Articles
How Many Carbs Should You Eat to Build Muscle?
Bodybuilders traditionally eat high-carb diets while bulking, getting anywhere from 50–60% of their calories from carbohydrates. Carbs are a great source of calories, they can be relatively easy to digest, they’re rich in nutrients, and they’re fantastic for building muscle.
In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits and downsides of eating so many carbs, cover the latest research, and then give you some modern recommendations.
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Are You Lean Enough to Bulk?
Let’s say you’re a skinny guy eager to build muscle. But you aren’t lean. You don’t have much muscle definition. No abs. Maybe you’re even “skinny-fat.” Are you lean enough to bulk? After all, even if you do a lean bulk, you may still gain some fat. That can be stressful if you’re already feeling too soft.
Plus, many bodybuilders believe that when your body-fat percentage gets too high, it interferes with bulking. Testosterone converts into estrogen, insulin sensitivity crashes, it gets harder to build muscle, and you gain proportionally more fat. Is any of that true?
How can you know if you’re lean enough to bulk?
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The Ideal Male Body Type According to Women (Survey Results)
I surveyed 423 women, asking them to rate different body proportions and levels of muscularity and leanness in men. To do that, I traced my body and then adjusted the proportions, leanness, and muscle sizes. I tried to answer questions like:
- What’s the most attractive amount of muscle for a man to build?
- Do women prefer more muscular upper bodies or lower bodies?
- What proportions do women find most attractive?
- What’s the most attractive body fat percentage?
- Which muscles do women find most attractive?
- Does neck size affect our appearance?
- What’s the most attractive overall body type?
Here are the survey results.
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Survey Results: What Does the Most Attractive Gay Male Body Look Like?
We surveyed 102 men attracted to men, asking them to rate varying degrees of muscularity and leanness. We also asked them which muscle proportions they found most attractive. Topics include:
- What’s the most attractive degree of muscle?
- What’s the most attractive body-fat percentage?
- Do gay men prefer more muscular upper bodies?
- Which muscles do other men find most attractive?
- What muscle proportions do gay men prefer?
Here are the results.
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Are Pre-Workout Supplements Good for Building Muscle?
We’ve seen some heated discussions about ingredients and dosages founds in pre-workout supplements. Does this particular brand have at least six grams of citrulline malate? Is it the correct ratio of citrulline to malate? Is there theanine alongside the caffeine to blunt the jitters? Are they using proprietary blends to hide subpar dosing? Unless you’re super into supplement research, it can be hard to parse.
But the more important question is, will taking a pre-workout supplement actually help you build muscle? Instead of diving right into min-maxing the ingredients and dosages, maybe we should take a step back and see if pre-workout supplements even work.
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Are You a Non-Responder to Weight Training?
There’s no doubt that genetics play a role in building muscle. In fact, especially when looking at outliers, genetics can have an enormous impact. If two people do the same workout routine and eat the same bulking diet, one of those people might gain twice as much muscle.
What’s more contentious is the claim that some people can’t build muscle at all. And there’s some truth to that idea. When most people start lifting weights, they build muscle. But not everyone. And these people who don’t gain muscle have been referred to as “non-responders” or “low-responders” in the research.
So what’s going on here? Weight training is supposed to cause us to adapt by gaining muscle size and strength. Why do some people fail to adapt?
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Should You Build A Dumbbell or Barbell Home Gym?
Let’s say you want to build muscle at home. You’ve got a few different options. You could use your body weight, but bodyweight workouts are painful and difficult. So maybe you decide to get some resistance bands, but they aren’t very good for building muscle. Exercise machines are good for building muscle, but you’d need a different machine for each lift, which is highly impractical. That’s why most people turn to weights: barbells and dumbbells.
Both barbells and dumbbells are great at stimulating muscle growth, both are reasonably affordable, and both can be used to do hundreds of different exercises, allowing you to follow a full hypertrophy training program. Still, barbells and dumbbells aren’t quite the same as one another.
