective way to stimulate a compensatory response. You break down the muscle so that the body is forced to build it back bigger and stronger. Most inexperienced lifters seize upon this basic physiological principle, and set about beating their muscles to oblivion with hundreds of reps of isolation exercises, thinking that if a little damage provokes a noticable compensatory response, a LOT of damage must trigger the inner Hulk. But not so fast. Like any group of workers driven too hard, your body does have limits. Demand too much of your hormonal and neurological workforce and it will happily go on strike -a condition we call “overtraining”.[/box]

PSSST! There’s more to it than “working out”

While the most effective stimulus to kick-starting the hormonal signal to build muscle is progressive overload through strength training, you won’t reap the maximum benefits of that stimulus (or the resulting hormonal activity) if you don’t support it outside the gym, too.  This is where most strength training noobs totally miss the boat.  When I tell someone they aren’t paying enough attention to their diet when training for mass, they immediately jump to nitpicking about their protein intake, or the supplements they take, or some other minutia, when the real oversight is much, much more fundamental and insidious.  Eating -itself- has its very own effect on anabolic hormones.  I’m talking about the basics here:  How much you eat at each sitting, how often you eat, the time of day you eat specific macronutrients -ALL of these have powerful anabolic repercussions.  It is no exaggeration to say that you can bust your butt in the gym and take all the latest and greatest supplements, but you if you aren’t eating like a polar bear in a daycare center, you are basically running a marathon with a piano tied to your waist.

Finally, the most overlooked anabolic trigger is also the easiest to supply, and therefor the easiest to take for granted: sleep.  Among the myriad physiological benefits that sleep provides, perhaps none is more profound or welcome than the regular (and completely automatic) regeneration of muscle proteins.  This is one of those things we can safely call universal; the vast majority of all the muscle ever built was assembled while we were counting sheep.  No one ever grew an ounce of muscle in the gym (unless they were sleeping there); they grew it at home, under the covers, when all their other metabolic functions (digestion, respiration, cardiac activity, etc.) were relaxed, and all those hormones could go to work.

With all these things considered, I’ll leave you with another fundamental truth about bodybuilding:

while the reasons you provide today are good enough to get your body releasing anabolic hormones, those reasons won’t suffice for long.

With a specific increase in strength comes a specific -and finite- increase in lean mass.  So if you’re not constantly increasing the intensity of your workouts (lifting heavier weight, taking shorter breaks between sets, varying your speed, or combinations of all these and more), if you’re not increasing your calories to keep up with the gains, and if you’re short-changing yourself on recovery time (sleep), sooner rather than later, your hormonal accountants will grow complacent, and your growth will “plateau” or “hit the wall”.  It takes constant variation, and more persistence and tenacity than most people are capable of to keep the engines of growth humming.

So, to recap:

1. All muscle growth is regulated by hormones.
2. The human body has a severe grudge against muscle, and won’t build more of it on a whim, so it won’t release those hormones without a LOT of coercion.
3. The most effective way to coerce the body into releasing those hormones is to a) break it down through just the right amount of progressive overload, b) feed the hell out of it, and c) give it plenty of sleep.
4. Never let your body get used to anything you do in #3.
5. None of this is a secret, and
6. There is no escaping any of it.