If You're Not Building Muscle, This Is Why.

what the am I supposed to say back to you bro what do you expect like let me write you let me write you a hall pass excuse doctors know I'm doctor right here's an excuse for not being jacked cuz reasons cuz thermodynamics what are you hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance puration there are 10 reasons why your muscles might not be growing and we're going to get through all of them and help you grow why would you want bigger muscles to begin with I suppose we can have a quick chat about this do you

remember that one time you had a crush it was ninth grade Kelsey was her name you finally got the coones to sit next to her at lunch and you said Kelsey I she's like up up up I'm just going to cut you off Billy was it he go yes you know my name she's said yes Billy but I'll tell you why I know your name I know your name because my anthropometry scan revealed that you were insufficiently muscular for me to reproduce with Billy and you're like she's an Android and you were even more in

love but the meat of what she said struck you right there paralyzed saying nothing you just lurched slowly back to your usual seat with the fucking nerds you sat down and everyone's like so bil how is it going did you ask F out our date there's a lot of spit when Nerds talk and you were like she said I I wasn't muscular and no room starts to fade to black but guess who else is sitting at the table me cuz I'm a fucking nerd and I'm like hey wait up wake up don't Fade to Black

I got 10 tips for your bitch ass so you can get fucking jacked and come up to that cyborg bitch and be like yo what up girl shit you trying to you trying to I'm saying you trying to get with this and she's like affirmative let's go reproduce and yep locker room boys bathroom all sorts of places to do things uh library in any case 10 reasons let's get to them number one first couple are nutritional because a lot of people ask like what do I need to be doing in the gym to grow more

and I look him up and down I'm like motherfucker you built like Harry Potter how much you eating there's no amount of training it's going to get you from 120 lb to 150 lb because it's not a training problem it's a fucking eating problem and unless you become the most jacked 120 pounder in the world you got to eat so the first thing is getting enough protein roughly a gram per pound per day really really swell idea because if you eat a lot of food but it's not a lot of protein you're just going to

get fatter and you're going be like Dr Mike fucked me over I'm just a fat piece of shit now and Kelsey the Android girl from school still won't interface with me that's what she calls it strange gram per pound per day next a sufficient number of calories what is a sufficient number of calories don't don't even bother Googling don't stop typing to chat GPT don't even ask if you are gaining something like half a pound to a pound of weight on average every week to few weeks consistently you're eating enough calories to supply all the

raw materials that you need to get jacked but if you've been training for the last 6 months let's say and you started you were on 132 lbs and now you're 131.5 how the fuck are you supposed to be getting bigger you are just not putting in enough raw materials to get bigger it's like trying to add an addition to your house you as you probably know I'm phenomenally wealthy like my money actually has its own money that it invests how's that work if I wanted to add another Castle to my property and I hired all

the fucking Builders and the designers and engineers and they were like we're ready and I was like yeah by the way uh here's like you know three planks of wood and like one little bucket of concrete go go go they're going to be like look Mansions are made of slightly more stuff if I don't Supply them with a raw materials how the fuck is that going to work where are they supposed to grow it from so if you are gaining weight steadily then you know your calories are straight if you're not gaining weight steadily slowly

on average then it just doesn't matter how much you're eating because a lot of times people ask me this and when they do interact with me in real life which is almost never they'll say like you know I'm trying to like trying to get jacked I'm trying to work on my eating but it's tough I'm like no I got you it's tough for all of us and they're like yeah like I'm eating like and they say whatever number doesn't fucking matter 150 lb kids I'm eating 4,000 calories like oh dope are you gaining weight like

no I'm like ah I got you you got to eat more and they're like but it's but it's 4,000 calories what the fuck am I supposed to say back to you bro what do you expect I'm like oh it's 4,000 Oh I thought he at 2,000 4,000 let me write you let me write you a hall pass excuse doctors know I'm a fucking doctor right uh uh here's the excuse for not being jacked cuz reasons cuz thermodynamics what if it's 4,000 is not gaining you weight up more food and there's tons of different ways to

do it you just search on YouTube you know like how to eat more some shit like that we've got tons of videos on that maybe Scott the video guy will even link one into here more calories enough to gain weight slowly on the other hand if you eat a crap ton more and you just gain like two pounds per week which I have done you just get really fat now you do get Jack too but really Ultra Fat so if you sit down next to Kelsey the Android she's going to be like you are insanely

