Articles
Do Smoothies Cause Weight Gain?
Most research shows that calories are less filling when you drink them, making it easier to gain weight (systematic review). Maybe that’s because you don’t need to chew, you don’t spend as long eating, and the food doesn’t stay in your stomach as long (study, study, study).
Smoothies aren’t like soda and juice, though. They’re made by blending nutritious whole foods. For example, when you blend fruits with seeds in them (like berries), you release more of the fibre, slowing digestion and blunting the blood sugar response (study). Perhaps that keeps you feeling full for longer, causing you to eat fewer calories.
Also, before going into the research, I should note that there’s nothing fattening or unhealthy about smoothies. Smoothies can be incredibly nutritious. Blending up food doesn’t make it more likely to be stored as fat, but it might make us more likely to eat more food, tipping us into a calorie surplus.
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How Many Sets Should You Do Per Muscle Group Per Week?
The latest meta-analysis suggests you can maximize your rate of muscle growth with 10–20 sets per muscle group per week (Baz-Valle). That means in certain circumstances, you can expect to build as much muscle with 10 sets as 20. In other circumstances, going up to 20 sets could stimulate extra muscle growth. Going past 20 probably won’t stimulate even more.
This is a contentious topic. Some people believe it’s better to train harder, for fewer sets, less often. Others believe that there’s no real volume ceiling—that you can benefit from as many sets as you can suffer through.
Right now, the most famous programs use a moderate training volume (of about 8–24 sets per muscle per week), the research supports a moderate training volume, and most experts recommend a moderate training volume (exhaustive breakdown here). It’s also the approach we use when training clients ranging from desk workers all the way up to professional and Olympic athletes.
However, there are quite a few assumptions baked into these set recommendations.
- You’re training for hypertrophy. That means choosing good exercises, using a deep range of motion, doing about 6–20 reps per set, resting at least 2 minutes between sets, and taking your sets to within 3 reps of failure.
- You’re training all the major muscle groups in your body. If we look at studies where people are only training some muscles, then they can usually handle much higher training volumes. For example, the recent Enes study found that people could work up to 52 sets of quad exercises per week, but they were only training their quads.
- The exercise does a good job of working the muscle you’re trying to grow. For example, rows aren’t ideal for the long heads of your biceps, bench presses aren’t great for the long head of your triceps, and deadlifts aren’t the best for the long head of your hamstrings. You’d want to target those muscles with isolation exercises.
- You work up to the volume gradually. A good workout program starts with a lower training volume and gradually works its way higher. For example, you might start with 2 sets per exercise and work your way up to 5 over 4–8 weeks. That saves you from crippling soreness in the early weeks, and it keeps the challenge high in the later weeks. It also builds more muscle (study, study).
That gives us a few things to talk about and a few interesting examples to go over.
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Does Blending Fruits Affect Their Fibre, Nutrients, or Sugar?
I’ve been asked a few times whether it’s healthy to blend fruits into smoothies. Usually, the concern is that blending breaks down the cellular structure of the fruit, releasing more sugar into your bloodstream and spiking your blood sugar. The opposite is true. I’ll explain that in a second.
Another concern is that blending fruits destroys the fibre or nutrients. Blending doesn’t usually destroy anything, and sometimes it releases extra nutrients, but there’s one situation to watch out for. It might be bad to blend bananas with blueberries, kind of.
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How to Build a Bigger Back: The Best Back Exercises & Workout
You can build a bigger back by doing a mix of horizontal pulls, vertical pulls, and deadlifts. Your back is made up of layers of overlapping muscles, all of which can work together, but many of which have different functions.
You could divide your back into your upper back (traps, rear delts, rhomboids, and teres major) and lower back (lats and spinal erectors), but even within the same back muscle, different regions respond better to different exercise variations. For example, your upper lats have a slightly different function from your lower lats.
You train your upper back and lats by combining vertical pulls (like chin-ups) with horizontal pulls (like rows). Adding a deadlift variation will take care of your lower back, giving you a thicker back. But it also helps to consider whether you’re tucking or flaring your elbows and whether you’re stretching and contracting your shoulder blades.
