Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body

by Michael Matthews

GLUCOSE: Glucose is a sugar that is an important energy source in living things. Carbohydrates are broken down in the body into glucose, which is the main source of fuel for all cells. It doesn’t matter whether you eat lettuce or candy; both end up as glucose in the body. The only difference is that the lettuce takes a lot longer to break down into glucose than the sugary candy.

SIMPLE CARBOHYDRATE: A simple carbohydrate is a form of carbohydrate that usually tastes sweet and that the body can break down quickly into glucose. Examples of simple carbohydrates are the fructose found in fruit, the lactose found in dairy, and the sucrose added to many foods for sweetness.

PROCESSED: To process food means to use chemicals or machines to change or preserve it. Many methods of processing food destroy some or most of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that it naturally contains, and often involves the addition of chemicals that can be harmful to the body. Heavily processed foods often have fewer nutrients but more calories than their less processed counterparts.

ORGANIC: Organic food is free of artificial food additives and often has been raised and made with fewer artificial methods, materials, and conditions, such as chemical ripening, food irradiation, and genetically modified ingredients. Pesticides are allowed as long as they aren’t synthetic. To be certified organic, food products must be grown and manufactured in a manner that adheres to standards set by the governments of the countries they are sold in.

ALL-NATURAL: All-natural foods are often assumed to be foods that are minimally processed or that do not contain any food additives such as hormones, antibiotics, sweeteners, food colors, or flavorings. That said, while the “all-natural” label implies minimal processing and additives, th...

BODY MASS INDEX (BMI): The BMI is a scale used for estimating how much people should weigh depending on their height. The BMI is meant to give a snapshot of the health of large groups of people or whole populations, but when it’s used to evaluate an individual, it’s often inaccurate because of different body types, like having a thin frame, having a lot of muscle tissue, or being very tall.

The amount of fat your body needs to accomplish basic body functions for living is about 3 to 5 percent body fat in men and 8 to 12 percent in women.

When your muscles are burning, what you’re feeling is a buildup of lactic acid, which continues to accumulate as you contract your muscles again and again. While lactic acid triggers what’s known as the “anabolic cascade,” which is a cocktail of growth-inducing hormones, repeatedly elevating lactic acid levels higher and higher doesn’t mean you build more and more muscle over time. Thus, for yet another reason, when guys spend a couple of hours in the gym pounding away with drop sets, burnout sets, supersets, and so forth, they’re working very hard for little payoff. If pump and burn don’t drive muscle growth, what does? Well, the short answer is progressive overload, which we’ll go over in more detail soon.

There is research that proves the opposite: free weights are indeed more effective at building muscle and strength than machines. A good example is a study conducted by researchers from the University of Saskatchewan, which demonstrated that the free weight squat resulted in 43 percent more leg muscle activation than the Smith machine squat.

The takeaway isn’t that you shouldn’t directly train your arms, but rather that by overloading your entire body, you cause everything to grow.

If you want to build an impressive physique, you’re going to have to work hard in the gym. You’re going to have to move weights that are just downright intimidating. You’re going to have to dig deep to finish that last set. You’re going to deal with muscle soreness and other aches. But you’re going to come to love it. You’re going to learn that these hardships are just part of the game—the “dues” you have to pay to meet your goals. You’re going to look forward to this daily hour of intense, uncomfortable, all-out physical exertion because you know that every workout you finish makes you a little bit stronger, both physically and mentally, and gets you a little bit closer to the “endgame.”

Well, many guys get it all wrong: they overtrain and then don’t eat enough calories or protein in particular (or eat way more food than they should) and eat too much non-nutritious food and wonder why they can’t get their bodies to change the way they want. You see, if you don’t eat enough calories and get enough protein every day, you simply don’t grow. It doesn’t matter how hard you lift; if you don’t eat enough, you won’t gain any muscle to speak of. On the other hand, if you eat enough protein but too many calories every day, you can gain muscle, but it will be hidden underneath an ugly sheath of unnecessary fat. If you don’t eat enough nutritious foods, you can change your body composition, but eventually you’ll develop vitamin and mineral deficiencies that impair both your health and performance, which in turn will limit your gains over time. When you know how to eat properly, however, you can gain eye-popping amounts of muscle while staying lean, and you can lose layers of fat while maintaining or even increasing your total muscle mass.

• If you chronically undereat, you won’t grow any muscle to speak of. If you chronically overeat, you will build muscle but will gain too much body fat.

