The Lessons From My First Year of Training - that can help you maximize weight and muscle gain!
By Wesley McDermott
Why reinvent the wheel? Below I tell you about the most critical lessons from my first year of training in the hope that it will help you along.
I’ve been in the weight training game for a very long time and, during that time, I’ve learned lots about building muscle and losing fat. I wasn’t always an expert and, in my first year, I tended to learn by my mistakes! Sometimes, though, I got something right first time, purely by accident. Why not have a read through some of the important lessons I learned in that first year?
In the beginning
I so wanted to get to be big and strong. During my high-school times, I had been successful at endurance sports, taking part in cross-country runs, football, and swimming). But, as a skinny 17 year old, all I wanted was to be big and strong and, like most lads of that age, I jumped in with both feet.
I saved up really hard and bought the Gaining Mass Program, which, as it happens, was mistake number 1 because, basically, it was just an expensive load of regurgetated information! It was June 2003, summer was coming, and I started my training schedule.
The program was good and improvements in strength were noticeable almost immediately. I wasn’t gaining muscle mass though, even though I was getting ripped to the bone. I wanted to be big, so I wasn’t very impressed with the fact that, after four months hard work, I still weighed 150lbs. Okay, I might have been only 4 or 5% body fat, but I was still the same size.
Lesson 1
I wasn’t eating enough in terms of amount or frequency, and I wasn’t getting enough protein. I would jog to my first gym session in the morning and do my workout. I didn’t eat immediately after training. I then jogged home and ate a bowl of cereal. The rest of the day, I worked in a physical job and would eat maybe once or twice. My biggest meal was always dinner.
College Life
I enrolled for College that Autumn and, having learned the lesson about not eating enough, was determined not to fall into that trap again.
Well, I didn’t fall into that trap again; instead, I swung the completely opposite way and ate at every opportunity. I ate in the cafeteria. Some people take to the drink during that first year in college, for me it was food.
Now, the cafeteria wasn’t totally bad, but they did fry a lot. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the salad had been deep fried!
In the interest in trying to keep my fat levels as low as possible, I would order fried eggs but just eat the whites. They were, you know, shiny with excess oil! If only I’d realized that, instead, I should have been eating the yolks, which contain the majority of the nutrients.
Well, I was 70lbs heavier at the end of the first year, but this wasn’t the sort of big I wanted! About half of the gain was muscle mass. As an interesting exercise, I worked out my calorie intake on ‘big’ eating days – it worked out to almost 9,000 calories!
Lesson 2
Okay, I’d learned about eating more to gain muscle, but I hadn’t taken on board that the type of food you eat is important as well. I must have gone from 4% body fat to about 20% body fat. Also, to be honest, the Weight Gain 3000 supplements probably didn’t help. Looking back with the knowledge I have now, I realise that these supplements were mostly cheap milk protein plus maltodextrin, which is a high glycaemic cheap source of carbs.
College Training
Because I was eating more, I ramped up my training, trying to do more and more sets, using more and more weight. I was still making great progress, due I suppose to the fact that I was eating much more. And, at 18 years old, I could work to destruction in the gym and still recover quickly and easily.
I was working towards my target successfully, I thought, seeing increase in strength and body weight almost daily. But then, one day when I spent two and a half hours in the gym, I realized that my workouts were taking far too long.
Lesson 3
I realized that I was training too long and doing too many sets. I also realized that I was probably only making progress because I was eating so much. This could not continue. From that day, I stopped my workouts when they got to an hour long, no matter where I was in my program. What happened amazed me, from the moment I started cutting back my strength shot up and my bodyweight increased by about ten pounds!
In the Spring, I decided to try the Truth About Building Muscle by Sean Nalewanyj. I started training 3 days a week, but only did 45 minutes for each session – max! Still eating well, I made wonderful progress, learning about the benefits of getting the most from your workouts.
I Forgot the Cardio!
I read somewhere, at the beginning of my journey, that if you do weights you should reduce the cardio training. The theory was that cardio work would burn up calories that otherwise would be used by the body for building muscle. So to keep the aerobic exercise going could interfere with the muscle building program.
Well, in my all or nothing way, I completely cut the cardio. The thinking behind this was that I did plenty of cardio in the summer, jogging to the gym and back, and didn’t see any muscle growth. Maybe it had been the cardio that had mucked it up. Unless I had no alternative, I didn’t even walk up a flight of stairs!
Lesson 4
Whilst its true that too much cardio training, especially when its long duration training, can interfere with muscle growth, its also true that some cardio training is vital to any bodybuilding program. The secret is to do the right type of cardio training, which is interval training, which actually helps the muscle building process.
It’s wonderful to be big and strong but it’s not wonderful to be big, fat, and strong. If you run out of breath climbing a flight of stairs, you can hardly describe yourself as being at the pinnacle of health! Think about it, what is it that pumps blood and nutrients to your muscles, what is it that helps you to recover between sets? Why, it’s the heart, isn’t it!
I now never do muscle building without incorporating cardio, neither should you.
The End of the College Year
Well, at this point, when I was big, strong, and FAT, I realized that I needed to burn off that excess fat. But, I made a huge mistake by going back to the regime that had caused my fat loss the previous summer. I didn’t eat enough to support my new muscle mass, and I didn’t eat enough protein either.
Plus, I started running again and, having not done any cardio training at all for eight months, this was a hard lesson to learn. I still imagined I was that 150lb cross country runner who could do 5km in 15 minutes, when, really, I was a 220lb weightlifter who couldn’t even jog for a paltry 3 minutes.
Because of my need to stop and walk every few minutes of my run, my long duration cardio training was really interval training. As my circulatory system got in better shape, I started to run for longer intervals. Little did I know that I would have been better sticking to the interval training.
I did lose weight but it was composed of some fat and a LOT of muscle. I had worked so hard to build that muscle, and here I was losing it. Okay, I didn’t lose it all, but I did lose enough to give me a big set-back.
Lesson 5
Whether you’re trying to lose fat or trying to gain muscle, the dietary requirements are pretty similar. The real differences in achieving these two aims are actually in the training variables, rather than in the diet. Whatever your goals, you still need to take in a lot of protein and, even if your on a fat loss program, you still need to lift heavy weights.
Increasing cardio frequency, eating few calories and decreasing rest periods between sets will get the fat loss process moving in the right direction. But you should neither starve yourself nor go made increasing your training workload.
What happened in my second year of training?
Well, that’s another story, which I might tell you another day. Suffice it to say that I went in completely the opposite direction to my first year.
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