Build 10 lbs Of Muscle Before Winter WITHOUT Gaining Fat! - Do These 5 Things | Mind Pump

if you want to gain 10 lbs of lean muscle before winter without gaining a single pound of body fat do the next five things wait a second before you drop these five here let's first talk about how realistic this goal is and uh you know what what percentage what factors um before we sell everybody on the idea that they could build 10 lbs of muscle with no fat no so okay so when this episode airs very difficult to do I just want to point that out so winter is com technically December 21st so winter technically starts December 21st this episode will is that really when winter officially starts yeah yes I didn't know that that's a winter solstice is that what they call it I believe so yeah okay and this episode's going to air on October 6th so that gives people 76 days okay so okay uh essentially to a little over two and a half months to build 10 by the way 10 pounds of lean body mass is very is visible I mean you can see and feel that you know people have gained 10 lbs on the scale but it's water and body fat but lean muscle I mean for most men to give you guys an example this would translate different to women because they have different uh you know where they hold their muscle tends to be different but typically for a man to add a full inch to his arms they he needs to gain about 10 pounds of lean muscle so this is a good like this fill you out pretty damn good goal is it realistic I'd say uh for the right person who's super consistent this can happen does that mean everyone can do this no uh but I think if you follow the steps we're going to go through you're going to build some lean muscle without getting body fat it's pretty similar I know we kind of touched on this when we were talking about the goldilock zone and like how like all these factors pretty much have to align perfectly but if you've been consistent and you've been uh pretty dedicated already and uh in the gym also with your eating habits uh you can just crank a few of these knobs and get pretty far there's some examples of what where I think this is easier than uh than other examples for example uh someone going through what I'm going through right now would be somebody who would be a great candidate for like someone who had muscle lost it the muscle M right which believe it or not is probably more people now obviously I lost a lot right saying that I at one point just five six years ago I had 50 more pounds of muscle on me as a big that's a huge difference probably not a lot of people can say that they lost that much muscle but a lot of people uh that have trained consistently in the past go through periods of time where they fall off on and off the wagon and so if you're somebody who's decided you're motivated before the holiday season like hey I'm going to I'm going to get back on my game here and you've lifted in the past you have more of an advantage doing this than say somebody who's been consistent for the last year Non-Stop been doing everything nutritionally they are going to have a a harder time it's not impossible but they're goingon to have a harder time accomplish versus the person who has already built regaining regaining muscle happens a lot faster I'd say the second of course men men are are going to build more body mass faster uh number one we're primed to do so more so than women and number two we also just have a larger frame which takes us to the next one which is people with a larger frame are going to have uh it's going to be easy for them to gain 10 pounds of muscle on the scale yeah because they're just bigger uh just much bigger people and then of course there are genetic differences between individuals and most people are somewhere in the middle so if you were look at the range of muscle building let's say genetics these are the two extremes over here is like you know muscle wasting disease type genetics over here is like prob bodybuilders if you go in the middle of the middle that's where most people are most people are in the middle of the middle some people more towards bodybuilders some people more towards the other end um and the more you are towards genetically gifted the easier this is going to be and I haven't run into honestly super genetically gifted in the 25 plus years I've been in the space but when I have been around them you could tell so if this is you you know if you're like guessing I think I might have those muscle build you need this episode of yeah but you know you know if this is if this is you and again I got to say this again um building muscle is is a game of grams what I mean by that is you know before you gain a pound of body fat you have to gain grams and ounces muscle is a is is a slow process muscle gain is a slow process now why am I saying this because consistency is what puts you in the positive when it comes to building muscle because your body is pretty much almost always either positive with muscle building or negative with muscle building now if you build no muscle it's because the positive balance out with a negative but for the most part your body's either in positive protein synthesis or negative protein synthesis and what makes you build muscle is when you're positive more often than negative what makes you lose muscles when you're the negative more often the positive so the more consistent you are with what we're about to say the more likely you are to be more in the positive more often of the time I think part of of of this is this is kind of a great conversation because it um it's a topic that I've been trying to talk about with my whole journey right now is this what we call this goldilock Zone and I explain that it looks like when you when you zoom out at 30 days and 30 days has gone by and I've uh added five pounds of muscle and I've lost five pounds of fat it looks like