Hello my name is Victor

Hello my name is Victor and I am trying to gain muscle. My goal is 150 and I am 135. To be honest I don’t know much about the gym, I’ve actually been two years going but I haven’t seen the results I want to, there have been results but for two years I believe I am taking longer than I though.

Replies

  • durakoafuego
    durakoafuego Posts: 2 Member
    If anyone could help me out I would deeply appreciate. Maybe let me know on certain stuff and tips. Thank you.
  • nutmegoreo
    nutmegoreo Posts: 15,532 Member
    How much are you eating? Are you following any particular program at the gym?
  • sugaraddict4321
    sugaraddict4321 Posts: 15,689 MFP Moderator
    Welcome to the MFP Community. :) I've moved your thread to the Gaining Weight & Bodybuilding section, as you might find some helpful folks and threads here.
  • gcpower
    gcpower Posts: 17 Member
    Hi @durakoafuego ! Welcome to MFP.
    Lots of material to cover regarding your question, but I'll break it down into three points to get you started.
    Note: I didn't intend for this response to be so long. It just turned into a relaxing Sunday morning sit down with tea. :) I hope it helps. If you have any question let me know.


    Part 1. Food - If you haven't seen any weight gain, lean or fat, then you are not eating enough. You may feel like you're eating enough, but you'll need to eat more. Give MFP a try and start logging your kcal intake. After a week or two of logging, add +100 kcal to your daily intake. Start weighing yourself regularly and tracking the upward movement. If you are not gaining weight after a week or two, add another +100 kcal per day. You'll be aiming to gain 2-3 lbs per month. Any more than that and you'll be putting on increasingly larger amounts of fat relative to your lean mass gains.

    Use your MFP food log, your weight tracking and just looking at yourself in the mirror to tweak your week to week intake up and down. Repeat +100 kcal / -100 kcal as necessary.

    Also, PROTEIN. You probably should already be eating ~140 grams of protein per day. If not, start playing around with meals to increase your protein intake. Make your +100 kcal addition all protein. Add an egg, or a scoop of whey powder, or a 1/2 cup of cottage cheese to your breakfast. Yum! There are a variety of numbers out there, but I go with 1.3 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So you'll be looking to increase your protein intake to about 175 grams per day. Don't stress too much about hitting that number, but the closer you get to it on a daily basis, the better your results will be.
    --

    Part 2. Weight training - Work out three or four days a week. 1 hr to 1.5 hr per workout is enough. None of this time, except maybe a 5-min warm-up, is cardio. Learn how to workout with barbells and dumbbells. Find a routine online that fits this. bodybuilding.com and muscleandstrength.com have plenty. This entry-level workout looks perfectly good and is similar to what I started out with when I was in your shoes.

    Has your strength improved over the last 6 months? In my first two years, my squat went from 65 lbs to 320 lbs. My bench press went from 65 lbs to 230 lbs. Have you increased your resistance over the course of your training? Adding from workout to workout, or week to week? To continue to build muscle, you must continue to challenge your body. Without a change or challenge (increased weight, increased sets, increased reps, decreased rest between sets) your body becomes adapted and no longer needs to 'change' and your muscles do not 'grow'.

    Run a weight training program from the websites above for 2-4 months and then be prepared to challenge yourself with a new program, either from those same websites or anywhere on the web. Do some reading, watch some youtube, there are lots of great resources out there. My two personal favourties are Alan Thrall and PowerliftingtoWin.
    --

    Part 3. Recovery - Weight training damages the muscles and stimulates them to repair bigger and stronger. Food provides the raw materials and energy required to do the repair. All you need now is to put aside some time for that repair to happen. Three ways to make time are, in order of importance:
    1. Sleep - 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night (even 9 hrs). A lot of people dismiss this but to efficiently build muscle you need sufficient time during sleep for hGH to be released by your body and for muscles to repair. If you are not getting enough sleep each night, you are undoing a large portion of the the work done in the gym and in the kitchen. Fun fact, alcohol consumption suppresses hGH levels during sleep.
    2. Days off - The days we don't workout are just as important as gym days. Days off are a chance for your body to recover from the stress of the previous workout and get ready for the next. Scheduling in additional workouts, cardio or sports will affect your body's ability to recover and will impact following workouts. If workout stress and fatigue can't be cleared during these days off, it will slowly accumulate and have an impact on future training.
    3. Deload weeks - Every 4 - 8 weeks, depending on accumulated fatigue, it is good to schedule in a light week (deload week) to allow the body to recover. Simply reduce the weight, or number of sets, or reps, or workout days. Don't stress out about falling behind or going easy. Your body will be fresh and ready to hit it hard the following week.