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How to Build an Aesthetic Physique
Most men want to have an aesthetic physique. Few know exactly what that means. For example, when they guess the degree of muscularity women prefer, they’re off by thirty pounds (study). Many have a deeper misunderstanding, failing to connect their appearance to their fitness and strength. Some shun aesthetics, mistakenly thinking it’s superficial. Others are superficial on purpose, thinking it’s the best way to become attractive. That’s never as convincing as the real thing.
We’ll cover the attractiveness research. We’ve spoken to some of the study authors. We also went deeper, testing our hypotheses by conducting our own surveys. We collected thousands of responses for each: survey 1 and survey 2.
But be warned: this article is long. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s a simple trick to improve your appearance: have a drink. It will boost your aesthetics (to yourself) by 50%. This is called “The Reverse Beer Goggles Effect,” also known as Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder (study). It’s not a perfect solution, but it will save you twenty minutes of reading.
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Does Creatine Make You Gain Weight?
Supplementing with creatine will probably make you gain about 2 pounds in 12 weeks. There are two big meta-analyses on creatine (Burke, Branch). Both found that creatine causes a man of average size to gain 2 pounds, with roughly 1.5 pounds from water retention, 1.5 pounds from muscle growth, and -1 pounds from fat loss.
That means creatine can make you gain weight in a calorie deficit. Losing a pound of fat burns about 3,500 calories. Gaining 1.5 pounds of muscle takes around 1,200 calories. The water retention doesn’t take any calories. That means the average study participant had a calorie deficit of 2,300 calories while gaining 2 pounds on the scale.
The amount of weight you gain can vary. Most people gain a couple of pounds, but for an extreme example, my roommate back in university gained 8 pounds after a week of supplementing with creatine. He was doing a “loading phase,” taking 5 grams of creatine four times per day, and he had an exaggerated response to it. During that same week, I took the same amount of creatine and didn’t gain any weight at all.
This makes creatine confusing. Creatine is great for building and maintaining muscle, making it a great supplement for both bulking and cutting. But since it causes a somewhat unpredictable amount of weight gain, creatine can make it hard to tell how big your calorie surplus or deficit is, making it hard to know if you’re eating the right amount of food.
Here are some tips.
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Does Bulking Make You Stronger?
Bulking is the best way to get stronger, especially if you’re thin or lean. If you’re skinny fat or overweight, you can burn that extra fat for energy, allowing you to build muscle without needing to bulk. That’s called recomping. Even then, you’ll eventually run out of extra fat, at which point you’ll need to bulk to continue getting stronger.
Bulking makes you stronger in two different ways:
- Bulking supports muscle growth. Bigger muscles have more horsepower, giving them a greater potential for strength. But building muscle is a costly process. A pound of muscle takes about 800 calories to build, and if you’re a naturally thin guy (like me), it might take closer to 2,800 to overcome your hellish metabolism. That’s why bulking is so helpful.
- Bulking improves performance. Eating more food gives you more energy and pumps your muscles full of glycogen, giving them fuel, improving your workout performance, and increasing your rate of muscle growth. Energy is powerful.
If you finish bulking and switch to cutting, that change in calorie intake can reduce your strength, even if you don’t lose any muscle. For example, it’s common to gain a tremendous amount of bench press strength while you’re bulking, then lose some of it while cutting afterwards.
But there’s a strange myth that building bigger muscles won’t make you stronger. That sounds crazy, but there are some top researchers citing real studies (like this one). Most recently, during an interview with Dr. Peter Attia, the blood flow restriction researcher Dr. Jeremy Leonneke said he’s skeptical that building bigger muscles increases strength.
Let’s delve into it.
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How to Cut After Bulking
There’s a long tradition of bulking up and then cutting away the fat. It’s popular with all types of lifters, from bodybuilders to powerlifters, because it’s the most reliable way to build muscle and then get lean. Body recomposition and maingaining can also work well, for a time, but bulking and cutting are more powerful.
I’ve bulked and cut a few times, gaining 70 pounds at the same body fat percentage I started at. I’ve also helped a few thousand clients do it over the past decade. I’ll show you the before-and-after photos below.