I built muscle and lost body fat at the same time but that's not really what happened that's what it looks like when you zoom out and you look at 30 days what it is more what is more likely or what happened is there's period periods of times in that 30 days where my body is anabolic and then there's times when it's catabolic building or losing and because I'm hovering around the maintenance calories so closely it's dipping in and out of that so much and it's never extremely swinging one way or another and why that's so good to not extremely swing one or the other is if you are trying to build muscle and you EXT extremely swing on the pro positive calories to be anabolic you risk potentially some of those calories being partitioned over to building to adding body fat right because you you swung so hard same thing is true the opposite way if you're in a cut and you're trying to reduce calories to lose body fat and you swing too hard you potentially pair down muscle and so the goldilock zone is when we are hovering around maintenance so close that when we zoom out in 30 days it looks like we built muscle and lost body fat at the exact exact same time but really what happened was you were constantly moving in and out of this I'm either anabolic or catabolic and it's so close to where you need to be maintenance that you don't ever risk losing muscle when you're you're catabolic and you don't ever risk adding body fat when you're anabolic hey sorry to interrupt you look we work with a company called vori they have the world's best ath Leisure wear and if you go through our link you'll get 20% off all right back to the show the reason why this is so hard is because it's hard to be cons consistently accurate it but we'll give you some tips uh we're going to get to that so it's it's just hard to be consistently accurate but also because there is a small anabolic effect from eating more calories than your body needs to build muscle in other words gaining some body fat sometimes also helps you build some muscle and and so why does that make this difficult because if you do more than you need and then you notice more muscle but you gain some body fat you might be like who cares I'm going to keep moving that direction but we're going to talk about how to do this without gaining body fat which is much more a science it requires much more discipline and and it it requires again dogged consistency like ridiculous ridiculous consistency all right so step one obviously you want to build muscle you want to build 10 pounds of muscle you need to lift weights but we're going to give you the recipe for lifting weights the split that works best for 85 to 90% of people watching and listening to this right now which is a 3-day a week full body workout routin Monday Wednesday Friday you work the whole body each of those days for most people this routine will build more muscle more strength than any other split that you're ever going to try and you know if you're listening like well I got to be in the gym more than that you don't this routine right here in fact built some of the most impressive physiques before anabolic steroids were really ever a thing like back in the day you're looking at John grimmick and Steve Reeves and those guys back when most most of them didn't even know what anabolic steroids were um they were impressively built and incredibly strong this is how they all lifted weights it wasn't until later where the in my opinion the addition of anabolic steroids and be able to stay anabolic all the time and this crazy recovery where bodybuilders increased the volume so dramatically they had to split the body up into body parts so for most people this is the this 3-day week split Monday Wednesday Friday is going to it's going to build the most muscle I think there's multiple factors to that right like so there's easier it's easier to program in these compound lifts I think in that sort of structure um it's it's easier to to get like the right balance of volume uh and and the right amount of recovery in between uh for your body to actually adapt uh which is a major factor a lot of people don't really consider the fact that you need that that extra amount of time for your body to fully recover so that way you know you're actually building you're not just uh you know recovering from the the insult that you've provided your body such a huge Point Justin probably the most important Point talking about why a three-day routine because in my experience clients that are motivated to move the needle this fast are also uh uh motivated to do more thinking they're going to get more in return and because we are hovering around this maintenance SL little deficit minus little Surplus you want to send just the right signal to the body you do not want to be hammering it so hard that you're stuck in this recovery trap and your body's never adapting and building muscle that's a for sure recipe for you to stall and plateau and not see the results and I think in my experience most people that are highly motivated to see results and see them as fast as possible tend to overdo it more than they tend to not do enough I think that's the most common thing you see the the the most correlated uh aspect of physical perform performance that is most strongly connected to muscle growth in other words if you were to examine Human Performance and you were to pick an attribute of uh performance that was most closely connected to muscle growth there I mean Head and Shoulders above all the others would be strength okay nothing translates to muscle like building strength or training when you're strong that's the other part of this right so all right where am I going well if you train your whole body Monday Wednesday Friday let's let's just talk about legs if you did three sets of legs on Monday three sets of legs on Wednesday and three sets of legs on