The Reality of Gaining Muscle Mass Slowly

I think part of it with the coaches is all the coaches we love to train and we tend to train too much. We tend to train way, way too much volume all the time, six days a week, 12 sessions a week, if we can. And it's sometimes, especially the younger guys. And you got to tell them, hey, calm down the nutrition. this is especially prevalent for the men, the young men who think that calories are the way to get bigger. So they start eating and then they plateau. And so they start eating more, they plateau, they eat more. And then by the end of it, their blood pressure stage two hypertension, and they don't look that great. They look like a, they get out of the shower and they look themselves in the mirror and they look like a fucking melted candle. So it's, and then they go crazy and then they starve themselves. Right. And then they just, they basically wipe out everything they've done. So what I tell people, and this is going to sound so bad, if you want to gain weight that quickly, then take steroids, put your big boy panties on and take gear. If you, because gaining muscle is a very slow process. It's decently fast. The first year you could put 12 to 15 pounds of dry muscle, muscular weight, and then it's going to slow down. And you just have to accept that it a long marathon journey of putting on a lot of muscle unless you willing to take performance enhancing drugs which I don have a problem either way somebody does or doesn want to To me it a personal choice Yeah 100 And it funny as you saying this I definitely can relate to that story right I'm a short guy, so I wanted to build muscle, right? I just had always been skinny. And so I think for a while I was probably not eating enough, right? It was all about just eating clean and how that can go for somebody who's 18 to 20, right? You end up not eating enough. But then I was like, okay, I need to eat more. So I did that and I was just gaining weight like crazy. when I got up to 190, which I'm five, seven, I did it in a relatively quick fashion. I was like, I definitely got bigger. And I think I put on some muscle, but I also just went too far on the other end of the extreme there because I was trying to like speed up the process. I was trying to look like these football players that were probably taking some PEDs and stuff like that. So I can definitely relate to that specific story there. We all, we've all done it. And I remember like in, when I was playing high school football, it was like every night before bed, a couple of scoops ice cream, some like wheat or weight gainer, half a gallon of whole milk. You were also training like three hours a day in the Texas heat. So you didn't really get, you didn't really put on a ton of fat, but then you keep doing that when you get out of high school and you're not, you're sitting at a desk in college. Now you're getting real fat really quickly. But I think it was Mike Isertel. I heard him talk about this, where you're just putting on weight for the sake of putting on weight and you're seeing the scale go up, but you're not actually looking better. You're looking worse. And people are commenting about, oh, look how nice you look in a shirt, but then you take a shirt off and you look terrible. So let's, why don't we slow it down a little bit and just accept that if you're putting on 80 to 100 grams of dry muscle weight per week, you're doing really good. And, but if you want to push that up to trying to gain like a half a kilo a week, you're going to end up fat. Then you're going to have to diet it off. You might as well just do a body recomp and just gain enough and try to limit fat gain because then you can go for extended periods of time without having to cut yeah and then most of the time when people take it too far they end up like for men they end up like 24 25 body fat and they go oh shit and then they get hyperactive the opposite direction and they just slash a bunch of calories maybe they do a shit ton of cardio and then they just they peel it off really quickly but at the end of the day they haven't really put on that much muscle so it doesn't make any sense to do it that way and even just on the way down Again, the quicker you go to the more you're going to be risking some muscle loss in that process as well, too, that the patience is key. It can be super frustrating, but it's super key on the way up and on the way down. But yeah, I've definitely changed my thoughts on that. I think the slower the weight gain, I know they, Eric Helms had a new study that came out on weight gain and it wasn't on a lot of people. They talked about, Hey, like this, this, that very small surplus is probably the way to go there. And it's definitely changed how I've wanted to go about gaining weight and stuff like that. So a couple of things for some of these metrics. So you mentioned HRV, but obviously with that, that one can be a little iffy just because each way you take it, it could be a little bit different. It's going to give you a different number and whatnot. Resting heart rate, blood pressure.