muscle gain diet chart
what's up, guys? jeff cavalier, athlean-x.com. today i'm dishing out the truth to the reasonswhy you might not be building muscle. i think i'm more qualified here to speak about thistopic than anybody because i lived that. i lived those problems, i've had those samestruggles. i couldn't build muscle. this was actually me. you guys have asked to see whati looked like. this is me. i dug up some old footage the other day. i was looking throughsome old home movies. that's me, in high school. painfully thin,unable to put on muscle. things have changed for me though, because i've learned from alot of my mistakes. i think if i can talk about some of those mistakes then you mightbe able to avoid them, too.
the very first thing that i learned quickly,early on was that i was overtraining. overtraining, i've talked about in many videos before. it'sa very real thing and a very real thing that sets up a roadblock for many guys that considerthemselves to be hard gainers, or just unable to add muscle. you see, we always think that more is better.we've been conditioned in this society to think that more is better. when it comes totraining, more is not better. more is not better. only the right amount of the righttype of training is better. as soon as you start going down that path you become evenmore likely to continue to go down that path because you try more and that doesn't work.
so what do you do? you do even more, and thenyou do even more. before you know it you're doing 55 sets for chest alone and your chestlooks like shit. so you want to try to follow and find the fastest way for you to cut backon what you're doing. if you're going to train – this is a very important point, this videoencapsulates what we're all about here at athlean-x. if you're going to be a drug free, unassistedlifter then you'd better find ways to enhance your recovery. most of us are not able to.without the assistance of drugs, we're unable to recover nearly fast enough to allow ourselvesto go back to that gym to do another 55 sets, and another 55 sets and we wind up hittinga wall.
it's a very real wall. don’t let anybodytell you differently. there is a wall that you hit hormonally, neurologically. you can'ttrain. you can't even bring the effort that you need to produce the gains that you'retrying to see. that leads me to my next point. guess what most people do wrong when they'retrying to build muscle? you may be shocked when is ay this; you'reundertraining. how can you be undertraining and overtraining? because undertraining iswhen you show up at the gym thinking that just by walking into the gym and gracing everyonewith your presence, swiping your gym card, grabbing your protein shake and then headingover the leg extension machine that you're going to build muscle.
if you head to a gym and your goal is to countreps, count to 12 over and over and over again i could save you a trip. you could have stayedhome and counted with sesame street as opposed to going to the gym and wasting gas if that'sall you're going to do. the numbers that you're doing in the gym, the reps that you're countingdon’t mean shit. if you want to build muscle, the only thing that ever matters is the intensitythat you're bringing to those numbers. if you're at 12 and it seems like you're tryingto lift a house on the 12th rep and you've got nobody around to help you, that's a goodeffort. if you're at 12 and you're doing this and you're looking around and you're puttingthe weights down and waiting, you go back and can do it again and you're looking forwardto the next set, you go down and you're looking
forward to the next set just because it'ssooner for you to get out of the gym; you're not training with nearly the intensity thatyou need to make changes. so how do you manipulate the two? how do youmanage the two? it's actually kind of easy. as i say all the time; you can either trainhard, or you can train long, but you can't do both. if you're at the gym doing 2 and3 hour marathon workouts there's only two things going on. you're either assisted – usingsteroids that you shouldn't be – or your half-assing it. there's only one or the other. you can't do it any other way. if you bringthat high level of intensity to what you do, and that high level of focus to what you doand you're not spread so thin doing a whole
bunch of everything, doing none of it reallywell; you'll find that you'll get an extremely intense workout and an extremely effectiveworkout in about 45 minutes or so. maybe an hour tops, and you're out. you're out. you're able to recover and allowyour body the opportunity that it gets to recover to build and allow you to build backand come back stronger. that's how you want to manage those two extremes. next up: peopletend to avoid the hard exercises. again, i'm guilty of it. i avoided the hard ones. youknow the hard ones; we all know the hard ones. the ones where it's like the impending doomof the bar that creates a threat to you and your comfort level in the gym. bench pressing.
