The Fastest Way to Gain 20 lbs Of Muscle (Naturally)

[0:00]This is a skinny guy, skinny fat guy, and heavier guy. And here's what it looks like if they each gain 5 lbs of muscle. 10 lbs, 15 lbs, and 20 lbs. Gaining that much muscle completely transforms your body, no matter your starting point. I know because it happened to me. I went from this to this, and just 12 lbs in the right places took my wife from this to this. But here's the problem. Based on the data, a less than 5% of people ever gain that much muscle naturally. Not because of age or genetics, it's because without the right plan, sure you might make some progress early on, but afterwards you get stuck, spending years with the same physique. And more protein, more creatine, and more workouts aren't going to help you break through that. It's why I teamed up with five of the world's smartest scientists and coaches, experts in all different areas related to muscle growth to answer one question. What is the fastest way to gain 20 lbs of muscle naturally? And at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a step-by-step plan that combines everything into one simple system. But before we talk about how to do it, we need to clear something up that almost nobody online is honest about. How long this is actually going to take, because you'll see fitness coaches everywhere promising 20 lbs of muscle in 3 months. With special sauce, sure. But naturally, muscle just doesn't work like that. With proper training and nutrition, it takes at least a year to put on that amount of muscle, and then every year after that, you gain slow by about half. But here's the good news, your fastest gains don't actually come when you start lifting, they come when you start lifting properly. So let's start with training because this is where 90% of your muscle growth actually happens. Take a look at this. 56 of the world's top natural bodybuilders, guys who have naturally built well over 20 lbs of muscle beyond what most guys could achieve even with drugs. And a few months ago, a group of researchers studied their actual training routines to try to find out how they're putting on so much muscle naturally. Now you'd expect them to spend hours in the gym, annihilating their muscles with tons of exercises, but that's not what they found. On average, they only do about 12 sets per muscle per week. So for chest, that's four sets of bench, four sets of incline, and four sets of flies for the whole week. Now for some muscles, they were doing just six sets a week, probably a lot less than what you're currently doing. And the reason why, not surprising, the more sets that you're doing, the less benefit you get from each extra set. That's Dr. Mike Zourdos, professor cited in over 6,000 studies, who currently runs a muscle growth lab out of Florida Atlantic University. Where he and his team recently investigated how much more muscle you grow by doing more sets in the gym. Now, most people expect a straight line upward, more sets, more growth. But here's what they actually saw. From sets 1 to 5, you're getting a lot of growth, from 5 to 10, you're getting some, and then every time you add sets after that, we're not as confident that you're still getting more growth. And so, if training longer and longer isn't the best solution, then what is? This is where it gets interesting. So Mike and his team actually ran a second analysis, how much more growth do you get by taking each set closer to failure? The point where you literally can't do another rep if your life depended on it. When you stop your set at 8 reps short of failure, which is honestly the intensity, I think most gym goers train at, your muscle still grow. But when you push each set to just one or two reps short of failure, growth nearly doubles. And I can hear you already, Jeremy, I train hard, that's not the problem. Trust me, I have worked with both beginners as well as train lifters who potote, and they both failed the two simple tests I look for. Number one, if their last rep isn't moving really slow, they aren't pushing hard enough. And number two, if on their very last set of their exercise, they can do more reps than their first set, even though they're using the same weight, again, they're not pushing hard enough. But now you may be thinking, okay, so if more sets help and training closer to failure helps, then why not just do more sets and take them all to failure? I always try to remind folks that there are downstream effects of every training decision that you make. And what that means is, if you take all of your sets to failure, you're going to feel terrible after the session. Then you might have some fatigue and soreness the next few days. If that lasts for a little bit longer, maybe you can't train again or train effectively, and then you've actually decreased your frequency throughout the week, and maybe that inhibits some of the total volume that you could do because you were so fatigued from it. So if your goal is building muscle as fast as possible, the key isn't trying to maximize everything at once. It's choosing the training style that allows you to train hard, train consistently, and avoid injury. And that usually comes down to two main approaches. But first is what I call the intensity method. And if you hate spending hours in the gym, you're going to love this. If somebody loves training to failure, then they can go and knock out all of their sets to failure. Perhaps they don't need as many total sets, maybe even five sets a week per se on a muscle group. You only do 5 to 12 sets per muscle per week. So for chest, you might do three sets of bench, three sets of incline, and two sets of cable flies. That's eight sets for the entire week. Your whole chest workout might take just over 20 minutes, and you might be in the gym as little as three or four hours a week. But remember, you're taking every set to failure, and I'm not talking, oh, this is getting hard failure. I mean, you physically cannot move the weight another inch. Your muscles are shaking, your face is red, and you're making weird noises. It is mentally tough, but I have personally seen many lifters switch to this approach and see way better gains with half the