Building Overall Mass

And you’re 150 lbs now, 4 months later. How much progress, size-wise, were you expecting? That’s insanely fast growth already. This shit doesn’t happen over night, my man. It takes time. If you add an inch to your arms in a full year, that’s exceptional. Your expectations are just outlandish, it seems.

It’s hard to see progress week to week, unless you’re nearing the end of prep for a bodybuilding show and getting extraordinarily lean. You won’t ‘see’ your muscular gains daily or weekly, but if you’re getting stronger, they are absolutely there. Getting stronger is linked to getting bigger, period. That’s why weight classes exist in bodybuilding and all strength sports.

Big picture: trust the process. You’re bench pressing 225 for 7 now. Do you really think that if you get to, say, 275 for 7 you won’t be significantly bigger? I promise you will be. Keep adding weight to the bar for now, and the results will be there.

As far as your recovery from your injury: clearly you fucked that up, and decided you didn’t want to prioritize your physical well being, for whatever reason. Your a weightlifter who decided that ‘walking 100%’ was your baseline for ending physical therapy? That’s why you can’t squat now. Maybe you should have continued with the therapy until you could do all the things you want to do with your body… like lifting weights. Because the fact is, this will likely nag you indefinitely unless you ACTIVELY pursue your recovery. leg injuries don’t tend to get better when you ignore them, they get worse.

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x2 above: focus on leg rehab

Run through Tnation templates like below and or run through PPL properly ie- give your upper body a break and one day just do legs. For now on leg day do moves you can and then do a ton of rehab stuff, lacrosse ball work, stretching etc

Other than that, you are making solid progress with the weight gain so stick to it👍

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for chest recently i’ve just been repping out 225 starting each chest day as many as i can. so i can get 7. then i’ll do another set with 225 for like maybe 4 and then another for like 2. then i’ll drop it to 205 and do long pause reps like 2 sets and then the 3rd set rep out a plate for as many as i can. then i’ll do 3 sets 12 reps on incline smith. then high and incline cable flies both 3 sets 10-12 and then i’ll finish off with some dips 3 sets as many as i can. i wrote what i did for arms a few days ago up more.

Then for back and shoulder i start out with shoulders heavy over head press 3x6 and last set is drop set. then lateral raises 3x12 and last set is drop set. Then i use the shoulder press machine and i do 3x10 on that and again last set dropset. then i hit some rear delt flys 3x10-12, then dropset. then some barbell shrugs 3x12 and dropset.

For back i start out with some heavy low machine rows 3x8. then some tbar rows 3x10. then lat pull downs 3x12 and dropset. then straight bar pull downs 3x10-12 and dropset. then i finish off with individual lat cable pull downs 3x15. i don’t know what it’s called but it’s at the lat pull down machine and instead of the bar there’s 2 handles that i pull down. that’s my split right now. the order is chest,legs, arm day, and back and shoulders and then rest if i feel like i need it otherwise i repeat so i’m hitting everything 2 times a week. Recently i thought of hitting arms and shoulders 3 times a week because i heard since they’re smaller muscles it’s better to not hit them as hard but so them more frequently? any thoughts on that? and i would like to hear any recommendations or changes anyone may want to add. Thanks everyone.

chest and legs on the same day just so no one gets confused.

Shoulders and arms are working during the chest and back sessions, in addition to their direct training, so they’re already getting plenty of work.

Like Flip said, you don’t really need to change much of anything, because your progress has been solid so far. Any impatience or lagging parts are in your head.

Only other thing, like several of us have pointed out, is that your knee issue should be getting more attention. Either specifically fix it if it’s still not working right or get into real leg training.

Didn’t see the leg workout.

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Oh right now for legs i’ll do 3x10 hack squat machine. and 3x10 leg extensions and 3x10 hamstring extensions and 3x15 calf raises. i just go light nothing crazy. i’m gonna start doing knee stretches again for my bad knee.

For clarification… so your knee won’t allow a regular squat with a bar on your back. But hack squats and leg extensions are no problem?

Great question. Those are so much more brutal on my knees

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I’m just curious thats all…

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Yes i have tried normal squats and even with just the bar my body goes sideways to the right when i go down and my friends have helped me try to fix it but i physically can’t do it without going to the right when i squat. I think it’s because my knee isn’t strong enough yet so my body naturally pulls it’s self to the right so i’ve been doing hack squats to try to get my strength up.

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What about a leg press machine?

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Have you considered box squats?

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What’s wrong with just using the hack squat machine though? It’s not like an RPE 10 set of hack squats is a bad quad stimulus. If anything I feel like it would be more likely to tax his quads and glutes effectively than back squats, given the injury history and low technique requirement

For building “overall mass”, squatting with a barbell loaded across the body tends to have a much greater impact compared to the hack squat machine.

That’s how I was approaching the dialogue at least: I didn’t understand squats being mentioned as purely a quad hypertrophy builder. If that’s what we wanted, I’d just go for belt squats.

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Gotcha, cheers for the reply

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Almost two months since this, how’re things progressing now - size and knee health?

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My knee is better I can finally start hitting legs now without it getting all wonky and hurting. Looks like I put some more size on but probs can’t notice if I took pics. I’ve been really struggling to gain weight tho with work I’m only 154 now :frowning:

What did you eat yesterday?

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Good to hear the old classics back

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This is good to hear.

This is bad to hear.

“So I’ve come upon this growth horomone secretagogue and it looks very interesting because of the little to no side effects.” - Has Anyone Tried MK-677?
This is worse to hear. I suggest putting more effort into diet and training, not drugs.

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