What drives muscle growth, then? The answer is known as progressive tension overload, which means progressively increasing tension levels in the muscle fibers over time. That is, lifting progressively heavier and heavier weights.

The conclusion of this research is simple: the best way to build muscle and strength is to focus on heavy weightlifting and increase the weight lifted over time.

Studies have shown that, depending on the intensity of your training and your level of fitness, it takes the body two to seven days to fully repair muscles subjected to weight training.5 Considering the volume and intensity of the Bigger Leaner Stronger program, we can safely assume full muscle recovery is going to take four to six days.

lift hard and heavy, get sufficient rest, and feed your body correctly.

Working primarily with 80 to 85 percent of your 1RM optimizes strength gains and muscle growth.

Here’s the truth, though: whether you want to call it “counting” calories, meal planning, or something else, to effectively lose fat, you have to regulate your food intake.

According to the laws of physics underlying this principle, if you give your body a bit more energy than it burns every day, a portion of the excess energy is stored as body fat, and thus you gain weight slowly. If you give your body a bit less energy than it burns every day, it will tap into fat stores to get the additional energy it needs, leaving you a bit lighter.

Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from the food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. Here’s a simple graph that depicts this cycle: The lighter portions are the periods where your body has excess energy because you ate. The darker portions are the periods when the body has no energy left from food and thus has to burn fat to stay alive. As you can see, we burn quite a bit of fat when we sleep. If the lighter and darker portions balance out every day—if you store just as much fat as you burn—your weight stays the same. If you store more fat than you burn (by overeating), you get fatter. And if you burn more fat than you store, you get leaner.

Simply put, you can’t get fatter unless you feed your body more energy than it burns, and you can’t get leaner unless you feed it less energy than it burns.

So the real problem isn’t counting calories but failing to make and follow a meal plan that allows you to eat foods you like while ensuring that you burn more fat than you store over time. Sure, it’s easier to just heat up a big plate of leftovers or grab some fast food for lunch and carry on with your day, but that convenience comes with a price: little or no weight loss.

Cardio can enhance fat loss in two ways—burning calories and speeding up your metabolic rate—but that’s it.

And since I’ve brought it up, let’s talk briefly about the “metabolic rate.” Your body burns a certain number of calories regardless of any physical activity, and this is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) for a day would be your BMR plus the energy expended during any physical activities.

Cardio, especially a variety I recommend called high-intensity interval cardio (HIIT), can increase your basal metabolic rate through what’s known as the “afterburn effect.”

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and have unwittingly eaten 600 calories more than your body has burned for the day. You go jogging for 30 minutes at night, which burns about 300 calories, with maybe another hundred calories burned from the “afterburn” effect. You’re still 200 calories over your expenditure, and that means no reduction in total fat stores for the day—and maybe even an increase. You could continue like this for years and never get lean; instead, you could slowly get fatter. This is the most common reason why people simply “can’t lose weight no matter what they do.”

While not all “latest and greatest” diets are bad (Paleo is unnecessarily restrictive but quite healthy, for example), the sheer abundance of fad diets being touted by ripped models and actors is confusing people as to what the “right way” to lose weight is (and understandably so).

The key to preserving strength and muscle while losing weight is to lift heavy weights. The goal is to continue progressively overloading your muscles, which ensures protein synthesis rates remain elevated enough to prevent muscle loss.

The reality is that training the muscles of a certain area of your body burns calories and can result in muscle growth, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.8

You see, fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. You create the proper internal weight loss environment (a calorie deficit), and your body reduces fat stores all over the body, with certain areas reducing faster than others.

A woman who has built an appreciable amount of muscle (one or more years of weightlifting) will want to stay at or under 20 percent body fat to maintain the “athletic” look of toned arms, a tight stomach, shapely legs, a big butt, etc. For us guys, we need to stay at or under 10 percent for the look we’re usually after: fully visible abs, small waist, vascularity, “dense”-looking muscles, etc.

The principle of energy balance underlies all weight loss and gain. The types of foods you eat have little to do with losing or gaining weight. • What you eat does matter in terms of body composition, however. If you want to lose fat and not muscle, a calorie isn’t a calorie.

• The key to preserving strength and thereby muscle while losing weight is to lift heavy weights.

This genetic programming is still in us. When you restrict your calories for fat-loss purposes, your body reduces its total fat stores to stay alive, but it also slows down its basal metabolic rate to conserve energy.1 If you restrict your calories too severely or for too long, this metabolic downregulation, or “metabolic adaptation,” as it’s often called, can become quite severe, and the basal metabolic rate can plunge to surprisingly low levels.2 This mechanism is why “calorie counting” seems to not work for some people. It has nothing to do with hormone problems or eating too many carbs or anything other than the fact that the energy out part of the equation is impaired. Their bodies aren’t burning nearly as much energy as they should be.