sets. Because, for the first time in their lives, they're training with actual intensity instead of just running on autopilot with three sets of 10. But I will admit, each set is a mental battle, which is why there's a second option. With the volume method, you do more sets, like 12 to 20 sets per muscle per week. But you stop two or three reps short of failure. So that same chest workout becomes four sets of bench, four sets of dips, four sets of incline, and four sets of cable flies. Each set is easier, but the workouts are longer. Now, which approach is actually better? The difference is pretty small. We get hung up on looking in the weeds at what is the statistical difference in this, and but we're talking about a few millimeters. So whatever somebody is going to enjoy and adhere to the most, they should do that. Now, for me personally, I do a mix of both. So for arms and back, I actually prefer fewer sets pushed all the way to failure. Now, whenever I'm short on time, I also use the intensity approach. But for muscle groups like legs, taking sets to failure can honestly be brutal and hard for me to recover from. So, I'll often prefer adding an extra set or two instead. But to find what works the best for you, here is an upper and lower body workout with the intensity approach. And here are those same workouts but with the volume approach. So try out both and see what style you're personally more likely to stick to. But regardless of which approach you choose, if you're training this hard, you have to be smart about how many sets you're doing in each workout. This is a pretty recent paper from us by Jake Remmert, one of my PhD students right now who just did a fantastic job on this. Unlike the other meta-regression from Pelin where we wanted to see the number of sets per week, we wanted to see, where do you tap out for those diminishing returns in sets per session per muscle group? We found that right about 10, 11 sets per session, per muscle group, so over that, we aren't sure if we're really getting more growth. And now, that could be for physiological reasons, it could be for fatigue, right? We're training in such a fatigue state that we're not really accomplishing any more. But what that suggests to me is that this is where frequency becomes a variable that becomes to be important. And all this means is rather than doing 12 sets of chest all in one workout, split those sets up into at least two separate days per week. Based on Mike's analysis, that one switch has the potential to speed up your gains by up to 30%. Which is why upper lower splits, push pull leg splits, and full body splits are great options to organize your training. Now for me personally, my favorite split is this five-day upper lower push pull leg split. But the exact split matters much less than choosing one that actually fits your schedule and lets you stay consistent. And if you stick to what we covered so far, depending on your experience, you should be able to build 3 to 8 lbs of muscle over the next 6 months. But you can speed up those gains even further by choosing the right exercises. A mistake that some newbies might make especially with this social media age and there's so much information is there's a lot of exercises you could be doing, but you aren't in a position where you can efficiently learn many, many exercises. That's Steve Hall, a pro drug-tested natural bodybuilder who has gained 45 lbs of muscle throughout his 20-year lifting career. He explained the three stages when it comes to choosing your exercises, starting with beginners. Yeah, at least for those novice lifters, fewer exercises, just general movement patterns, a press, a pull, a squat, a hip hinge, and then you can kind of build from there. In fact, with just these six core exercises done three times a week, you can build well over 10 lbs of muscle. But once you actually put on some muscle and have at least two or three years of consistent training under your belt, you might notice those same compound movements have limitations. This is where stage two comes in, and this is where most people partote. Once you're at this point as an intermediate, you've probably really grown some of your strong, genetically well-endowed muscle groups because your body is just, it wants to move the weight A to B the most efficient way possible. For example, squats did a great job of growing my glutes and inner thighs, but my quads barely budged. And bench press never really did much for my chest and often just bogged my shoulders. It wasn't until I started doing hack squats for quads and more machine and cable work for my chest, did these areas finally start responding. But I know for others, it's the complete opposite. There are some exercises that really suit certain body types versus others. At this stage, you need to become your own guinea pig and figure out what your body and your joints respond best to. And this is also a stage where you might add a few more specialized exercises, especially for muscles that tend to lie behind. Like the rear delts, upper chest, or lats. But here's a list of a few exercises for each muscle that I find tends to work well for most people. Try two or three of these out per muscle and pay close attention to which ones feel the best on your joints and give you the best pump and next-day soreness. Those are likely to be your winners. And so by the time you've reached stage three, you've figured out which exercises actually grow your muscles the best. So instead of constantly changing exercises, you simply double down on the ones that work and rotate them only when needed. May or may not like this question, but I'm just curious if you could pick one exercise for every single muscle, what would they be? You're right, I don't love it, but I will, I'll play ball. Delts, I'll go for a cross body cable lateral raise. Triceps, I really like skull crusher variations. Dumbbell skull crushers probably are the most sustainable for me. Then for biceps, I will say Bayesian curls are a big go-to. For chest, I, I struggle with my chest. I will go for a good converging machine press. Uh, for lats, I will say any sort of shoulder width to slightly inside shoulder width lat pull down