Find out how to achieve long-term muscle gain and pack extra pounds of strength in your body.
Losing weight and building muscle gets hard the more you evolve in your fitness journey. Some people want to understand how to get leaner and build muscle for the long run, not just a quick fix that, honestly, could backfire.
Dr Mike Israetel, has a PhD in Sport Physiology and is the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. In a recent video, he explained how to achieve long-term muscle gain.
How To Achieve Long-Term Muscle Gain
Israetel warns from the get-go that there is one golden rule to understanding how to achieve long-term muscle gain. “You cannot rush the process,” he says.
- Do not go over the 0.5% weight gain per week.
- Do not go much over 16 weeks of the training phase at a time.
- Do not skip maintenance and mini-cut phases.
Dr Mike Israetel explains there are 3 rules to understand how to achieve long-term muscle gain.
1. Perform each of the gain/maintain/mini-cut phases
Sometimes you can expect a longer cut to recover leanness. You should perform mini-cut phases to shed off the fat you probably will gain from the bulking process. That could be a classic fat loss phase of 8-10 weeks of eating less calories than burning.
Also, it could be the case that you need a longer maintenance phase to get back into normal strength feeling or maybe you want to do some powerlifting.
2. Experiment with Exercises, Techniques and Programs that Work Best
You may decide to also prioritise phases for specific muscle groups. For example, during a macro cycle, you may choose to hit your back and chest extremely hard. The following macro cycle you switch to arms and shoulders, and so on.
“Your body can really grow muscles best when it focuses on them,” Israetel says. How many muscle groups can you choose? As many as you can recover from, as long as you don’t feel systemic fatigue at the end.
3. Expect Gains to Slow Down
You could gain 15 pounds of muscle the first year, but the following year, even if you do everything correctly, you could gain only 10. Don’t get demotivated by this.
As time progresses, you may gain more fat than you’re used to, your gains could be smaller and smaller, but do not be discouraged. The one thing people who look jacked have in common is that they’ve been training for years and years. Time will be your friend if you remain consistent with your workouts.
And those are some tips on how to achieve long-term muscle gain according to Dr Mike Israetel. To see a more detailed explanation, click on the video below.
VIDEO – How To Achieve Long-Term Muscle Gain
5 Tips For Growing Lean Muscle Mass
How To Force Muscle Growth – 5 Methods To Accomplish That
How to Build Muscle – A Beginner’s Guide to Hypertrophy
Does Training to Failure Matter For Muscle Growth?
How to Make Muscle Gains At Every Level
Top Training Programs to Gain Size and Mass
How to Tell If You’re Training Hard Enough?
5 Exercise Methods to Burn Belly Fat Faster
Fascia Stretch Training – What Is FST-7 Training and How To Benefit From It?
100 Push-Ups a Day for 30 Days – What Happens to Your Body?
2 Most Intense Sets For Muscle Growth – NOT FOR BEGINNERS
Image Sources
- Triceps Shown: Julia Larson on Pexels