Before we start, you probably have some questions. So, let’s blast through the most common ones:
- Maintenance periods after bulking to “lock in” your muscle mass. The idea is that it takes a few weeks or months for your new muscle to cement into place. So, by delaying your cut, you’d keep more of your hard-earned muscle. There’s no evidence for this, and it probably isn’t necessary.
- High-rep sets to focus on muscle definition. The idea is to switch from 6–12 reps per set to 15–30 reps. This was thought to give greater muscle definition. Both rep ranges are great for stimulating muscle growth, but high-rep sets can be absolutely miserable, especially when you aren’t eating as much food to fuel your workouts.
- Short rest periods. The idea is to use shorter rest periods to boost growth hormone, improving muscle growth and retention. The “hormone hypothesis” of muscle growth was mostly debunked, but short rest times can be effective if you program them properly.
- More ab training. Bodybuilders used to think you could train your abs to burn more ab fat (spot reduction). That myth died a decade ago. You could still train your abs to build bigger abs, but cutting makes it harder to build muscle, so you’d get even better results by training your abs while bulking.
- Shorter workouts to match your lower energy levels. When you’re cutting, you’re eating less food, so you have less energy. That can make it harder to survive big bulking workouts. Thus, cutting workouts are often shorter and easier. That makes sense, but it’s tricky, so we’ll talk about the pros and cons below.
- Long walks to burn fat faster. Cardio burns far more calories than lifting weights, making it easier to lose weight. Plus, most cardio adaptations are enhanced by losing weight. You can finish your cut with a higher VO2 max, a lower resting heart rate, and better performance.
- Cutting carbs (and ketogenic diets). The idea is that carbs are good for building muscle (true) but make it harder to lose fat (not true). Carbs are just as powerful while cutting. However, when you cut calories, you need to cut back on something. It’s usually best to cut back on both carbs and fat, but some people find it easier to lose weight on low-carb diets.
- Carb cycling. Some bodybuilders try to get the best of both worlds, eating low-carb diets on rest days, but eating more carbs in the meals before and after their workouts. That way, they show up to the gym with full muscles and higher energy levels. There’s some evidence to support this. Even the taste of carbs improves workout performance (study, study). It’s a good option to consider.
- Intermittent fasting. About a decade ago, bodybuilders started eating fewer meals instead of smaller meals because they thought it would improve their growth hormone production. That didn’t pan out, but intermittent fasting might help you control your appetite. It’s an option.
- Refeeds to revive your metabolism. Refeeds can give you a psychological break, and they might boost your metabolism a little bit during the refeed, but your metabolism will wither away again when you go back to cutting (meta-analysis). The best way to keep your metabolism high is to keep your activity levels high. More on that below.
We can keep the best methods, get rid of the worst ones, and build them into a balanced cutting routine.
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Maingaining: How to Build Muscle Without Gaining Fat
Maingaining is when you slowly build muscle without gaining fat. It’s usually set in opposition to bulking, where you eat in a calorie surplus to support muscle growth. Bulking is a more powerful, reliable way to build muscle, but it often comes at the cost of gaining body fat. Maingaining is supposed to solve that problem.
Up until a few years ago, “maingaining” was called “gaintaining.” I think it was Greg Doucette who flipped it around, and he caused enough controversy that it became the more popular term. The controversy had less to do with maingaining and more to do with the false claims he made to sell his fake turkesterone supplements.
Still, much of the internet’s ire landed on maingaining. Some argued it didn’t work. Most argued that it was a confusing way of combining body recomposition (where you build muscle while losing fat) with lean bulking (where you bulk slowly and leanly).
However, both body recomposition and lean bulking can work quite well. Combining them both together can be quite effective, especially under some circumstances.
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How to Count Macros: Beginner Guide
Counting macros is when you count how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat you eat. You can do that by looking at nutrition labels, weighing your food, or following recipes with pre-calculated macros. Most people plug those macros into a calorie-tracking app.
Tracking macros used to be a bodybuilding thing, but it’s become more popular over the past few years. The idea is that you need certain amounts of calories, protein, carbs, and fat to build muscle, lose fat, and be healthy. That’s true, kind of.
Macros are important, but it isn’t hard to get them right. Most cultures have found ways to eat balanced diets. Your appetite is pretty good at asking for the nutrients you need. And most macro targets are pretty forgiving.
Here’s what you need to know.
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