Friday you're going to be lifting heavier each of those workouts than if you did nine sets on Monday if you did all nine sets on Monday because fatigue kicks in and sets in you're now working more on endurance and stamina and less on pure strength so that alone makes a big difference plus you're also practicing the lifts more often you more likely to do the best exercises because you have the strength and energy uh to do them and because and there's data that supports this but still murky but again you ask strength coaches they'll they'll they'll back me up on this uh if you take the total volume but divide up that volume over multiple workouts versus doing it all in one it it it seems to send a louder muscle building signal probably because that muscle building signal is being sent three times that week versus just once yeah I think that makes a big difference I think that you're especially if you're a natural athlete I think that you are taking advantage of keeping that signal High because what is it 24 to or I mean 48 to 72 hours before that signal kind of starts to dip back down and so if you're the person that does this upper body split or you do this one muscle or one muscle group per uh per week and you hammer it well sure you get a big loud signal for the first two days and then it really starts to dip off and come back down and then you don't have anything that's saying oh go build muscle on my legs for another 4 days until you hit it again versus dividing that up over 3 days in a week it's like just as that starts to dip back down you hit it again and just as it starts to dip down and you hit it again and I think that frequency not to mention you also choose way better exercises that are going to build more mus we're let let's talk about that right so when it comes to now there's a lot a lot a lot of strength training or resistance training exercises and all of them have some value in the right application but we're talking about just building muscle okay this episode's about gaining 10 lounds of muscle in like 76 days right when it comes to building muscle not all exercises are equal not even close uh so the exercises that you should be doing on a weekly basis in these workouts maybe not in every workout but at least once in each of these workouts are should be the ones that build the most muscle and the exercise about I'm about to list will build more muscle than the next 15 exercises combined that's how powerful of muscle Builders they are these are so the first one is the barbell squat then you have the deadlift the bench press the and the overhead press like and you could probably throw in a barbell row with that as well those exercises just build in fact if you just did those five exercises including the row uh you'd build lots of muscle just in fact a lot of people would be great just doing those exercises alone I I don't know if you heard the clip I just did an interview with Doug Bops uh we both did and um he was asking for like this advice for you know and in regards to like the Obesity epidemic and I said you know what's crazy is if you literally took two pieces of advice one of them was following a whole food diet was one piece of advice the second piece of advice was literally take these five exercises and just practice them I said two times a week like we're obviously talking about optimal building more muscle burning more body fat in a certain period of time so this is why three times a week makes sense for this person but we would literally solve the Obesity epidemic if everybody just did that like literally eat as much as you want so long as it's Whole Foods and literally just do these five lifts practice these five lifts two times a week and you would be blown away at what an incredible healthy sh you're not going to go win a bodybuilding show but you most certainly will build an impressive strong healthy physique just literally practicing this is foundational I mean this is where I mean it's kind of funny because uh I was fortunate to have a weight training class when I was in high school and we focused just on these lifts and uh you know broke them down because they're each each part of these lift have has its own uh unique sort of uh uh uh attribute to them that you have to like learn the skill of it you have to learn and and really break it down uh but then we get away from it and we we try to add on more and we try to add all these different variations and um you know different machines and different things to to Target different muscles of our body but when you always come back to it because it it's the one that that keeps consistently building and and moving the needle I wish that I had a story like that I it's cuz this and part of why I'm so passionate about this conversation was because I'm on the other side I made the mistake for over a decade of being the guy who was doing all the creative silly exercises like avoiding the big five I mean I might have bench pressed here and there maybe occasionally did like a shoulder press more often not a bodybuilder military type press sometimes I rode but I was doing doing all the machines all the creative stuff and I was I was not doing the squat the deadlift the overhead press like consistently and I look back now and I look back how hard and consistent how much I trained in my early 20s to the amount that I have to train to Build a Better To Build a Better physique at older in age with way less effort by just focusing on those lift it makes me so angry that I didn't either I didn't listen or I didn't have the right person communicating to that to me when I was in my 20s because I didn't do that I totally missed out on on those early gains had I just focused on those Liv hey sorry to interrupt it's October Maps muscle mommy is 50% off half off if you're interested click on the link below all right back to the show and