Strength training is known for favouring barbells, bodybuilding is known for favouring dumbbells (and exercise machines). For building muscle, we want to use both strength training and bodybuilding lifts. We want to use aspects of both styles of training. So which should you choose? Barbells or dumbbells?
Let’s go over the pros and cons.
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The Best Workout Splits for Gaining Muscle—Explained
A workout split refers to how you organize your exercises throughout the week. Should you do 2, 3, or 9 workouts? Should you stack all your chest exercises into one of those workouts, split them between two, or do a few sets every workout?
There are a few different workout splits, each of them good, but each with its own pros and cons:
- Body Part “Bro Split:” This split focuses on one body part per workout. Monday is Chest Day, Tuesday is Back Day, and so on. This type of split is incredibly popular with bodybuilders—and for good reason.
- Upper/Lower Split: This split severs your workouts into upper-body days and lower-body days. This split shifts more emphasis toward your lower body, making it great for gaining strength and athleticism. When Marco was helping professional and Olympic athletes bulk up, he had almost all of them on upper/lower splits.
- Push/Pull/Legs Split: This split organizes workouts by movement pattern. Pushing exercises work the triceps, chest, and shoulders. Pulling exercises target the back and biceps. Leg exercises focus on the entire lower body. It’s more logical than a Bro Split but also less clever and efficient.
- Full Body Split: You train your entire body every workout. It’s the most efficient way to train, allowing you to build a tremendous amount of muscle with just two or three workouts per week. I gained my first 50 pounds this way.
- Hybrid Splits: This split combines different ideas together. For example, maybe you add an upper/lower split to a push/pull/legs split, giving you a 5-day workout routine for gaining strength, athleticism, and muscle size. Or if your arms are lagging behind, you could add an Arm Day to your full-body routine.
Without further ado, let’s break all these splits down so you can find the one that’s best for you.
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How to Build a Dumbbell Home Gym
This article covers how to build a dumbbell home gym, which is ideal for people living in smaller apartments or on a tight budget. With two adjustable dumbbells, you can build just as much muscle as you can with a full barbell home gym. Your workouts may not be quite as efficient, but there are actually some interesting advantages to dumbbell training, too—especially for your arms, chest, and shoulders.
There are several different types of adjustable dumbbells, and some are much better than others. When I built my first dumbbell home gym, I made the mistake of buying the wrong type. They were rickety, it was difficult to adjust the weight, and I couldn’t rest them on my legs, making it hard to do the dumbbell bench press. They were such a pain to use that I wound up disliking dumbbell training. But we’ve learned a lot since then. Buying better dumbbells makes all the difference.
Finally, there are some great accessories you can add to your dumbbell home gym, including a workout bench, a chin-up bar, a couple of kettlebells, and maybe even some parallettes or gymnastic rings. These are totally optional, but we’ll go over the advantages they offer.
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How to Build a Barbell Home Gym
Let’s say your goal is to build muscle, and you want to do it at home. If you don’t have a spare room or garage available, you can build a dumbbell home gym, and that’s great. But if you have room for it, a barbell home gym is the ideal way to train. You can do all of the best compound lifts, all of the best accessory lifts, and you can gradually add a little bit of weight to those lifts every workout. Not only that, but barbell training is by far the most efficient way to train. You’ll stimulate a ton of overall muscle mass with every repetition.
The problem is, building a barbell home gym can get confusing. I help people build muscle for a living and I still found it confusing. There are so many different brands, setups, and pieces of equipment. Even when picking a barbell, there are many different types, ranging from power to bars to weightlifting bars. And each type of barbell can have various coatings, ranging from zinc to cerakote.
So what we’ve done in this article is outline a basic setup that’s ideal for building muscle. Then we’ve recommended the best brands and pieces of equipment, going from the most affordable options to the best quality options. I’ll also show you my own barbell home gym and give you links to each piece of equipment I bought.
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