the treat that the bar could come down onyour chest. there's a pending doom. you're threatened by the security of exercise. squats,dead lifts; who wants to get down there and try to lift that. you know how hard it isto lift the bar out of that position? that's why it's called a "dead lift". no momentum.you've got to get that bar off the ground. those are the exercises that tend to deliverthe most bang for their buck though. if you want to build muscle, you'd betterbuild your foundation of strength and build it with those key foundational exercises withthose scary exercises, with those intimidating exercises. you don’t have to jump in anddo what everybody else is doing. just because i see everybody else benching 300-400 pounds,or squatting 400 pounds or whatever it might
be, that doesn't mean that i have to startthere. we all start somewhere. we all start at the bottom. no matter who you are, you start somewhereand you build from there. that's what makes us great as humans. we can develop ourselvesto become – the capacity is endless to what we can become. but it starts somewhere; usuallydown toward the bottom. you build your foundation learning how to do those exercises properlyand then you add from there. you don’t shy away just because they seem hard and theyseem intimidating because they're going to be intimidating, but they're going to holdthe biggest benefits. just by doing those exercises doesn't meanthat you're accomplishing everything that
you need to accomplish. a big mistake is thinking"okay, i did the exercises. now what?" well, how'd you do them? what was the purpose? whatwas the purpose of your training? if you're trying to go for hypertrophy, maybe a powerclean is not the best way to go. power clean is great if you're trying to be explosiveand build top level explosive strength as an athlete, but it's not a great hypertrophyexercise. there's no real eccentric portion of the lift.not a controlled eccentric targeting any one muscle group. even though the eccentric isthere it's a very quick eccentric. there's other ways i could do that. i could do reallyslow eccentric shoulder raises if i want to build my deltoids. again, different purpose,different time, different exercise, different
application. people will take power liftsand they'll be doing them from high reps. why? what's the purpose of that? don't misapply the exercises that you're using,but don’t shy away from those that are the most intimidating or the most scary to youbecause they often hold the key to your most growth. nutritionally we all make mistakes.i made plenty of mistakes. i was the biggest junk food eater. i've talked about that somany times. the biggest junk food eater on the planet. no doubt, i know there's no – iown stock in entenmann's just because of how much i ate of their stuff every morning, andafternoon, and when i got home from school. i wasn't building muscle.
i was that painfully skinny guy. how the hellcould that happen? blessed with a fast metabolism? maybe. but why couldn't i build muscle? becauseeven though i was over nourishing in terms of the amount of calories i was taking ini was under nourishing my muscles. that's all that matters. i was not providing thenutrients that my muscles needed as a substrate for growth. you see, it's a very importantdifference. if you don’t provide yourself with the right type of calories, caloriesalone will not help you to build muscle. think about every skinny guy you know whoeats a ton of food and just can't do anything. i can tell you, the fastest way to fix him.the fastest way to fix him is to tell him to stop worrying about all the shit that he'seating and start focusing on eating the right
stuff. if he starts to eat the right stuffi bet you his muscle growth soars over the next year because for the first time in hislife he's finally providing his muscles with the fuel it actually needs to grow. it's like trying to grow a lawn with the worstgrade fertilizer and seed versus high grade fertilizer and seed. there's a reason whythere's a difference in price because one of them is – it's the "shit in, shit out"concept. one of them is not going to grow you a good lawn, the other one is. you couldput a whole ton of that crap seed down and it's not going to do anything. you put theright amount of the good stuff down and it will.