just some personal um experience with this I you know when I really was training a lot of clients there was a period of time there when I got uh a decent amount of client s that were men in their 20s that wanted to build muscle it was a like I trained one dude and then he recommended his friend and next you know I'm training like the six guys now the thing about it was that they all worked out so none of them were complete beginners they all lifted weights they all worked out they all trained the whole body and the diff what I did was is I gave them good workout programming they all followed split so we went three days a week and then I had them do the exercises that I said uh very consistently and none of them did them consistently definitely not squat or deadlift some of them they all bench pressed overhead pressed they didn't do a full range of motion Barb row they never did squat deadlift they never did I can tell you exactly how much of a difference in muscle mass just doing these exercises uh did for them and it was on average s pounds on average seven pounds of Le mon Mass each one of these guys gained and it was mainly from getting strong at these exercise myself uh you know when I was a a freshman in high school and working out uh the the year between freshman and Soph more year I gained so much muscle because I met a group of powerlifters that and by the by then back then I was training my whole body it wasn't like I avoided legs and did I use leg press and hack squat leg extensions leg curls and I did all the you know cable rows and that kind of stuff but these guys taught me primarily uh had a bench press and deadlift and I gained as I mean as was a kid I gained almost 15 pounds of muscle uh or or or or weight I should say on the scale some of it was body fat but most of it was muscle and I got I had got really strong strong at squats and deadlifts so these exercises talk about packing on muscle if you miss these exercises you're not going to build near as much it's a loudest signal You' be able to provide like hands down yes next up is to eat your target body weight in grams of protein so if you want to gain 10 lbs of lean body mass that is your Target in grams of protein in other words if you're 150 lbs and you want to weigh 160 because you want to gain 10 PBS of muscle you need to eat6 60 gam of protein every single day do not miss this at all now this one alone makes a tremendous difference and I would see people gain muscle just from bumping their protein in fact a lot of people experience this by taking a protein shake believing the shake has something magical when in reality it was just you increase your protein I mean I attribute the entire protein shake Market to this the reason why it's so popular and it's been a staple in so many uh people's lives when it comes to their fitness journey is because you do see a significant difference on it and it's not the Magic in the shake it's that most people miss their protein intake so much that simply adding a 30 gam protein shake to the diet significantly improves your musle but I would definitely take it a step further and say track and make sure that I mean I'm going through this process again I don't know how many times I've done this in my career where I go back to kind of tracking to get an idea where I'm at and I am trying with all my might to hit protein I think about it and then when I go to bed I'm thinking about tomorrow morning I'm going to eat this and then I'm going to eat that like I'm like prioritizing it that much and I still fall short on many days so in and if you were to ask me probably you know 10 15 years ago if I were to assess the way I was eating if I was consider that I would say oh man it's high protein I'm eating four or five times a day and there's always a big piece of meat involved in it or eggs like I'm eating a lot of protein protein but when you actually measure it out and track a lot of times you might be eating enough protein to be survive and be considered okay and hitting with your your Bare Essentials but there's a difference between the Bare Essentials protein and then there's a difference to maximal benefits for building muscle and it's closer to that one: one that you're talking about which I would venture to say 90% of the people that think they're hitting that are not hitting that no in fact uh I bet you right now if all if if you're listening to this and you already strength train and it's not a terrible workout and you're doing you know your workouts and stuff and you start tracking and you know that you're not hitting this number just doing this not even following the other steps not even do the other stuff I said just hitting your protein targets you'll see a nice three to 5 pound in lean body M just from doing that alone that's how big of a and now you want this to come if it if it can from Whole Natural Foods okay that's the most important that's that's that's also important and also start your day off with high protein because it is very hard to hit this protein Target especially because it's going to be 10 grams above what your current body weight is this is a difficult one and and it becomes impossible you know if like me I'll try and eat 200 grams of protein or more in a day if I don't have 50 grams of protein for breakfast it's not happening yeah it's you literally have to train yourself to to do what you're saying seek it out it's not intuitive because first of all it's like satiating which is our already like a signal your body like I'm good I'm you know everything's fine and literally have to go beyond that to be able to get especially in a a condensed window like this we're trying to optimize like it's a huge importance to give you those building materials totally now next up is to every night again this is a this has to be consistent get eight hours of good sleep every single