The Definitive Guide to Building Muscle Naturally

I began weightlifting at the age of 14. For about 4 years, I spent my time in the gym doing what, I would say, 99% of people in the gym spend their time doing. Very lightweights. Supersets. Drop sets. Cluster sets. Taking selfies. Eating extreme amounts of protein at the exclusion of all other dietary factors. The reason I did this was simple: not only was it the case that everyone else was doing it, but also, almost every mainstream source of fitness information basically ascribed such activity as if it were the holy grail of gains. Articles explicating the fact that “Arnold did it” from bodybuilding.com, so it must be true that I could get big too by doing the same thing.

After 5 years, though, I began to wonder: my first year of weightlifting at the age of 14 yielded some pretty good results; my body looked way better. But after that first year, continuing the same routine, I failed to make any noticeable progress for literally half a decade. And when I was 17, due to further horrible advice — from bodybuilding.com, again — to go on a crash diet, I lost almost all of that progress and became skinny-fat. All of this was extremely demoralizing.

After doing much in the way of reading online — through several different forums, like that of Reddit — I came to discover that I was no anomaly: this sort of thing was the norm. And once I discovered this online, I began to look around my own gym — everyone else has looked the same for years and has also been doing the same nonsense for years!

I grew to wonder why this was happening. The conclusion I drew was the financial drive of the fitness industry to make bank off of the insecurities of gym-goers. Basically it goes like this: “if we can keep people out of shape while giving them the illusion that they are on the way to their best body ever, we can make huge amounts of money from training programs, supplements, nutritional programs, and magazine subscriptions.”

Getting fed up with being a victim of this, I decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands. I began to read into the science of what it takes to build a great body, both through books like Starting Strength and Bigger Leaner Stronger and by reading research through websites like Stronger By Science and PubMed.