Highlights of the Podcast:
00:39 – Today’s topic is muscle gain in men and women
01:09 – Stephen and his hay fever
01:49 – Men want to gain muscle, but they’re clueless as to how much
02:33 – People tend to equate the amount of muscle gain to the amount of fat loss
03:32 – Mark and Stephen’s personal muscle gain experience
04:36 – Consistency is key to muscle gain
05:53 – Eating right consistently results in muscle gain
06:38 – Gaining a pound of muscle each month
08:24 – Focus on the habits that will lead to muscle gain
09:06 – It is a misconception that women will become big and bulky
09:47 – A 0.5 pound muscle gain per month is ideal in men
10:50 – Decrease in testosterone affects muscle gain negatively
11:22 – The amount of sleep greatly impacts muscle gain
13:15 – The story behind Stephen’s low testosterone level
14:47 – Ways to increase testosterone levels
16:11 – It all boils down to consistency
16:36 – Muscle gain in women
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another new episode of the TheDVCC.com podcast. I am Mark Gray, and my cohost, Stephen, is next to me! Say hello, Stephen.
Stephen: Hello there!
Mark: So, today, we thought we’d bring it outside. So if you hear birds tweeting, cats meowing, dogs barking, the wind a blowing, then we are outside in the sun recording this podcast, sitting on the floor. It’s a lovely weather, so we just thought we’d go al fresco, baby! So, today we are going to be talking about que?
Stephen: We are going to be talking about muscle gain.
Mark: Okay. So specifically for men?
Stephen: Well, no. I think we’re going to discuss it for both. But, in the sense of often, what you find is that men – particularly if they’ve lost fat – they want to gain muscle. And for women, they want to gain muscle tone or what they know as muscle tone, but they don’t want to get big and bulky. So, I thought we could just talk around those two things.
Mark: Okay. And firstly, actually, I want to apologize to you, the listener, for Stephen’s voice, because he sounds like he’s got a cold. He hasn’t. It’s very annoying. I find it very frustrating, his voice when he’s got a – basically, he suffers from hay fever like one week a year?
Stephen: Two weeks.
Mark: Two weeks a year. And he gets all depressed and life is the worst thing in the world. He’s all moody because he’s got a little bit of hay fever.
Stephen: Which, actually, if you think about it, it wasn’t the nicest thing for you to suggest sitting outside. It wasn’t really.
Mark: No, with all the daisies. Do they give you hay fever?
Stephen: No. I love daisies.
Mark: Grass, freshly cut grass?
Stephen: I think it might be the tree pollen or…
Mark: Oh, we’re next to some trees so it should be a good experience for you.
Stephen: Perfect.
Mark: Right. So, let’s get into it. Muscle gain. So, actually, this has kind of come about from kind of in the last week or so more. I don’t know if it just so happens I’ve just been chatting to a lot more men recently than usual. It sounds wrong, but I have been, and about their results and what they want to achieve and what have you. And yeah, like Stephen says, a lot of it is muscle gain. And it seems to me that men seem to be a little bit – not uneducated in respect of. They just don’t know what to expect in terms of how much muscle they should be gaining. Why they don’t look like Arnold yet and why it is a slow process.
Stephen: Well, I think what happens is that with fat loss, you end up talking about 10 pounds, 14 pounds, 20 pounds losing your fat. So, what happens is that people kind of get conditioned to using those numbers – double figures of fat loss. I mean, obviously at DoubleVision Conditioning Centre in Milton Keynes and Bedford, we often have quite a few people who lose really large amounts of fat. And so, what happens is everyone’s saying these figures of fat loss and actually then just think that they should equate that to when they’re looking to gain muscle. So, if someone loses 20 pounds of fat, surely, I should gain 20 pounds of muscle. And I think it’s through no fault, but we’ve actually probably never covered what is a realistic amount of muscle to build as a man to start with, and therefore, people have had to come to their own conclusions.
Mark: Okay. So, when I said put ourselves in this, so basically, we’ve been training, exercising consistently since we were what? 19?
Stephen: 18, 19.
Mark: 18, 19. So basically, actually, how it started is after six at school, we kind of started skipping rugby training because we wanted to play a better level. So we wanted to play club rugby. But we skipped rugby training at school to go to the gym. We only just started and kind of that started our love. So we’ve been training consistently since, yeah, 18. I think we’ve had possibly maximum a week where we haven’t done any sort of…
Stephen: Resistance training.
Mark: Resistance training. So, as a man, I’m pretty sure you listening to this right now, have not done that. And so, therefore, the levels of muscle that we perhaps have, which is a good amount. It is a little, but not like bodybuilder style. It’s athletic, I’d suggest. But that’s taken a lot and a lot of effort and consistency. And that is the keyword I always use. I mean, it’s very vital for weight loss, but just as much for…
Stephen: If not more.
