Tips on gaining mass

You have to actually count your calories a day and up it.

I'm following the 5x5 workout that I found on bodybuilding.com and I mix in some circuit workouts for shoulders, abs, and arms. I tried counting what I ate for a while (I'd aim for 3,000 calories/day) and was worried it was giving me the wrong kind of weight.

When I packed in the most mass during DC training, I drank a gallon of whole milk a day. That's basically 2000 calories then are normally. I had to make chocolate milk because for how much I love milk, it gets tiresome.

read this thread and pick a program. I suggest Greyskull LP, 531 BBB or madcow Gainz thread

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I mix in some circuit workouts for shoulders, abs, and arms

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Stop doing a circuit if you are trying to gain mass.

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I tried counting what I ate for a while (I'd aim for 3,000 calories/day) and was worried it was giving me the wrong kind of weight.

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You are going to gain some fat when gaining mass. There are little things you can do to ensure its mostly muscle you are gaining, like Intermittent fasting, morning fasted walks, largest meal after lifting etc. But YOU WILL STILL GAIN SOME FAT.

I suggest you read This to make sure you don't turn yourself into a fat frick.

yea the super squats(20 rep squat program) is another great program. But main thing he needs to eat.

You need volume to grow bigger. 5x5 is usually trending towards strength.

I posted this on Nugget's bulk thread.

From Dave Tate:

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There was a time at the Old Westside gym where I couldn’t gain weight to save my fricking life.

There was this dude who trained there who could just put on weight like fricking magic. He’d go from 198 to 308 and then to 275 and back down to 198. And he was never fat. It was amazing.

I finally asked him one day how he did it.

“You mean I never told you the secret to gaining weight? Come outside and I’ll fill you in.”

Now remember, we’re at Westside Barbell. And this guy wants to go outside to talk so no one else can hear. Think about that for a minute. What the hell is he going to tell me? This must be some serious shite if we have to go outside, I thought.

So we get outside and he starts talking.

“For breakfast you need to eat four of those breakfast sandwiches from McDonalds. I don’t care which ones you get, but make sure to get four. Order four hash browns, too. Now grab two packs of mayonnaise and put them on the hash browns and then slip them into the sandwiches. Squish that shite down and eat. That’s your breakfast.”

At this point I’m thinking this guy is nuts. But he’s completely serious.

“For lunch you’re gonna eat Chinese food. Now I don’t want you eating that crappy stuff. You wanna get the stuff with MSG. None of that non-MSG bullshite. I don’t care what you eat but you have to sit down and eat for at least 45 minutes straight. You can’t let go of the fork. Eat until your eyes swell up and become slits and you start to look like the woman behind the counter.”

“For dinner you’re gonna order an extra-large pizza with everything on it. Literally everything. If you don’t like sardines, don’t put ’em on, but anything else that you like you have to load it on there. After you pay the delivery guy, I want you to take the pie to your coffee table, open that fricker up, and grab a bottle of oil. It can be olive oil, canola oil, whatever. Anything but motor oil. And I want you to pour that shite over the pie until half of the bottle is gone. Just soak the shite out of it.”

“Now before you lay into it, I want you to sit on your couch and just stare at that fricker. I want you to understand that that pizza right there is keeping you from your goals.”

This guy is in a zen-like state when he’s talking about this.

“Now you’re on the clock,” he continues. “After 20 minutes your brain is going to tell you you’re full. Don’t listen to that shite. You have to try and eat as much of the pizza as you can before that 20-minute mark. Double up pieces if you have to. I’m telling you now, you’re going to get three or four pieces in and you’re gonna want to quit. You fricking can’t quit. You have to sit on that couch until every piece is done.

And if you can’t finish it, don’t you ever come back to me and tell me you can’t gain weight. ’Cause I’m gonna tell you that you don’t give a frick about getting bigger and you don’t care how much you lift!”

Did I do it? Hell yeah. Started the next day and did it for two months. Went from 260 pounds to 297 pounds. And I didn’t get much fatter. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, though

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You should look into trying the 10x10 program aka GVT. Or getting into pyramids and drop sets to increase volume.

Get is a good program for shocking the muscles but the whole not enough reps thing people are saying in this thread is bs. You don't need volume to pack on muscle.

In general when in a nitrogen positive state( plentiful protein) and in a caloric surplus
Gains in strength= gains in mass.

You don't need a ton of volume. In fact the best program pretty much in the world for gaining mass is doggcrapp training which is extremely low volume but extreme high intensity.

Using madcow many Olympic lifters have trouble not moving up weight classes and tend to have to cut calories drastically to keep from doing so. In a caloric surplus you pack on muscle very fast.

Same with starting strength. Hell on smovlov many guys bd up only doing the squats but still end up packing on mass.

You just need to tear down the muscle enough to cause it to repair itself to protect itself. All the crazy volume does is cut into cns recovery while causing mild amounts of sacroplasmic hypertrophy which is temporary growth. We are looking for more miofibillar hypertrophy which is essentially caused by gains in strength.

Pump/volume training is fine as a small meso cycle but it should not make up the majority of a natural lifters programming.