Men's Fitness Guide Issue 18

The chances are that you’ve picked up Six Rules of Building Muscle for one of several reasons. You may have never set foot in a gym before but want to make some positive changes to your physique. Or maybe you have trained with weights for a while but have been disappointed by your progress. Or you may be an experienced gym-goer who’s looking for new ways to continue to add muscular size and strength. The scenarios may be different, but the ultimate aim is exactly the same. You want to add hard, lean muscle to your frame to be fitter, stronger and to look better with your shirt off. Let’s face it – who doesn’t? Despite what you may think, building muscle is easy. That’s right. There is no myth or mystery…

Here at Men’s Fitness magazine, we get asked a lot of questions, and many are on the subject of how best to build muscle. With so much training information flying around – either at the gym, or on websites and online forums – often offering contradictory ideas on how to make yourself bigger, stronger and leaner, the simple truths can quickly become overcomplicated and downright confusing. Which is why this guide has separated the facts from the fiction and the fads, to provide you with all the information you need – explained in simple but highly effective terms – on how you can transform your physique. Simple steps In the pages that follow you will find out how to identify your body type. Once you know that, you can make the most of…

» Before we begin, it’s important that you establish which body shape you have been gifted by your parents. Knowing that means you can train in the most efficient way possible, to reap maximum changes in minimum time. The idea that human body types are genetically pre-set is nothing new. Plato mentions it in The Republic, which was written around 380BC, and the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referred to the idea in The Antichrist, years before psychologist William Herbert Sheldon popularised three broad ‘categories’ of body in the 1940s. It’s now widely recognised that most people have a body type marking them out as either being an endomorph (big, with higher levels of body fat), a mesomorph (naturally muscular), or an ectomorph (naturally lean). Power struggle Over the past decade, science has discovered a…

» If you have trouble shifting weight even when watching your diet, the chances are you’re an endomorph: characterised by having a relatively high amount of stored fat, a wide waist and a large bone structure. What’s going on Evolutionarily speaking, you’re a badass: when food was scarce, natural selection probably favoured humans with fatstoring metabolisms. But now sofas and milkshakes are readily available, those same genes are scuppering you. In one study, where subjects were overfed for 1,000 calories a day over a 100-day period, weight gain varied from 4.3kg to 13kg, and demonstrated that people more predisposed to store fat put on three times as much weight as others. Some experts suggest that heredity factors might account for as much as 70 per cent of your body mass index (BMI),…

» If you are a mesomorph, you’ll know it from the envious looks you get. That’s because mesomorphs can look fairly well built without even setting foot in a gym. If this sounds like you, then you’ve hit the genetic jackpot – but you can still make the most of your DNA with some tactical workout tricks. What’s going on If you expand in size when you so much as look at a dumbbell, chances are it’s all to do with satellite cell-mediated myonuclear addition – or, in non-science terms, the amount of cells surrounding your muscle fibres and your ability to add more of them by training One study showed that out of 66 people put on the same weights programme, the top 17 ‘responders’ experienced a 58 per cent gain…

» You’ve got the build of a marathon runner – lean, but short on muscle. And it can be difficult to pack on size, despite hours in the gym. What’s going on Research shows that some individuals have trouble responding to strength training Further tests on the group mentioned on page 20 showed that the worst ‘responders’ saw no change in their regulation of myogenin – a key gene responsible for muscle growth while other subjects on the san workout programme saw their levels spike by as much as 65 p cent. But don’t be put off by this Different people respond better to different training regimes an by tweaking the volume, intensity or frequency of their workouts the poor responders may well have seen better results. FIT TIP Compound lifts, such as the…