Mark: If not more for muscle gain, is consistency. It’s consistency in eating and that’s consistency in training. So, a lot of guys think that I hit it hard – I see it on Facebook all the time. “Beast mode, training hard, I’m smashing myself in the gym.” And they say this a lot and there’s all these guys. And sure, they might be training themselves hard for that month, for those three weeks or whatever, but the consistency really, it is kind of along the lines of the snail. Like slow and steady gets the monkey or whatever it is.
Stephen: “Softly, softly, catchy monkey.”
Mark: So basically, I’ve never been one for like smashing hard for a month, and then easing off or whatever. I just kind of go decently well.
Stephen: If you go three to four times, you’re working out well, hard, improving your strength, trying to get stronger. And then you’re eating consistently. The thing is we’ll cover it probably in a bit about eating because eating potentially is – I see a lot of people that train very well, but then, they think that’s enough. But actually, I would suggest, particularly with muscle-building and particularly for men, is actually maybe 50%, if not 60%, goes around to eating the right thing.
Mark: And when we say eating the right thing, I don’t mean doing it for a week and then expecting to put on two pounds of muscle, or three pounds or four pounds or whatever it is. I’m talking weeks and months, right? And eating well, and as you would be directed for ongoing. Like continuous without short, sharp bursts.
Stephen: Well, if you were to gain a pound of muscle a month, right? Which probably doesn’t sound much to you.
Mark: That’s a load.
Stephen: But that’s 12 pounds in a year, right? That’s pretty much a stone of muscle, one whole stone of muscle. Now, you’re aware of what muscle looks like, but if you were to add a whole stone of muscle onto your frame, imagine the difference.
Mark: You’d be transformed. A stone is an absolute load in muscle.
Stephen: I would love to be able to build a stone in a year.
Mark: I think we worked out how much weight we put on last year or whatever of muscle, and it was about 9 pounds or something like that. Actually, no. Sorry. It was 9 pounds over 18 months because we did it from when we had the new body machine, which is a body fat machine. And like this is the thing. We train multiple times a day sometimes. We eat pretty much perfectly like 95% of the time.
Stephen: A lot of the time, yeah.
Mark: And we’ve been doing this a long time. And then, you will have the people that say, “Well, but you’ve been doing it a long time. You shouldn’t expect those kind of results. It should be slower results.” It’s kind of true and kind of not in that when someone just starts, sure, you’d hope that the results would be a bit quicker if they suddenly stepped into an amazing nutrition and an amazing sleep pattern, an amazing training schedule where they push themselves hard each time, they know all the movements and they tax the right muscles. Which isn’t going to happen because you’ve just started. So, what’s that? 9 in 18. So it’s almost 9…
Stephen: It’s less than that. Obviously, it’s less than a…
Mark: It’s less than a pound a month.
Stephen: A pound a month.
Mark: Yeah, of course. But it is about 0.5, right?
Stephen: About 0.5.
Mark: It is 0.5. 0.5. Half a pound of muscle a month. So, how would I put this? You always need to focus on the habits, like we always say. The things that are going to get you that muscle gain as opposed to the muscle gain. It doesn’t happen overnight. So guys, stop being deluded in that.
Stephen: Muscle gain is a long term process. And when we talk about nutrition, I think it’s important to know that people undereat. So if you’re not gaining muscle, often it’s because you’re undereating. So, when we talk about eating well, we’re talking about five meals a day. Protein, a decent amount of protein in every single meal and having enough protein throughout the day. And literally, a number of people I meet that are just undereating, but expecting to gain muscle. It’s not that easy.
And actually, this qualifies for them when we’re talking about women because a lot of the misconceptions for women are that they’re going to get big and bulky, which is really, really incorrect. So if we’re talking about men struggling and having to work really hard and be really consistent to put on half a pound a month, it’s tougher for women because they don’t have the same androgenic hormones – testosterone and things like that. They don’t have as high levels. So, it then becomes even tougher for women to build significant amounts of muscle. So that’s why 99% of women will never build bulky, large muscles. If you were going to, you’d know already because you would probably have a large amount of muscle anyway.
Stephen: So, let’s quickly clarify then. For a man, how much muscle would be a very good amount of muscle gain?
Mark: I would be happy with half a pound a month.
Stephen: Exactly. So 0.5 of a pound of muscle tone.
Mark: Good quality muscle. No fat.