works super well for me. And then for my upper back, a good pronated grip, shoulder width or slightly wider machine row suits me down to the ground. Glutes, like a, a machine hip thrust. Can't go wrong with it. Quads, if you've tried a lot of hack squats, the Cybex one, like a lot of well-trained lifters kind of acknowledge it as one of the best. It's very challenging and humbling. Hamstrings, a good RDL. And then last but not least, calves. A straight leg calf raise, can't beat it. What's exciting about the stage is even someone like me, I'm still discovering exercises that unlock new growth. My chest and back are good examples. They've grown more in the past couple years than they have any long time, even though my body weight didn't change that much. But while training is the engine that drives muscle growth, your nutrition is the fuel. And the most important question you need to answer is, how much should you eat? Take a look at this chart and let's start over here, above 20% body fat for men or above 30% for women. If that's you, then while it may not look like it, you actually have a unique advantage. There's about five times the energy in the fat tissue compared to the lean tissue, roughly. And if your body believes it needs to build muscle because you're giving it a resistance training stimulus, some more body fat may be metabolized to feed that. That's Dr. Eric Helms, a muscle growth scientist and pro natural bodybuilder. If you have enough body fat, he suggests you want to aim for a body recomposition, losing fat while building muscle. You probably don't need to be in a surplus, and you might be able to make just as good of gains, probably not exactly as good, but pretty close. You're going to get a little more bang for your buck visually, accepting like 80 to 70% of the muscle gain you could have got, but losing body fat in a appreciable rate. But the trick is you don't want to be in a large deficit. The likelihood of muscle mass losses scales with the deficit size. I would probably cap your deficit at say, losing 0.5% of your body weight per week. So if you multiply your body weight by 0.005, that is how much weight you want to aim to lose per week. Which means you're eating about 250, max 500 calories less than your body needs per day. Many of our ad members follow this exact protocol and end up seeing a complete transformation, even though their weight hasn't changed that much. I personally saw it with my brother-in-law's six-month transformation, too. While he only lost about 12 lbs on the scale, he actually lost around 20 lbs of fat while gaining 7 lbs of lean mass. But if you're serious about maximizing growth, you actually don't want to use this approach forever. And in those scenarios, you can probably, until you get below that cut-off, that 20 or 30% respective body fat percentage level. Just based loosely on the data, that's the point where you might go, you know what, if, if muscle gain rather than fat loss is my principal goal, now I'm going to move it closer to maintenance or a slight surplus. So if you're lean enough, this is actually where more calories can help maximize growth. There's a great study by Rozenek and colleagues, 2002, untrained university age males. They go into a hypertrophy-oriented program and they're being given either nothing, just follow your habitual diet, or a 2,000 calorie weight gain shake. They were just so responsive to training, they gained almost a pound a week of lean mass and body mass. So exclusive at the group level, lean gains over eight weeks, almost a pound a week when they added those 2,000 calories. For context, most new lifters can expect to gain 10 to 20 lbs of lean mass after a full year of training. And just by pairing hard training with a large calorie surplus, these students were able to gain eight after just two months of training. But that same approach isn't going to work for everyone. The key is scaling your calories based on your potential to grow. Your nutrition is permissive to growth. So if you are a rank beginner, 2% gain in body mass per month, that's a great target, and it should be enough to not hold you back. And if you are intermediate, somewhere closer to 1%, and then if you're advanced, which hopefully also comes with the ability to precisely track your nutrients, that might be something closer to 0.5%. And so based on Eric's advice, here's the exact approach I'd recommend, depending on your experience level and how much body fat you're carrying. But with your calories now figured out, how much protein should you eat? Considering protein has been put into literally everything nowadays, it must be a game changer for growth, right? Well, the real answer might surprise you. So protein overall has a very small effect. So I've made a whole past video on this, and while protein does support muscle growth, it doesn't play as big of a role as people think. And you don't actually need very much to maximize its benefit. So I still think say 1.6 grams per kilogram or higher as a kind of cutoff on the low end is a good idea. 0.7 gram per pound if you're an American. And it's not like you won't build any muscle if you're not meeting that, right? Again, that's like the minimum for the maximum. Exactly, you're still making gains. Even as low as 1.2 grams per kilogram, which is like hard to not hit. So if you weigh 220 lbs, only consuming 120 grams of protein per day. Honestly, someone really needs to fix our whole metric and imperial system. But here is a good summary of how much protein you actually need. Now, if protein doesn't matter as much as we thought, then now you may be wondering, is there anything else you can do with your diet to speed up muscle growth? And yes, there is, because based on my experience as a coach, the biggest nutrition mistake people make isn't protein. It's what they eat or don't eat before their workout. You won't believe the number of times I've had someone start a workout, and I ask what they ate before, and they say something like, oh, three hours ago, I had a coffee and a granola bar. And what I like to do is about 1.5 to 2 hours before my workout, I'll have a meal with slow digesting carbs and protein. And so for me, that's usually