grotesque and I hate you and you're like oh holy shit that that's that's fat phobic God damn bitch didn't you get the memo is 2023 but you're still dry so enough protein enough calories now on to the training and I'm going to analyze the training from kind of like uh maybe not first principles but in a sequential manner The Logical structure of which is the first things first which is why the first thing I'm curious about that doesn't mean it has the biggest magnitude of effect but it should be what you address first in your

program is what is your Technique like because people will say oh I'm like my chest won't grow and I'll watch him bench press and do flies and I'm like fucking Christ and they're like what I'm like yeah on paper you're training a chest but in reality like you're training mostly triceps and front delts because you're like you're benching like this the fuck is going on like arch your goddamn back get your elbows back really stretch the PEC so on and so forth really really good technique control the weight at all times especially slowly on these

Centric get a deep stretch for every lift that it's possible to get a deep stretch with and make sure most reps look very similar if someone plays an Instagram video of you lifting it better sh shit look like fucking replay except it's just 15 reps and then you stop and walk off and holy fuck I thought that was just one rep on replay that's what you want consistency with excellent Technique we have tons of videos on that once you have good technique then you go to think about the next level in the hierarchy as it

expands into real world lifting and the next level is okay you've got great technique in any given set but how hard are you going unless you get roughly around three reps in reserve three reps shy of muscular failure to where you can't move it anymore you can go harder and get better gains a real good way to tell that you're at least in the conversation for training hard enough is that most of your sets in most cases either distinctly slow down so you're curling curling curling and you stop and walk off people are going to

be like how many RS did you have but if you're curling curling curling and then at some some point one of the Reps is like a little slow boom you're in the money how far into that how many reps Beyond when it starts to get slow you go is actually a minor Point there's a very nuanced discussion there about how close to failure is good but somewhere near failure is already so much better than far away from failure that at least get there from a TR a troubleshooting perspective and the second thing even if your

upstone externally slow down at least internally you should be feeling a huge asymmetric buildup of resistance towards the end of your sets so like when you're curling it easy easy easy even if it looks easy to the external observer in the last couple of reps internally you got to be like holy fuck I got to oh I got to really push like the weight it feels like gravity just multiplied for no reason if at the end of your sets you regularly experienced that you got 99 problems but how hard you go in the sets probably

not one but if you're seemingly just kind of going through the motions and if you really try to push yourself close to failure and you realize you're reling eight reps in the tank once you fix that you will almost certainly grow more muscle next we got great technique each set is pretty hard not enough sets generally speaking per any session in which you try to hit a muscle my take is that something between five and eight working sets for that muscle sets taken close to failure with anywhere between your five rep max and your 30

rep max weight kind of no wrong answers there that is at least a really good guess to make sure you're doing enough work if you're doing like this is a real common thing people will complain that the rear adults aren't growing and I'm like okay how much do you train your adults and they they say well I got a shoulder day like okay dope what does that look like I could do overhead press I do seated dumbbell press I do side laterals I do Cable One Arm side laterals and then I go on the um

rear ADT machine and I do three sets of 10 and I fuck off I got it how many shoulder days do you per week like well one it's called shoulder day not shoulder days okay okay okay so you train a muscle that's like this big that recovers in like a day once a week with three fucking sets and you expect it to grow what are you nuts that's actually below what you would expect to be even maintenance volume so if you want a muscle to grow you got to put in some fucking work now five

to eight sets per session isn't 20 sets per session but it sure a shit isn't two or three either so make sure it's somewhere in that 5 to eight range something you can recover from so you're not sore tired session to session when you have to train it again but definitely like a solid amount of training next solid amount of training in one session is dope but you need multiple weekly workouts to get your best results and time and time again all the literature reviews come in and they show us one thing that on average

and there are some Nuance here you get better results training twice a week for the same muscle than you do just once a week and in some cases you even get a better result training that muscle three times a week than twice a week but twice a week is what I would consider consider as a serious attempt at muscle gain so if you tell me like yeah man my fucking biceps won't grow and I'm like how often do you train biceps like well fucking bicep day like okay once a week yeah come on man twice