  • viajera99
    viajera99 Posts: 252 Member
    Here's a well written article that may help you get started, about eating for muscle gain, with links to other articles with suggestions for lifting programs.

    https://www.aworkoutroutine.com/the-muscle-building-diet/

    Also, what @gcpower said. :smile:
  • Also, here is a copy and paste from a post I made a few weeks back about the importance of writing down and logging your progress.

    First off, I'll start with the math. On average, a lifting session is between 12-30 sets a day, 3-5 days a week. That's between 36 and 150 sets. I sure can't remember all of that - I can only remember what I ate 3 days ago because a) it's logged in MFP and b) I eat close to the same things every day so that's an unfair example. The same principle goes for excersises.
    .
    Without writing things down, I end up at "comfort weights" things I KNOW, I can handle in a rep range I KNOW I can handle, give or take a rep and 5lbs. By writing things down, every set, every rep, I can look back to the last time I trained that body part, and now I have a goal to meet or surpass. It allows me to apply the principles of progressive overload every single time I train. It doesn't have to be lifting, it can be running, cycling, plyometrics, whatever. TRACK IT.

    Now that I've ranted on why I think it's important, I'll delve into my tracking methods for an example...it's pretty simple.

    For weight training:
    The excersise - reps@weight with a / between sets IE
    SQUATS - 5@225/5@315/5@315/4@315

    For running: distance@time IE 1mile@8:21

    For interval work, it looks something like this:
    Sledge Tire, 16 lbs, 30sec work/1min rest - IIIIIIIIII
    (I can't do the horizontal slash for 5 that's supposed to be 10 rounds)

    etc, etc. I'm sure you can figure out your own method if you choose to do this.

    Lastly, I'd like to address that pesky problem of getting sweaty, filthy, spilling your water etc. Paper doesn't like those things - I use "Rite in the Rain" notebooks to combat this issue - Waterproof paper = problem solved. They're great, you can get them on Amazon pretty cheap (no I don't make money off this, I just find them useful, in more than just excersise logging too)
  • Erik8484
    Erik8484 Posts: 458 Member
    If anyone could help me out I would deeply appreciate. Maybe let me know on certain stuff and tips. Thank you.

    What have you been doing so far?
  • billkansas
    billkansas Posts: 267 Member
    Read some of the posts here, start logging your food... I think you'll find you need to eat more. I think Starting Strength is a great beginner program if you aren't already on a good one.
  • sgt1372
    sgt1372 Posts: 3,971 Member
    edited August 2019
    I'm always puzzled by posts from people who say that they can't gain wt.

    I quick look at the other subforums will reveal that gaining wt is NOT a problem for most people here. Their problem is quite the opposite.

    Not to be flippant but the easiest way to gain wt is simply to eat more. How to go about doing w/o just getting fat is another matter.

    As recommended in detail above, in order to gain muscle while minimizing fat, you should eat more cals & protein AND exercise and lift wts to promote fitness and muscle development.

    Not much more can be said about it. You'll know pretty quickly if you're doing it "right" or not.
  • sardelsa
    sardelsa Posts: 9,812 Member
    sgt1372 wrote: »
    I'm always puzzled by posts from people who say that they can't gain wt.

    I quick look at the other subforums will reveal that gaining wt is NOT a problem for most people here. Their problem is quite the opposite.

    Not to be flippant but the easiest way to gain wt is simply to eat more. How to go about doing w/o just getting fat is another matter.

    As recommended in detail above, in order to gain muscle while minimizing fat, you should eat more cals & protein AND exercise and lift wts to promote fitness and muscle development.

    Not much more can be said about it. You'll know pretty quickly if you're doing it "right" or not.

    For many people it can be a combination of factors. Physical and mental. Physically they may burn a lot more calories than others which can be hard to keep up with.. they might constantly moving, fidgeting, jumping off the walls, breastfeeding etc. They may not have much appetite or hate the feeling of fullness. Mentally they could be scared of weight gain, they might have eating disorders and fears of eating certain foods (calorie dense etc), they might hate how they feel being heavier so they stop or lose the weight again.