oats with Greek yogurt and protein powder. And then, about 30 minutes before training, I'll have some fast digesting carbs. Now, these get right into my bloodstream, and I can feel the energy almost immediately. I usually don't last very long, but when I eat like this, I can go hard for hours. But of course, no discussion about diet would be complete without talking about supplements. It's super cost-effective. It just has a really good track record of having small but pretty consistent positive effects on muscle growth. That's Dr. Eric Trexler, a researcher out of Duke University who has published studies on pretty much every supplement you can think of. And the supplement he's referring to is creatine, which has been found to boost your lean mass by as much as 2 to 3 lbs in the first 8 to 12 weeks. But there's two downsides to keep in mind about this number. First of all, most of that lean mass is simply a one-time boost from creatine pulling water into your muscles to help it look fuller. So it's not like you're going to continue getting the big boost every 8 to 12 weeks forever. And the second downside is something I've personally noticed whenever I do take creatine. Some people do not respond to creatine. Some studies will suggest it's like 20 to 30%. As for how to tell if it is working, if you were getting 10 reps with that weight and you add some creatine to the mix and pretty soon after adding the creatine, you're getting an extra two or three reps, or like a 20 or 30% increase in that kind of rep range. And while Eric and I did talk about a handful of other supplements, I honestly don't think you need any to build 20 lbs or more of muscle. I mean, look at people in suboptimal conditions, like prisoners with no supplements and limited protein. They can still build serious muscle as long as the training stimulus is there. But that's only going to work if it's paired with a final piece of the muscle building puzzle. So, you know, you stimulate the muscle to grow, but then don't give it the chemical signal that it needs to do so. It's eventually going to just shrink. That's Dr. Andrew Spector, a board certified neurologist and sleep specialist at Duke University. And the chemical signal he's referring to comes from sleep. The body actually produces more growth hormone and testosterone when you've slept better. So if you want to build muscle, you have to get the sleep. And then the other side of that is if you don't sleep following a workout, you're not going to have the recovery time, and the body has to have that rest to be able to rebuild and regenerate. So if you go into a workout, sleep deprived, or if you don't have recovery sleep, you're limiting what you can possibly achieve. And according to Andrew, it's not just about getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. Because if you're getting 7 hours and waking up and still not feeling refreshed, there was something wrong with the quality of that sleep. Right? 7 hours ought to be at least mostly refreshing for somebody. Based on Andrew's research, there's three main ways many of us sabotage our sleep quality without us even realizing it. So the environment plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for. And so when we say you want your room to be dark and quiet, everybody intuitively knows that, but they don't necessarily know what dark means. And all these chargers around your room that have LED lights on them, you know, or your smoke detector with an LED light. I mean, that that's actually too much light, just from the LEDs in your room. The goal in dark is that you can't see your hand in front of your face. And if you can still see the room around you while you're trying to sleep, that's not the dark we're talking about. Um, quiet, I don't have a measure, you know, it's hard to, to measure the noise, we don't easily do that. Um, but yeah, you do want it dark and quiet. While most of us aren't going to install blackout curtains and a noise cancelling room, you can spend just $15 on Amazon for something I use every night, and something Andrew recommends everyone else use as well. An eye mask and ear plugs. These two items alone can make 7 hours in bed start to feel like a restful 8 or 9 hours. Especially when it's paired with Andrew's third tip. And people are often trying to sleep when it's too hot. The body needs it to be cold to sleep. And if you can program your thermostat so that it drops even during the night, so by 2, 3, 4:00 in the morning, it's even colder, that's preferable because that's when you really needed to be cold to sustain sleep well. Now some nights are bad sleep are still bound to happen. But there is something you can do to prevent it from sabotaging your next day performance and recovery. It can be hard to get enough sleep overnight. And naps have been shown repeatedly to improve athletic performance. I can tell you about sprinting, for example. A sprinter, they sleep deprive the sprinter to 4 hours, and they didn't nap, 20 minutes. That's it, just 20 minutes, doesn't need to be a long nap. Then in another session, they did 4 hours of sleep, and that sprint speed decreased several percentage. Now, 2 to 3% may not sound like a huge amount, but if you're competing at a higher level, that 2 to 3% is usually the difference between first and like eighth place. Right? That's the margin of of elite athletes. Keep in mind, nothing we covered so far with training, nutrition, or recovery is magic, but it does work. I personally seen it with men and women of all different ages and body types. Because the biggest challenge isn't knowing what to do, it's actually applying it consistently week after week. And if you want someone to take care of all that guestwork for you, literally tell you exactly what workouts to do and what nutrition to follow based on your body, so that all you have to do is execute. Then you can try two weeks free on my Build Science Plus app by scanning this QR code, or heading to build withscience.com. After that, give this video a watch next for a new three-day per week full body workout that can get you solid gains, whether you're a beginner or intermediate. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.