on the flip side of the coin, when you doclean up your diet one thing you'll want to be aware of – and a big piece of advicehere – is make sure when you make your substitutions, think about what you took out and what you'reputting back in. you're taking out a lot of calorie dense, nutrient thin food. that'swhat you're getting with entenmann's. calorie dense, fat laden – you're getting rid ofall those. by doing that you're losing a lot of calories. what you might find is, when you replace itwith the more nutrient dense you're going to have a lot fewer calories going back in.the nutrient dense foods are, by nature a lot of times, much more lower in calories.so you'll find that you'll struggle to put
on size because you're undereating. the firstthink you'll want to do is: don't throw up your hands and say "sorry. this way of eatingdoesn't work, jeff. you told me and it didn't work." no. now you want to start making sure that you'reeating more at every single meal. every opportunity that you can, you're trying to drive moreof that nutrient dense food into your body so you can increase the calories to be ableto get to that level that your muscles need to be able to help you to grow. get enoughprotein, make sure you're following a strategy to get you there. one of the strategies i use all the time issupplementation because for me, the liquid
intake of those extra calories, those extrahigh quality calories, those extra proteins that i need; that makes it so much easierfor me to take it in and around my solid meals throughout the day, and number two: it allowsme to be very, very consistent. consistency with nutrition is key. you can't make a changetoday, follow it for one day and think that you're going to start building tons of musclejust because you ate well one day. you've got to make sure that you apply yourself. this is a long term approach. you want tostart eating right, and eating right for a lifetime. you can do it if you identify foodsthat you like and then have a strategy from being consistent with it. supplementationoften comes in here in a very valuable way
to allow you to get that stuff in withoutreally feeling like you're eating so much throughout the day. so, tying a bow aroundall this, this is what athlean-x is all about. it's what it's all about. let's pursue thebest you that you can be, drug free. let's pursue what you do in the gym with a purpose. don’t just show up. don’t think you'remaking me happy because you walked through those gym doors. you make me happy when youwalk through those doors and you lay your ass on the line and you put everything you'vegot into that workout and then you get out of there and allow your body to recover. stophaving a fear of those hard exercises. those hard exercises are the things that you fearthe most and the things that will change you
the most. i've had that very same fear. build up your ability to perform those exercisessafely. don’t just go and jump in and do what everyone else is doing because they'relifting a lot of weight on those and you know you should be lifting a lot of weight on those.you build your strength by starting at the bottom and you work your way up. i show youhow to do that in all of our programs. i show you how to jump in at any level that you'reat right now and push yourself to that next level. don’t misuse the exercises. don’t do what everybody else is doing becauseeverybody is doing it. you do it because it makes sense for where you are in your program.you do it because it makes sense for what
you're trying to do at that very moment inyour program. when it comes to nutrition don’t think that it's unimportant. that "oh, i'mjust a hard gainer. i won't be able to put on muscle because i just have a fast metabolism."i've seen the hardest gainers put on muscle when they approached their nutrition right.so stop focusing on just eating calories. start focusing on getting the right kind ofcalories. get nutrient dense foods into your diet. then from there, adjust if you haveto. increase the amount that you're eating at each and every opportunity. add supplementationif that allows you to be more consistent, but there's a fact of the matter here, guys.there's no shortcut around this. it pisses me off when i hear about shortcuts. you guysknow that's a soft spot for me. there's no
substitution for being serious about whatyou do. take your workouts and your nutrition seriously. i guarantee you'll get serious results. ifyou are looking for a way to get serious results, guys; i'm more than happy to deliver you theworkouts, nutrition plans, step by step everything you have to do. you're just not going to getit sugar coated from me. i'm going to tell you everything you've got to do and you'regoing to do it. i can't come there and lift the weights for you. i sure as hell can'tcome there and eat the foods for you. you've got to do it the right way, you've got tofollow it with an intent to change your life because you will.
guess what? things change in your entire lifewhen you get this thing right. you know how you feel if you feel like you can't buildmuscle. you feel like you're skinnier than everybody else, you feel – i was there.i know how it felt. i showed you the picture before. i wasn't really comfortable there.i was a little bit insecure. you know how much it changes your life to where i can geton here and deliver messages like this to you and have the confidence to be able todeliver messages to you and hopefully change everybody else's life so they don’t haveto go through what i went through. if you're ready to do that, guys, i'm morethan ready to take you by the hand and do that for you. head to athleanx.com right nowand come on board. join team athlean. if you
found this video helpful, an eye opener, alittle bit of a kick in the ass; fine. any of them will apply. just let me know belowby giving me a comment and telling me what
muscle gain diet chart,else you want to see; what other problemsi could help you to solve because i'm more than happy to do that, guys. this is why istarted this channel. that's why i continue to do this channel eachand every week. all right, guys. i'll be back here again very soon. see ya.
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