One of the most anabolic things you can do is sleep. It’s not training in the gym that makes you grow - training is actually catabolic, meaning it breaks down muscle, not builds it! For your workouts to be effective at building muscle mass, you need to stimulate your muscles in the gym, then rest, rest, rest. To quote Matthew Walker (a sleep scientist who wrote the amazing book “Why we sleep” - definitely pick yourself up a copy and have a read!) “Human beings are the only sp

It’s no accident I’m posting this one now. Christmas is here, and New Year is just a week away; meaning there’ll be a LOT of people starting ridiculous “Diets” in an attempt to lose weight “this year”. For many, this is the same goal as last New Year… and the previous one… and quite possibly a few before that too! Crazy, fad Diets DO NOT WORK. At least not long-term. If you’re morbidly obese, extreme measures may be necessary in the short-term because the benefits outweigh th

So many people train, expecting to build muscle or lose fat, but they fail to eat the protein necessary to actually do that. It’s like trying to build a wall without bricks… It’s not going to happen. Obviously there’s a LOT more to it than just protein; vitamins, minerals, fibre, carbs and fats are also needed, but whilst protein shakes are all the rage, ironically, many people just don’t get enough protein. Amino acids in proteins are what your body needs to build muscle tis

This happens all the time. People are “good all week”, so they reward themselves with a few drinks and a takeaway at the weekend. Don’t reward your hard work with food. It defeats the object. What’s the point in restricting calories and struggling to get through the week, only to over-consume calories at the weekend and undo all of the work? Let’s say you’ve got a 300-calorie-a-day deficit x5 days = 1,500 calories. Now we get to the weekend and you have a couple of beers and

If there’s ONE thing that you absolutely need to get the best results possible, it’s consistency. It’s all well and good following an extreme program for 2 weeks and seeing some rapid results, but if you can’t sustain that work rate or nutrition plan, you’ll soon see any results you got start to unravel. Training 6 times a week and dropping 1,500 calories a day will get you rapid fat loss, but it’ll also mess with your body and make you feel like shit. After a couple of weeks

This aligns with the “lifting too heavy” post I put up previously, but there is a very slight difference. Whilst lifting too heavy could be a mistake for a couple of reasons - partly because you can’t maintain good form with higher loads, but also because for many guys (and girls) who want to get bigger, it’s not all about weight, but about time under tension and volume of work, so for many bodybuilders, it may actually be more beneficial to lift slightly lighter weights (eve