This is only the beginning of the problems with the “crash” approach to dieting, however, that has you enduring severe calorie deficits for extended periods: • You lose a lot of muscle, which not only leads to the dreaded “skinny fat” look, but it also impairs bone health and increases the overall risk of disease.3 • Your testosterone levels plummet and cortisol levels skyrocket, which not only makes you feel horrible but also accelerates muscle loss.4 • Your energy levels take a nosedive, you struggle with intense food cravings every day, and you become mentally clouded and even depressed.5

Of course, Haub doesn’t recommend this diet, but he did it to prove a point. When it comes to fat loss, calories are king.

As you also know, healthy fat loss isn’t as simple as drastically cutting your calories and starving yourself. Eventually the muscle loss, metabolic slowdown, and other undesirable effects become too much. Finally, after you can’t take the misery anymore, you’ll likely go in the other direction, dramatically increasing calorie intake by bingeing and gorging on everything in sight for days or weeks, and wind up back where you began.

If you eat too little protein while restricting calories for weight loss, you’ll lose more muscle than you would if you had eaten an adequate amount.9 If you eat too few carbohydrates while in a calorie deficit, your training will suffer, your muscle repair will be impaired, and your hormone profile will become more catabolic.10 If you eat too little dietary fat, you can experience a significant drop-off in testosterone levels and other undesirable effects.

Let’s now talk about a bogeyman that scares dieters everywhere: late-night eating. Somehow, many people believe that eating too much food later in the day will accelerate fat storage, so they avoid it all costs, preferring to go hungry for hours on end over shifting meals around to better suit their hunger patterns. Well, as you now know, fat loss and gain depend wholly on energy balance and have nothing to do with meal timing. This means you get to eat as late as you want. This isn’t just theory, either—it’s been proven in multiple scientific studies.

While we’re on the subject of late eating, I recommend that you eat 30 to 40 grams of a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein (either from a powder or from a whole-food source like low-fat cottage cheese) thirty minutes before going to bed, as research has shown that this improves muscle recovery due to the increased availability of amino acids for repair while you sleep.

Now, if you’re wondering where to start—with more or fewer meals per day—I recommend that you eat several smaller meals per day (four to six meals per day works well). In my experience coaching thousands of people, most are like me and prefer the experience of eating more small meals as opposed to fewer large ones. I personally don’t like eating between 800 and 1,000 calories to then feel stuffed for several hours. I much prefer a 400-calorie meal that leaves me satisfied for a few hours, followed by another smaller meal of different food. If you already know that you don’t want to or can’t eat that frequently, then don’t sweat it. Do whatever will work best for you.

Cardio is negotiable. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy or bad about not including it in your weight-loss regimen, but I’ll tell you this: you will only get so far with diet and resistance training alone. If you’re planning on getting below 10 percent body fat, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to need to include some cardio in your routine to get there. Fortunately, however, you won’t have to do nearly as much as most people think.

A calorie is not a calorie when it comes to optimizing body composition. If you want your weight-loss regimen to be maximally effective, you want to eat enough protein and carbohydrate so as to preserve muscle and performance capacity and enough dietary fat so as to maintain general health.

Eating a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein (either from a powder or from a whole-food source like low-fat cottage cheese) 30 minutes before going to bed improves muscle recovery.

The addition of resistance training to a calorie deficit preserves muscle and BMR, and it provides a substantial “afterburn” effect. • The addition of cardiovascular training burns more energy and thus more fat.

Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but nonetheless doing it like you love it. — MIKE TYSON

Once you catch sight of that cheeseburger, a chemical called dopamine gushes through your brain. All of a sudden, all that matters in life in that greasy, delicious pile of meat, cheese, and bun. The dopamine tells your brain that you must consume that sandwich now, no matter the cost, or suffer the ghastly consequences.4

You see, once you become aware of an opportunity to score a reward, your brain squirts out dopamine to tell us that this indeed is the droid we’re looking for. It plays up the sweet song of immediate gratification and plays down any chatter about long-term consequences.6

Your brain doesn’t give a damn about the bigger picture. It cares nothing about whether you’re going to be happy 30 pounds heavier or a thousand dollars poorer. Its job is to identify promises of pleasure and raise red flags, even if pursuing them will entail risky, chaotic behavior and cause more problems than they’re worth.