Stephen: And then, this goes down with weight loss or muscle gain is not linear. So, you might not put any muscle on for three, four, five weeks. And then, put on two pounds in what seems like a week. But actually, it’s not. It’s everything you’ve done in the last five, six weeks that will result in that. So, we did an article or a podcast on is weight loss linear. The answer was no. And the same thing with muscle gain. Is muscle gain linear? The answer is no. So, across the board, if you’re putting on 0.5 of a pound of muscle a month, then you’re doing very well. And the key, like we always say, is to focus on the smaller parts that will lead to the result. Don’t focus on the result. Focus on the smaller parts.
Mark: And we should actually probably talk about the things that get in the way of muscle, which actually, I don’t think men really think about. So, when we talk about testosterone being important, now testosterone in most people nowadays is a lot less than it used to be, which is a negative thing. So, what you find is a lot of men do things that actually affect their testosterone anyway. So, for example, drinking alcohol knocks down your testosterone I think for about 72 hours. Marijuana knocks down your testosterone massively. Smoking knocks down your testosterone. Eating sugary carbohydrates will negatively affect testosterone ratios and things like that.
So, really, you have to be thinking about sleeping. Sleeping, how much you sleep, has a massive impact. If you’re not getting enough sleep, then you’re not going to be recovering. You’re not going to be able to produce enough muscle. So, there’s a lot of scope, a lot of different things involved. So, like we’ve already stated, that just turning up to the gym is not enough to build significant amounts of muscle. And you will. I mean, you will build some muscle, but I think the key is that firstly, you need to get what you’re expecting to achieve in perspective. And then, also, realize that everything you do outside of the gym affects it. And as guys – I say men worse than women – in that they’ll be going out in the weekends, drinking. And then, dropping their testosterone.
And when we say dropping your testosterone, pretty much until Tuesday, your testosterone is…
Stephen: Depressed.
Mark: Depressed. Which means you are not going to be as strong as you could be, you’re not going to be able to recover as quickly, you’re not going to be able to put on muscle tone as you should do. So, all of these things play a factor and they all play a role into achieving a 0.5 pound a month increase in muscle tone. So, that is very good, 0.5. And that means that you’re not going out smoking, drinking, having illicit liaisons or whatever it is, and you’d get in 0.5 if you didn’t. So, therefore, it’s going to be reduced if you do all the other things. You know? So, I mean…
Stephen: I mean, that’s not to say that you can’t build a pound of muscle a month if you like, but we’re just trying to make the statement that if you’re training regularly, eating well, sleeping well…
Mark: You’ve got good testosterone amount in your body.
Stephen: Testosterone amount.
Mark: And then, for example, let’s give you into perspective. We’d had our testosterone tested in America. We had all our testosterone tested. And just so you know, mine is higher than Stephen’s.
Stephen: [Laughs]
Mark: However…
Stephen: Well, it’s for a reason.
Mark: Well, yeah. I was actually low, right? So Stephen’s was on the borderline of he would find it – if he wanted to – he would find it hard to conceive, pretty much.
Stephen: Hey! Well, come on! You’re exaggerating a little bit. You’re just trying to make me look funny. But, basically, my…
Mark: Harder than I would, anyway. That’s what I meant.
Stephen: Well, okay. Yes. So my testosterone was not as high as it could be. Actually, the reason for mine was what can happen is when you get hit on the head a few times, one of the hormones that you need to produce isn’t produced quite the same. So, actually, they see it in a lot of big American football players.
Mark: So basically, head concussions he’s had or the knocks in rugby…
Stephen: In rugby.
Mark: Have affected it, his testosterone production. And we both had a fair few knocks in rugby, so that was the reason for both of us. We fixed it now, and it was simply a matter of a few herbal supplements that managed to or have realigned our hormones. And also stress as well. So magnesium has helped that a lot in putting our testosterone levels back up to normal. But like we say, if your testosterone is not where it should be, then you are going to struggle to put on muscle tone as well. So, let’s talk women now, Stephen.
Stephen: Well, I actually just wanted to mention one thing that’s really good for helping increase testosterone would be zinc.
Mark: Right.
Stephen: Zinc. But as well, there’s quite a lot of problems nowadays with what happens too. Even if you do have testosterone, if you’re eating poorly, if you’re taking a lot of toxins, drinking from plastic bottles and things like that, you can actually end up turning your testosterone into estrogen. So that’s why we always hammer home green vegetables. Particularly, broccoli.
Mark: Green vegetables.
Stephen: Green vegetables. Particularly, broccoli and things like that, because that helps stop that changing of testosterone into estrogen. So, there’s an awful lot to think about, so I think people really don’t realize how complex and how tricky it can be to actually build muscle.