a week frequency is is probably not your limiting factor but you got to hit every muscle you want to grow especially the problem Aries you really care about at least twice a week that doesn't mean three times is better there's a very nuanced conversation about two versus three but the conversation about one versus two is not very nuanced yes gigantic prob bodybuilders can train a muscle once a week because it takes that long for the shit to recover but last I checked your biceps don't look like fucking big ramy's biceps and maybe you can recover

quite quickly and train them well at least twice a week and as far as total number of training days per week for whole body the everything that you train my idea of what like a decent effort looks like a serious attempt is four times a week training or more and that means four times five times or six times a week training total not per muscle but just for the whole body what does that mean that means that if you're like yeah man I'm fucking trying to get jacked I'm like oh cool you go into the

gym I I do ask that sometimes and be like yeah absolutely I go to the gym twice a week you're like twice a week as a beginner that works but if you are more of an intermediate you've been training for a few years and you're really struggling to get to that next level of size you got to show up to the fucking gym like the people you look into the magazines Chris bumpstead and shit like that Chris bumpstead doesn't go to the gym twice a week he goes to the gym four five or six times

a week I don't know exactly what his frequency is but I bet you it's one of those I bet you a considerable amount it's one of those I'm Jewish I don't bet real many on bullshit like this ever I only bet on one thing it's the stock market it's not a bet it's a it's a statistical abstraction in any case four five or six times a week if you complain to me that you're not growing enough and you train with weights twice a week or even three times a week and you're anything other than like

a brand new beginner first year of training try training more I know it's crazy but training actually causes muscle growth what do you get when PhD Sports scientists collaborate with Pro bodybuilders the most effective muscle growth training app ever made get yours now next in the this is a fucking big one point number seven not enough weak toe consistency is the fucking killer of gains now here's the thing if you have baller genetics you can train like every other week and still be the fucking the the fucking Big Man on Campus sweet but first of

all you're probably not watching this video because too many science words confuses you it hurts your tiny soft brain but all I'm I'm just kidding Meatheads stay calm probably not watching this video they're also not struggling so they watch a video about people struggling and kind of be like oh yeah I remember never having that experience if you are struggling that means you can't afford to be inconsistent was it Scott uh was it Oscar wild that said consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative we talked about this before yeah the last Refuge Oscar wild

consistency is the last refuge in the unimaginative dope I love that all the time in the world for that but you know of all the many things Oscar wild was a traveler poet an American hero he wasn't fucking jacked in the least in the slightest and so his existence to me is kind of insanely irrelevant consistency is king So if you tell me hey I'm having trouble growing and I'm like well how was your last month of training kind of stable everything's kind of clicking or you got some problem here like well like mean like

I had finals and like family went on a trip so like last month was just kind of bad for me you know I'm like well I solved your fucking problem bro mystery solved you don't actually train now when you consistently start to apply any of these recommendations or even just your own program then we can say we can analyze and say okay this is the thing that isn't working but if there is no thing to analyze that isn't working because you're not sufficiently consistent enough to actually do the thing it's like telling someone like oh

man like I really suck at math okay like so you study math and it just doesn't sort of the concepts don't click we like I don't really study what the fuck how the fuck you supposed to say you know you're not even studying if you study this shit and then it's hard okay great you're not good at math fine but if you start studying math you may realize you're quite good at math same idea with training same shit Point number eight there is a probability that all of these points are in the very wrong direction

for you the opposite of the truth because you could be doing too much how do you know you're doing too much people say overtraining overreaching it's a thing I'll say this you know you're doing too much when you're grinding in the gym and you're just dog tired all the fucking time and you might not even be getting excellent pumps anymore not a ton of Mind muscle connection you just feel like the gym is literally a fucking grind and if you also are kind of losing Steam and motivation because you're like I'm not getting bigger I'm

not getting stronger I'm just pounding away at it at what point is the pounding going to get some results quote of myself to my wife we're getting carried away if you are really grinding and really tired and you're not getting results you could be training too much but if you're not grinding and not tired and you don't feel totally spent for days and weeks on end you're probably not overdoing it if you don't have consistency you almost certainly don't have an overtraining problem if you have fucking gnarly consistency and you're kind of burning the candle

at both ends and it seems like the harder you work the more ground you lose then backing off taking all of your so first of all Point number eight Del Lo every few months take an easy week of training or no training at all when you get really tired do that right now if you think you're overdoing it and then coming back slice everything in half cut all of your volumes in half you typically do 10 sets of of legs now you do five do that low volume for a few weeks you might actually start

