Gaining weight

Your muscles don’t shut down after an hour. Yes, it’s true that research has shown that tesosterone levels begin to decrease after 45-60 minutes of training, but if your muscles shut down, how would you be able to complete a whole game of football? Sure, it’s a 60-minute game that ends up taking about three hours. If you only went an hour, you’d never make it to the second half. As for training, for the most part, you should keep your weight training to 45-60 minutes, but you can work out longer if needed. Renegade Training will take 1-2 hours, but it addresses all facets of training (agility, cardiovascular/GPP, strength training, flexibility, etc.). And the weight training section typically takes less than 45 minutes, so you don’t have to worry about the decrease in testosterone or having it affect you drastically. Keep eating big and training big!

NS, if you get to 210 your speed and flexibility should actually IMPROVE. Just make sure to stretch out between sets. Do you have a plan for your lifting routine? If you want to get bigger, a plan is a MUST. You MUST have targets, and you must record them into a log. You must do everything in your power to hit those targets. You miss a target then you get it the next week. What Nate said is true, eat big and lift big and you will get big.

You think you pinpointed the problem as being cardio, but you haven’t even seen his routine. What if he were doing 15 sets of bench presses, squats, deads, and cleans, repeated 4 times a week? That’s an exaggeration, but he said those are the exercises he does, and that he lifts 4 times a week. I want to see his routine, I have a feeling he’s doing way too much volume and not training within his ability to recouperate. Of course, maybe he is, but the second someone has a problem you automatically assume it’s their diet. Nutrition is very important, but you guys make it out to be more important than your actual training sometimes.

while generally i put more emphasis on training, for adding muscle, he does have respectable lifts that indicate he has atleast some intuitive training knowledge. also if you cant gain weight period- fat or muscle- then it does come down to kcalsin and out. i still say pasta is one of the most calorically dense foods out there. as is pizza. you might want to drink a weight gainer like nlarge while playing bball as well.

Trust me, it doesn’t matter WHAT he’s doing in his routine, there is no way he’s going to get bigger no matter how much he eats or how he trains. Of course, yes his routine might be hindering but I still say his main problem is the cardio. Again I point out NBA basketball players who all bulk up in the offseason when they aren’t running so much.

With young male trainees, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the problem is inadequate nutrition. They can have the worst overtraining program in the world, but if they’re young and getting enough of the right sort of food, its’ hard for them to do “too much” in the gym. The guy who posted above who gained so well while eating junk? Newbie gains, pure and simple. If he continues to eat like he’s been doing, the gains will stop. If he gets his dietary act together, he can continue to improve.


NS, you don’t sound like a training newbie, but you do sound as though you haven’t really gotten specific about your nutrition. Read “Foods that make you look good nekkid” on the T-mag site, as well as everything written by John Berardi. There’s also a food log article if you need help with that.


Good luck.

This is a pretty complex problem. Getting big is easy if you’re willing to give up your fitness. We’ve all seen the 260lb monsters gasping for breath after each set and wheezing to the water fountain. Unfortunately, this fellow cannot give up his fitness.

As well, it’s not just about diet. Calories are needed to grow, but we only want muscular growth. Therefore, increased calories are only useful if they will go into muscle building and repair.

Finally, training volume is important. After ~ 60min (+/- 20min) of training, catabolic hormones start to crop up. They are there for defensive reasons, I think to limit future work capacity so that the person doesn’t become injured. The body knows what it’s doing, but we want to trick it into what we want it to do. Luckily, insulin can be used to counter-act the catabolic hormones.

Okay, training. To get bigger muscles (long-term) you can do two things. You can increase the glycogen stores in the muscle or you can cause muscle protein synthesis. One way of inducing synthesis is to stretch out a fatigued muscle under a heavy load (heavy weight, slow reps, multiple sets). This will cause you to “grow” if you’re getting enough calories. If you’re not getting enough calories, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. These types of exercises will take at least 2-3 days to heal, and you’ll need to eat more to do so.

Unfortunately, you also need to get stonger explosively. Any exercise that has you lift quickly, and then not resist the weight’s descent fits into this catagory. Snatches, dropped deadlifts, etc. Please note that these exercises won’t send as much of a growth signal, and as such don’t need to be repaired as much. Any high-rep exercise probably fits into this catagory too. If you split your workouts between the “strength” exercises and “growth” exercises, you need to have a different diet for after the work-out to repair. You simply don’t need as many calories for the two days after a strength workout. If you get them, your body will store them as fat.

Machine cardio causes little to no damage, and so only needs calories to replace the ones burned. Any cardio work that involved a lot of stopping or causes eccentric damage (sprinting jars the legs and causes microtrauma) needs to be repaired over a couple of days, and thus needs elevated calories to compensate. If you’re doing machine cardio (and there’s no reason to stop, since you need the conditioning) you need to eat more P+C after the workout to replenish the calories burned, but that’s it.

