How to Build Muscle: The 3 Things That Actually Matter

Why Building Muscle Gets Overcomplicated

There’s a lot of confusion about how to build muscle the right way.

Sometimes it’s way oversimplified.

“Just eat big and lift big.”

But more often than not, it’s way overcomplicated:

12-15 sets per muscle group per week you’re trying to grow. No more than 10 sets per muscle group per session to avoid junk volume
Train to failure, but only some of the time and on certain exercises
Eat more food than you’re burning, but not too much or you’ll gain fat
Follow the perfect training split to avoid overtraining
Cardio will kill your gainz. But not doing cardio might kill you too…

How To Build Muscle: Simplified

Today I want to simplify muscle building, whether you’re brand new to working out or you’ve been working out for most of your life.

I spent years of my life overlooking the most important things required to build muscle, while focusing on the non-essentials (butter in my coffee, kettlebell swings, cold plunges, and dozens of other things that didn’t really matter).

I spent other years overcomplicating everything. Filtering over every last piece of my program or diet — always tweaking and changing things — but never seeing results.

Both are a distraction from what matters, and both won’t lead you to the path of body transformation.

If you follow this path long enough, you’ll end up feeling and looking the same 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years from now.

Just more frustrated and anxious from how hard you’ve worked with little to show for it, and all the noise going around health and fitness.

It doesn’t have to be that hard or complicated.

Once I discovered how few things really mattered when it came to building muscle, two things happened.

1. At age 35, I ‘stumbled’ my way into a better physique than I had even compared to college sports, or my 20s and early 30s working out 6+ times per week

2. My mind was clearer and less anxious. I didn’t try changing every little detail as a new study, video, or social media post came out

If you’re ready to transform your body, and quit overcomplicating everything, focus on the things that really matter (and withstand the test of time).

How To Build Muscle: 3 Priorities That Matter Most

Priority 1. Training Stimulus

The training stimulus is giving your muscles enough stress to actually grow. There are a few ways to increase your training stimulus:

Volume: do more sets or reps
Load: lift a heavier weight
Intensity: train closer to failure

There are bad exercise programs. There are great exercise programs. And there is everything in between.

But if you provide a high enough stimulus to tell your muscles to grow — it’s possible to add muscle.

Even if you’re following a bad program or bad diet.

Will you make things harder on yourself if you’re not following a great program and a great diet?

Absolutely.

But this is really the main thing that matters when it comes to building muscle.

If you’re unsure of what program to follow to build muscle — sign up for the Body [re]Building Playbook. On day 3 of the email course, you’ll get a downloadable Google sheet with proven workout templates that tell you exactly what to do — whether you’re training 3, 4, or 5 days per week.

Priority 2. Protein Intake

A close second priority is sufficient protein intake. If you train hard, but don’t eat any protein, it will make it a lot tougher to build more muscle.

While protein is heavily focused on today for muscle building, there’s a reason it comes in second.

You can eat all the protein you want, but if you’re not training hard enough, you’re not going to build much muscle.

I’m glad eating more protein is getting pushed in mainstream health and fitness advice. But without the training stimulus, you’re missing out on muscle building potential.

Aim for 0.7-1.0 g of protein per lb of bodyweight.

Priority 3. Calorie Support

Calories matter — but maybe not as much as some people lead you to believe.

An ideal muscle building environment would include a 10-25% calorie surplus above your maintenance calories.
If you have a lot of fat to lose, haven’t trained in a while — or if you really nail the first 2 things listed above — it’s possible to build muscle even when maintaining or losing fat.
If you’ve been training for a long time, and you are closer to your muscle building potential — eating enough calories will be much more important.

Whether you’re starting out, or you’ve been training for a long time, this isn’t an excuse to eat whatever you want.

This might (or might not) actually lead to more muscle, and will almost certainly lead to more fat gain (that you’ll have to spend more time/energy on cutting in the future).

While there are some benefits to getting your carbs and fats dialed in, this doesn’t matter for 95-99% of people reading this.

Get your calories right (and the first 2 things listed above) and you’re already over 80% of the way to your dream physique.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive on nutritional principles that matter most for fat loss or muscle building, sign up for my free Body [re]Building email course.

Build Muscle Consistently, Not Perfectly

Nail those things.

Month over month, year over year.

And block out the rest. Everything else is just noise until you get those things right.

That doesn’t mean everything else is worthless — but until you nail those first 3 — it doesn’t matter all that much.

If you’re consistently hitting those 3 things (not just for a few weeks, but for a few years), then you can start worrying about the smaller details that bring smaller improvements.

If you want a deep dive into all of the x’s and o’s to transform your body, go sign up for day 1 of my free email course: The Body [re]Building Playbook.