getting better gains right away and if you think okay this is really way too low increase the set here and there just to get it just right so that you get really tired and really sore and then when your next workout comes up you're completely healed and ready to go again like yesterday my chest was sore and now it is not sore at all triceps are not sore at all and guess what in a couple hours here I do my fucking chest and tricep work I'm perfect so I know I'm healing on time but for

me it's a surprisingly small number of sets that uh ends up checking the Box in many instances if for you could be more fewer sets just make sure that whatever it is you're training with start on the low end and work your way up don't start with psychotic high and work your way down because if you start loan to work your way up you actually get really good strength gains at least with lower volumes and potentially some size gains and as you increase you could be like oh holy shit I'm growing more but if you

start with too much you actually just get overreached um and you start to not accumulate muscle you start to accumulate potential for injuries and wear and tear and damage you demotivate yourself it's just all kind of bad stuff guess on the side of easier of less rather than more and lastly if whatever types of rep ranges and exercises you've been doing just aren't hitting your muscles where you think they should be hit underhand pull Downs just like I don't feel shit in my lats or my back it's just mostly my biceps and my forearms then

don't just perseverate on those don't just be like oh it's fucking Basics man it works for everyone try some different shit so if sets of five to eight on leg presses just kind of hurt your knees and don't really do much to your quads even though your body seem to think it's a great way to train try sets of 15 to 20 UNL presses with some with some myette pauses you might do on set like that and you fucking cook your quads you're the most pumped you've been in your life you get sore for three

days and you're like oh oh that's the shit that works barbell curls aren't hitting your fucking biceps much switch to dumbbells switch to cables from behind the back you make that switch your entire training career is a lifetime of guess and check it's a lifetime of experimentation because all the studies and all the science and all the bullshit I talk about on this channel is dope as a good first guess but your body is yours and yours alone unless somebody else owns you in some capacity in which case call for help maybe you're in a

basement and that's impossible they do give you Wi-Fi apparently because you can see this shit hello captors in any case your journey is going to be yours and there's going to be some exercises and some repetition ranges that work better for you than they work for the average and others that work worse for you than they work for the average so definitely take all the recommend ations I've said hopefully with a little bit of oh go that could work and then guess and check guess and check try some different exercises for about a month at

a time to really see if they work try your best with them really try to get the technique going so if you try barbell curls and they just don't work try them for a few more weeks be consistent and if after a few weeks you're okay this definitely fucking blows even though I've really tried to get as much exercise as I could go to dumbbells go to machines go to cables and as your body evolves over time some of the answers that used to be incorrect may become correct some of the answers that used to

be like this is man this rep range and this exercise is really my shit might become less your shit and that's where variation comes in is you're always doing some new exercises every now and again and you're always trying some new rep ranges over time you're going to learn a lot about what probably doesn't work well for you a lot about what really works well for you and then you're no longer plateauing I haven't plateaued in fuck knows how long I don't know 15 years because I learned how to do this guess and check method

and once I learned that even if I make small gains I make gains all the time because I'm never standing still and going what the fuck is wrong I'm always changing a little bit of something something to make sure that I'm adapting to my always changing body in any case if you need help with any of this stuff Link in description to the RP hypertrophy app which is a training app you can use and it will just allow you to construct your training in a scientific manner you check in all your training it progresses for

you it auto regulates for you it asks you how you're feeling if you're sore if you're tired if you're recovered and it scientifically adjusts everything to your needs to make sure that all the stuff I just talked about you can just have a machine help you with it's like it's like chat GPT but for your for your muscles I know that that's that don't quote me I don't want to open any eyes suing the fuck out of us for that um and we also have the RP diet coach app which can do the same thing

that the RP hypertrophy app does for your training you can do that for your eating systematize formalize tell you what to eat when to eat and to make sure that if you tell it hey I want to gain like eight pounds in the next three months it will fucking hold you to that and make sure you get all the gains you need so go click on stuff buy things remember I have a team of butlers that take care of a team of Lamborghinis and none of that's free and please buy things or I will be

a regular person and not a mega Rich uh guy and I I I can't handle that and I won't accept it see you next [Music] time