Diet. First off, with your volume of training, I’d highly recommend taking a good volume of fish oils every day. The immune response to training is mostly over-kill (like martial law to stop speeders, I always say) and prevents muscle growth and costs calories. Fish oils will reduce the immune response and decrease muscle soreness.

Second, you need carbs to heal and to do the exercises. For this reason, you need a post-workout shake (to replenish glycogen and provide more protein to the muscles). As well, after any “damaging” workout, you should eat 2 slow digesting protein + carb meals after the training so that you have slow leaking carbs in your belly for six hours after the training ends. Something like tuna + whey + oatmeal. After a non-damaging training session, the post-workout shake is important too (replenish glycogen and reduce the catabolic hormones) but the heavy P+C is not needed.

Any time your training goes above 1 hour, you should start consuming a shake to stop the catabolic hormones.

One principal of massive eating (and t-dawg) is that if there is little insulin, your main fuel source is fat. This is why (except for workouts) you want your main calories to be coming from fat. Unless you’re training (or have trained recently) you should be eating meat and animal products. Idealy you want to be eating the perfect amount needed to live and build the muscle you want. That’s obviously tough, so you just want to make sure you’re not getting fat. This means that you’ll have to do regular bf tests and reduce the fat calories if you’re gaining fat (or, keep them the same if you will do more damage in the gym).

Finally, when you’re bulking, I’ve learned that liver glycogen is the enemy (that’s right you read that correctly), and so you want to avoid non-glucose sugar sources (basically avoiding fructose and galactose if your liver is not empty). The reason why liver glycogen is the enemy is because post-training, you’ll probably consume more glucose than your body currently can use. If your liver is full, those extra glucose will be converted into fat. If it’s not full, the glucose can be stored there until it’s needed again. For this reason, only eat carbs in the morning and post-training. If you’re going to have milk (which you should) only drink it in the morning when they liver is depleted.

Supplementation. Since you have really high activity levels, I would recommend Tribex and ZMA. The ZMA is important for recovery, and the Tribex is important for both work-load and recovery. I’ve already mentioned the fish oil. Finally, if you’re not getting a lot of vegetables every day, I have to recommend them. There is so much nutrition a person needs that can’t be gotten through ‘easy’ foods. If you’re an athlete, you’re cycling through micronutriets even faster, and so you need even more.

I’ll summarize. Break up your training into cardio, damaging/growth, and strength sessions. The cardio can come after OR before training, but only if you consume a shake before and after training. Ideally, cardio will be at a different time of the day and the workouts will be on different days. Give yourself 3 days of rest in between damaging sessions (incl. practice) and give yourlself one day of rest after stregth sessions (not. incl cardio)

Consume mderate P+C post cardio and strength sessions (ie. one fast or slow digesting meal). Consume heavy P+C post growth sessions (ie. one fast and two slow-digesting meals)

Consume at 2g/lb of bodyweight in protein. You will be getting enough protein at these levels, so you don’t need to modify the amount based on the day’s activity level. Just get it every day.

Consume a lot of fatty foods (with NO carbs) at times not around the training. Eggs and hamburger are easy and ideal. Either increase exercise damage (become stronger or more sets) if you’re gaining too much body fat or decrease fat calories.

Keep on learning.

statistics can be used to prove anything that is even remotely true.

Oop, I forgot a couple things. I have never tried Surge, and so my work volume reflects that. I have heard on the forum that Surge will increase your healing capacity. For this reason, you should use it after any damaging workout. That way you can do more damage during the session and expect to repair it.

Additionally, I forgot to ask. Are you ‘required’ to drink Gatorade during your games? (as in, it’s all that’s provided). It’s not an ideal source (since it’s full of fructose), but it might be all you have. If so, I would suggest consuming a sugar drink (ie. sucrose) or Gatorade during/after you do a cardio or practice session (or another sport). I know this doesn’t agree with my avoid fructose rule, but you want to keep the energy pathways in practice for using Gatorade in an ideal way. This way, the enzymes needed to cleave sucrose and convert it into liver glucose stay in practice and then they can handle your needs during the game.

I just wanted to thank everybody for their replies. I dont think Im overtraining, someone thought that I might be overtraining. I do a power exercise four times a week such as:

Mon-Snatch/Bench Tues-Cleans/Squats
Thrus-Deadlifts/Back Fri-Push press,etc.

I think my problem is my diet. I may eat alot but not enough. What foods should I be eating and how many shakes in a day? Or what should I eat after a workout and how much?