night yeah sleep is where the majority of the repair and growth occurs not only that but suboptimal sleep is a fantastic way to take your hormone profile and make it one that is pro- fat gain and and anti-muscle gain okay lack of sleep makes your body not want to build muscle and it makes your body want to gain body fat there was an interesting study I've quoted a few times where they took two groups of people put them on the same calorie restricted diet so they all ate in a calorie deficit okay it was all controlled the difference was one group got bad sleep the other group got great sleep the group that got bad sleep here's you know here's the funny thing they all lost the same amount of weight but the group that got bad sleep lost twice as much muscle of the weight that they lost because it literally primes your body to tear down or tear break down this very active tissue because lack of sleep is is stressful let me tell you the most common mistakes that you will see and these will be people that are hitting protein and training hard I can't tell you uh the first tip where we talk about lifting weights three times a week how often I see this the uh over application of intensity and volume so they're training four five six days a week hoping they're going to get their results faster paired with not getting adequate sleep and recovery and repair the combination of the two of those is one of the most frustrating things that lead to plateaus with so many people because they're like man I'm hitting protein man I'm training good exercises I don't get it I'm training five days a week but they sleep as [ __ ] and they're over they're over applying intensity and that is a recipe for you not seeing results and it's so hard for people to wrap their brain around because they know oh I know protein's important oh I I know I got to go to the gym consistently I'm doing that oh I'm doing those ex they're doing a lot of the right things but that sleep and Recovery goes so hand inand with the the amount of training volume and intensity that you apply and if those are off you could be perfect everywhere else and you're not going to see the results that you want to see 100% all right last and this one really that I'm about to say speaks to the and not gain any body fat part of what I said at the beginning episode which is avoid heavily processed foods if your diet is made up of heavily processed foods you will overeat okay they are engineered to make you overeat there's lots of time and money that's been invested in developing these foods to make them so that you overeat them and you're not going to win you're not going to be able to eat the appropriate amount to build muscle and not gain body fat so if you simply avoided heavily processed foods and hit the protein targets and did everything else we said the odds that you'll gain muscle and it's going to be lean with no body fat is high if you include heavily processed foods the odds that you'll gain muscle and fat becomes very high the thing that I love about this tip or that I find interesting and this is my personal journey and then with clients is that if I have a client who is not excited about weighing and measuring every bit of everything that they consume and tracking it like to a tea if they just ate Whole Foods listen to their body when it's hungry fed it every time it felt that way but just made a choice to eat Whole Foods and eat the protein first it would solve this I didn't have to have them we track of if you're somebody that has a really hard time eating Whole Foods and processed foods makes its way into your diet more often than not then it becomes Paramount that you weigh and track everything because you will overeat other way you will because they engineered to do that and if you listen to those same signals that will guide you in the right direction with Whole Foods it will certainly send you in the wrong direction with processed foods and I just want to make that clear because I don't want to demonize processed foods I utilize processed foods all the time Greek yogurt is considered that I eat that every single night but I'm also tracking diligently and I also understand that these processed foods can send that signal for me to want to eat more food and so you have to understand that we're not demonizing that and saying you can't can't have processed foods we're just saying that if you do avoid them it makes this so much easier for your success if you choose to include them a lot you got to be really careful about making sure you're staying right around that maintenance to slight Surplus or that can get out of control really fast hey sorry to interrupt look I have a free guide that teaches you how to lose fat in three steps just three steps that will burn the most amount of body fat help keep it off this guide is totally free we're giving it to everybody right now if you want it click on the Link at the top of the description below all right back to the show all right do you have questions Doug first one is should I track calories as well okay tracking calories will get you much more specific and what that would look like is you would track for a week you would get what you're averaging and then you would add maybe 400 calories above that um while hitting the protein targets to to do that I think that would make it more likely uh that you you hit this Target and goal but I think if you just hit your pro targets and don't try to avoid eating anything except for heavily processed foods in other words don't be like I'm hitting my protein but I'm avoiding carbs or I'm not going to then then if you're eating the protein not trying to avoid food eat when you're hungry stick to Whole Foods I think you'll be okay if I have the option if a client asks me like do you want me to track and I say will you track everything and they say yeah then I say yes