How I finally gained (a significant amount) of muscle mass

Table of contents

Disclaimer

Even though I have a background in nutrition and training I am not a doctor. Therefore, if you want to apply any of my suggestions to your life please consult a doctor first.

Where’s the muscle mass?

Here’s the deal: If one year ago I told you that I had been weight lifting and training in general on and off for the past 9 years, you maybe would have thought to yourself “But shouldn’t you look more muscular?” and you would have been right.

The Backstory

Throughout my life I struggled immensely when it came to gaining weight. I didn’t have (and still don’t have) the biggest appetite which stopped me from gaining weight in my youth. I started lifting weights when I finished high school and at the beginning I weighed a whopping 60kg with a height of about 1,78m. In my first year I gained around 5kg which was an immense success to me and I noticed the changes health wise and visually. It felt great. Later I found out, that you call this “newbie gains” which refers to the fact that in your first 1-2 years you can much more easily build muscle. And to be honest, I didn’t really take advantage of that timeframe. A few years and a bachelors degree in nutrition later I found myself at a whopping 67kg of bodyweight and the same height. Sad right? But:

What went wrong?

These were the important factors that stopped me from progressing:

1. Injury. I injured myself when I was finally making real progress a few years back when doing deadlifts. The diagnose: A herniated disc in my lower back. This set me back immensely and I still struggle with this to this day, but I found ways to train around it.
2. Mindset. My mindset was never really in the right spot. I was extremely afraid of gaining fat and as a consequence I didn’t fully embrace the training cycles which typically occur (namely bulking - “gaining weight” and cutting - “losing weight” phases). That led to an almost permanent maintanence phase where progress is neither made nor lost.
3. Sickness. Especially in the last two years I got sick a lot, due to my first covid infection that really wrecked my immune system. You can’t really train if you’re sick every two weeks, can you?
4. Poor Sleeping Schedule. I think that says enough.

Ok, so what changed exactly for me to make a significant progress in a relatively short amount of time? And how much progress did I make?

The Progress

As I said before, about a year ago (10 months) I weighed in at around 67kg. At this point my top bodyweight of all time was around 71kg (a phase where I had a bit more fat too). Now I am sitting at a comfortable 81kg of bodyweight, which means that I gained 14kg in 10 months. I scheduled a DEXA scan (scans your body composition including body fat and muscle mass) in a few weeks, but judging from my physical appearance around 9kg of that weight was muscle mass, 1-2kg water weight and about 3-4kg of fat.

Now for the fun part. What where the most important factors driving that change?

1. New “Newbie gains”

As I already had trained before and lost a bit of muscle mass due to being sick for a long time, my body was “detrained” and had to rapidly adjust to the new training stimuli. This switch from not training for a longer period of time to training intensely again led to a new phase of newbie gains. I attribute around 3-4kg of muscle to that phase alone.

2. Creatine

It mind sound clicheé, but I finally started to take creatine and I immediately noticed a difference. Not only in weight (creatine “sucks” water into your muscles), but also in training intensity and the amount of weight I could lift. For the last 10 months I took 5g of creatine every day and I think the strength gains you get from taking creatine really accumulated over time. More strength = more weight moved = more adaption from your nervous system and therefore muscles necessary = more muscle mass.

3. Don’t be scared of fat

This will be short: I vowed to not be afraid of gaining fat and just embrace the bulking phase, because I was tired of not gaining any muscle.

4. Energy and Proteins first

I followed a nutrition approach I found on Youtube by a respected influencer Alan Thrall. In this video he outlines that the most important factors for gaining muscle are eating enough calories to have the necessary energy for training sessions and eating enough grams of proteins for muscle synthesis to occur. It’s really as simple as that. As I didn’t want to track any calories I just tried choosing high-calorie foods that I saw in the youtube video and also picked some of my own. Having a background in nutrition helped estimating the calories and proteins I ate every day. TLDR: I ate as much protein and calorically dense foods as I could without vomiting and that worked for me.

An example full day of eating could be:

That would bring the total to: 2850 calories and 155g of protein. I didn’t track my calories this accurately, but I think I ate around 2800-3200 calories a day and around 120-160g of protein. Oh and I didn’t eat any meat. So any meathead reading this: You don’t need meat to gain muscle.

5. Introducing new styles of training

During the last 10 months instead of doing the usual bodybuilding style I focused a bit more on weighted calisthenics, which is a form of bodyweight training where you add weight to your bodyweight exercises. Shoutout goes to weighted dips and weighted pull ups, which really made a difference in my physique. I think introducing that new stimuli to my body really helped me to grow.

6. Rotate your exercises (but not too often)

The majority of the muscle I built I built at home using weighted calisthenics, two dumbbells and a bench. However, to test my strength and the carryover (how much strength you can transfer from one exercise to another) I did a few weeks of classic bodybuilding/powerlifting style training in the gym. Even without bench pressing for the majority of the 10 months my max bench press went up from about 85kg to 110kg which is insane considering that I didn’t have bench press in my routine for the majority of the time. I think that rotating exercises and training styles can really help you to break through plateaus and to grow, but don’t do it too often. I think every 2-3 months is a good time frame to switch things up (at least for me).

7. Training intensity

Don’t limit yourself. I trained 4-6 times a week and I trained hard. The training intensity of my current workouts is definitely higher than it was before. However, I actually think that was one of the least important factors for my progress.

Conclusion

Eat enough calories, eat enough protein, train hard and don’t be afraid of gaining fat. It’s really as simple as that. The hardest thing about all of this is the mindset change, the resilience and the discipline you have to have to really implement this every day. I hope this can help some of you to make progress in your fitness journey and I hope it serves as motivation seeing that even after 9 years of suboptimal training you can still make significant progress.