How to Grow Bigger Muscles Fastest! (NO PLATEAUS)

If you want to grow bigger muscles you have to first learn the three options you have for doing it and then not get attached to any one. The biggest problem people have is that they get stuck on one particular method for building muscle and are afraid to explore other avenues for doing it. This ha

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re talking all about how to grow bigger muscles, and it’s right here. It’s actually really simple.

You’ve got three paths to do it, but the big thing is; you can’t get attached to one at the exclusion of the others. I’m going to show you today how all three have to be explored, and rotated if you want to see your best gains ever. If you want to reach your true, full potential you have to make sure you’re doing them. I’m going to cover that, and the reasons why that is. Let’s identify what we have as our options, first.

We’ve got progressive overload, metabolic stress, and eccentric damage. These are the three main ways you can grow muscle. Ironically, if you were looking at the three of them, only one of them would I say is going to cause a lot of muscle soreness. So right off the bat, you realize that muscle soreness is not a prerequisite for growth. But it actually might be.

You see, at some point – I did a whole video on this – you’re going to have to dip into the eccentric muscle damage technique as a way to continue to illicit new gains because these are going to dry up, if these are the only two things you use. I’ll get back to that in a second, but these two don’t necessarily do that. So what are we talking about? With progressive overload we’re talking about adding weight to the bar. Getting stronger in different exercises.

Have your strength gains proceed your size gains. The only thing you can do is increase your workload. We can increase the volume of what we do inside of our workout. We can increase the density of a workout by decreasing the time that we do the same volume that we did the last time. So we can increase workload and volume, or we can increase our training frequency, taking advantage of the fact that we know muscle protein synthesis peaks, and then gets back to baseline within 48 hours.

So if you train a muscle more frequently you can hit it more often. You can spark that stimulus for growth more often. Or you could do both. You could even increase exercise variety from time to time because the new exercise stimulation on a muscle that you’ve never really felt before can be a good form of progressive overload. It’s a lot more limited than these two, but it can be something you can rely on.

Metabolically, it’s kind of exciting because you use lighter weight here, but what you’re really relying on here is not just the tension of the muscles’ feel, but the chemical reaction that goes on inside of a contracting muscle. As your muscles contract you produce metabolites. These metabolites start to accumulate, and what we normally do is, we stop when it starts to burn. But if we learn how to train with a purpose here, train to seek out this stress, and train through it; we start to take advantage of the fact that chemical reactions start to take place inside our muscles, which provide a stimulus for growth on their own. So it is a way that we can train with lighter weights.

There’s another thing too, dispelling the myth that heavy weights are the only way to do it. We’ve just seen we can do it with heavy weights, lighter weights, or again, heavy weight, but with more muscle soreness. So what happens is, if we go down this road and we get attached to one, single method that’s when problems occur. Let’s start at this end. Let’s say I wanted to do my progressive overload using weight.

We know – if we’re not newbies – that this eventually becomes a problem because, yes, neurological gains are a thing of beauty when you’re new to lifting because you become more efficient at the lift. If it’s a multi-muscle group exercise, a compound movement, you might even become more coordinated at recruiting the different muscle groups to contribute to that lift. So all these things start to allow you to increase your strength, the strength gains help to proceed the side gains – as I’ve said – and you can increase muscle contractile tissue, and that’s feeding into your ability to even lift more weight, and this whole thing is a beautiful cycle until it ends. When it ends you have to look elsewhere. What a lot of people will do now is they’ll look over here.

They’ll say “Well, I’ve just got to change my training volume around. If I could change my training volume then I’ll be good. If I could increase my workload, then I’m good to go. ” Well, here’s the problem with that. As you increase your volume, or if you increase your training frequency what happens is, we often times find ourselves derailed by that method because we s tart to get tendonitis.

Overuse injuries. We’re approaching this without realizing ‘what is the actual recovery that I have in a muscle, by muscle basis? ’ Because some of our muscles don’t respond the same way. Some muscles, we feel like we can go right back out there and train. Other muscles take us longer.

So we’re going to have a 48 hour window to do so, and we think that’s the magic number, we’re not really doing ourselves a service by doing that. So we’re undercutting our ability to do it the right way, and more importantly, we’re costing ourselves by creating overuse injuries that create problems here, because this can take you out of the gym entirely. As anybody that’s felt pain in their elbow every time they curl, or shoulder pain every time they try to press, or knee pain every time they try to bend their knees. This can become a problem. So if you rely exclusively on this, and think your volume approach is going to be the answer; it’s not.

Even back here, if I were to point out, if you think that I’m going to just keep adding weight to the bar, what happens here is less of an overuse injury. This can become more of an acute injury because you tried to add too much weight and you can’t do it, and you wind up getting hurt. Even worse, in an attempt to look like you’re moving more weight all you do is continue to bastardize your form to the point where it’s not even recognizable anymore of what you were doing. Then what started off looking like a bench-press, or a squat now looks like a quarter rep of both. That’s not helping you either.

So now, if you’re in this game here, and n ow you’ve got to go down and look for something else, we can go down this road. This is the one that I said is pretty exciting because I don’t think enough of us train this way. I don’t think enough of us rely on the lighter weights. We think that the lighter weights aren’t capable of building muscle – which we’ve already told you is not the case – and when we do use them, we don’t train hard enough with them. That’s the problem.

You can take light weights and train really damn hard because if you can create this metabolic distress in the muscles, and push through it – what I like to say is “When it starts to burn is when the exercise starts. ” Then, how far can you push through that? When you do, you create a new opportunity for growth. But it is uncomfortable. You do benefit from having a knowledge of strength curves here because it helps you realize where in a certain exercise you can do more damage here, but the fact is; this opens up new doors, and it’s something you should do.

But here’s the problem here. If you exclusively use this method, and you’re using lighter weights to do so; where is the tension overload? You’re using the chemical overload here, but where is the tension overload? The tension overload is coming back here. So you can’t just keep doing this.

You need to do more than that. So then, we always come back down to the end, here. That is, you’ve got to start throwing in some eccentric muscle damage, too. W