Mark: Yeah. And you know what? This is why we have transformation centers with experts in them. And I’d like to include ourselves as an expert. That it’s not as simple as turning up, exercising and going home. Eating less calories and you expend. Because if it was, then everybody would be walking around in the shape they want to be. Every man, every woman. So, it’s slightly more complex than just turning up, lifting weights, putting on muscle. It is not as simple as that. And that’s not to say we see it as a negative. It just means that nothing in life that comes easy is worth or worthwhile, we say.
Stephen: But consistency would probably be the main buzzword.
Mark: Yeah. And I keep saying that all the time. I was saying it a lot I think this evening, consistency is the key, and you pretty much can’t achieve anything without consistency anyway because it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. You don’t have to be an expert in lifting weights to increase your muscle, but you need to put in a sufficient amount of time and effort into it. So, the female, Stephen?
Stephen: I mean, women tend not to actually want to be building lots and lots of muscles. So, actually, I never really have many conversations with women complaining that they haven’t put on enough. But it’s just important to realize and I think it helps explain for women who worry about getting too bulky, that women tend not to be able to build. Like I said, they can’t build significant amounts of muscle. So women who say they’re feeling like they’re bulky and getting bigger, rarely! I mean, I can’t even think of one case and I’ve trained and helped hundreds of clients now. It’s never a case of getting bulky. It’s a case of eating poorly, which puts on fat. And then, trying to explain it away by saying, “I’m getting bulky because of doing resistance work.”
Mark: Yeah.
Stephen: Incorrect. It’s always putting on body fat. Muscle density, size-wise, is much, much smaller than fat, density-wise, so it takes up much less room. So, if you’re doing weights and you think you’re putting on size, it’s because you’re eating incorrectly and putting on fat. If you’re doing weight training correctly and eating correctly, you will not put muscle on. And therefore, you put size and you’ll lose fat, and therefore lose size. It doesn’t happen that you build massive amounts of muscle as a woman. It doesn’t.
Mark: It doesn’t and…
Stephen: Like he said, unless you would already know you would have big, bulky muscles already.
Mark: Do you have a chiseled jaw? Do you have excessive facial growth hair and are you growing hair on your back as a lady? If you’re not, then you pretty much don’t have…
Stephen: Are you a Russian sharp putter?
Mark: Exactly. You pretty much don’t have the amount of testosterone your body naturally needed to achieve that or to have that as an issue. And like Stephen says, if you’re putting on muscle – which is a lot of people call “bulk” – if you put on muscle, then you will be smaller and not bigger and you would not feel really bulky.
Stephen: Because you’d lose fat.
Mark: So, if you’re doing resistance work and then putting on body fat, it’s simply because you’re not eating correctly and you’re not eating what you say you’re eating, and you’ll know that if you write down what you have or you take photos of it.
Stephen: And what you drink as well.
Mark: And what you drink. Then you’re not basically eating the right foods because if you’re putting on muscle tone, you’re going to be losing fat as well. It’s simple. So, anything else you want to add on that? So basically, we just kind of wanted to use this as a way of managing expectations, I guess, in males and females.
Stephen: I think that’s the key. That it’s not impossible. I mean, we constantly strive to put more muscle on. Excuse me!
Mark: Oh, here comes a sneeze.
Stephen: [Sneezes]
Mark: Oh!
Stephen: Oh! [Sneezes]
Mark: Oh no!
Stephen: [Sneezes] Oh no! Oh God!
Mark: I apologize for that.
Stephen: It’s not impossible, but it’s just important that you realize it’s all about consistency. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was – who’s the guy who sits? The chiseled guy. Is it – oh no.
Mark: Mark.
Stephen: No. The thing they chipped away and – oh gosh, I can’t remember.
Mark: Oh, the famous guy who sits.
Stephen: With the thingy.
Mark: Yeah, he’s got a great, you know.
Stephen: Anyway, he wasn’t built in a day either. It took a long time to get him built. It’s the same for building your body.
Mark: I apologize for Stephen’s sneezes there as well. So, I hope you found this informative. And hopefully, it will allow you to know what you should be achieving and what you should be aiming towards. We put when it needs to be in a positive light. It’s not a matter of you can’t do it. It’s a matter of don’t expect too much too quickly.
Stephen: Well, because I think people expect a lot. And if they don’t achieve it, therefore, they then go, “Oh, it’s rubbish! I can’t build muscle.”
Mark: Yeah, which is wrong. So, you can. You just need to be consistent. So, anyway, leave your comments. As a guy, as a girl, as a lady, as a man, leave your comments. Let us know, do you struggle to put on muscle? Do you think you put on muscle quickly? If you do, let us know if you’re a lucky one. And also, send this around to your friends. We had quite a few people who contacted us. And actually, their friends have emailed articles around. So that’s great! Until next time, au revoir!