the reason why you hear us give advice the way we give advice is we recognize that a majority of people won't right a majority people or a majority of what people will say they will and then they don't and so we've had to figure out uh from years and years of experience training these people that say they will and then don't how do I get them to get the results they want knowing that they're not going to do some things that would really help me out like tracking therefore you hear these tips like avoid the heavily processed food just focus on the protein and that's going to help pretty much most people get there but man if I got an option if you're willing to track and and do that then absolutely more data that we have I mean I would say that goes with testing your body fat first I would say that would be tracking your steps track like man the the more you're willing to track uh the easier is going to be for us to make adjustments along the way but I think the idea of this episode was to give you guys like some takeaways that if you just did this you should be able to get these results from that next question is what supplements should I take oh creatine for sure creatine for sure whether you want to build muscle burn body fat improve your health but you will build more muscle on Creatine um your muscles will be more hydrated better pumped they're going to be stronger and they and it seems to contribute to faster uh muscle building I'm going to add eaas to that now because this person is we already know that they're going to be catabolic at sometimes uh because they're hovering around close to maintenance to a deficit sometimes because they're trying to reduce body fat and build muscle so I think the benefits of having that just simply as a just in case you have days where you don't now if you're listening to this and you're like your goal protein is 150 and you Crush 180 to 200 every day okay well then maybe this is not the supplement for you but if you you know you're somebody who has to really go after the protein to hit your protein targets and you know that you miss sometimes then I now believe that having those eaas uh By Your Side would be very beneficial yeah and then next would be protein powder if it's very hard for you to hit your protein protein targets uh then a protein power powder can be quite valuable but you you don't have to take any of the stuff that we said you could do without those things but they can help it's mainly for convenience and to make sure you're on target next question is should I include cardio uh no not NE no cardio isn't going to really help you build muscle unless your cardiovascular fitness is holding you back from doing your strength training exercise like if your if your cardio is so bad that you can't do more than three reps of a walk cuz you're out of breath then you probably want to incorporate some cardio that being said for everybody else just walk every day walk every day it's good for your health yeah um it's it's a great activity helps facilitate recovery but like traditional forms of cardio aren't muscle building and they would just be taking away from the recovery reserves that we need for building muscle I'm glad you brought that I honestly would have said no it just you know out of out of this jump but like in that situation if you're the type of person that uh will always do low ws and and we'll we'll have a lot of rest periods already established uh and then want to switch which again I don't know if this really made it on there but switching your focus training wise you know will help create a new stimulus so to be able to kind of switch into higher reps uh you know that's kind of where too you can you can look at that as another way of adding a bit of cardio yeah I would I would strongly say no just because the title of this episode is like the goal is to build 10 pounds of muscle as fast as we possibly can there is uh the only benefit you can make the case for with me on where cardio helps is if you can't do more than 10 10 reps of squats because you're so your endurance sucks so bad but then even then I would make the argument of okay let's go build that endurance through lifting weights yeah get it through the Reps and and get it through the Reps and so versus cuz doing in doing traditional cardio where you're actually running or elevating the heart rate to the cardio threshold is uh catabolic it's not it's not pro building muscle it is not ideal uh for this person and their specific goal in this short period of time that is not me saying that cardio isn't extremely beneficial and healthy and good for this if the person was I want to be healthy the be most healthy I can be in the next four weeks or the the goal was hey I want to lose body 10 pounds of body fat the fast as I possibly can okay well then you would hear me communicate this differently because then we it's a different goal but if the goal is build maximal muscle in a short period of time then for most people most people this is not going to help our cos it's why too if you're following along the series that I'm doing right now cuz the main goal is for me to build as much muscle as I can right now to build my metabolism uh naturally before I in introduce any cardio like you don't see me doing any that for that exact reason all right I know you like that episode if you did check this one out 30% body fat for men this is way too high this is actually a bit high for women as well so in today's episode we're talking about how you can go from 30 to 10 what is 10% body fat this is when you have a visible six-pack can you go from 30 to 10% yes it's possible but not if you guess along the way so we're going to talk about how you can do that in today's episode now there's a huge range right of like body types some people can run uh a little bit heavier uh and or a little bit higher body