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

by Michael Matthews

My true love is researching and writing, so I’ll always be working on another book, my website (www.muscleforlife.com), and whatever other types of literary adventures come my way.

mineral is a substance that contains no carbon (whereas vitamins do) and that forms naturally in the earth.

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.

Inherent shortcomings of BMI.

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.

Researchers also found that working in the 4- to 6-rep range (80 percent of one-rep max, or 1RM) is most effective for those who train regularly.

Packing on slabs of rock-solid lean mass is, in essence, just a matter of following these three laws religiously: lift hard and heavy, get sufficient rest, and feed your body correctly.

“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.

In terms of 24-hour energy expenditure, they found no difference between nibbling and gorging. Small meals caused small, short metabolic boosts, and large meals caused larger, longer boosts. By the end of each day, they balanced out in terms of total calories burned.

study conducted by scientists at the University of Missouri with 27 overweight/obese men found that after 12 weeks of dieting to lose weight, increasing protein intake improved appetite control, but meal frequency (three vs. six meals per day) had no effect.

For example, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Chieti in Italy found that calorie intake in the morning or evening didn’t affect weight loss or body composition parameters.

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.

And what about those with higher levels of willpower? Well, they do better in school, earn more money, make better leaders, and are happier, healthier, and less stressed.2

There are two other aspects to willpower, though: “I will” and “I want.”

We don’t realize, however, that the stress we feel isn’t caused by not having the apple pie, pair of shoes, or Candy Crush trophy—it’s caused by the desire itself. It’s dopamine’s emotional tool for making sure we obey its commands.

Research shows that people who are less stressed—whose heart rate has a desirable amount of variability—display remarkably better self-control than those with less variability.

the stresses of the “daily grind” is to simply relax. If you want to see this in action, the next time you face a willpower challenge, deliberately slow your breathing down to about 10 to 15 seconds per breath, or four to six breaths per minute. An easy way to do this is to exhale through your mouth slowly and fully with your lips pursed as if you were blowing lightly through a straw.

Research shows that just thinking about the future—not even the rewards, per se—can strengthen willpower. Thus, by imagining the future, doing what you need to do or refraining from doing what you shouldn’t do, you can increase the likelihood of your following through.

FutureMe.org offers a cool little tool for this that allows you to write an e-mail to yourself and choose a future date on which it will be delivered.

Research shows that a willingness to think thoughts and feel feelings without having to act on them is an effective method of dealing with a wide variety of challenges, such as mood disorders, food cravings, and addiction.56 On the other hand, trying to suppress negative thoughts and feelings, like self-criticism, worries, sadness, or cravings, can lead to greater feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, depression, and even overeating.57

A simple rule of thumb for putting this into use is to wait 10 minutes before acting on a craving or other impulsive urge to do something you know you shouldn’t. This not only gives you time to pause and reflect on the matter, but it also takes away the power of immediate gratification and future discounting. By pushing the reward just 10 minutes into the future, you can take away its most effective weapon against your willpower.

Those with higher levels of willpower? Well, they do better in school, earn more money, make better leaders, and are happier, healthier, and less stressed. They have better social and romantic relationships (they can keep their mouths shut), and they even live longer.

Now, there are seven aspects of nutrition that are of primary concern when trying to build muscle and lose fat and stay healthy. They are calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats, water, vitamins and minerals, and fiber.

As you get leaner, keeping your protein intake high becomes very important. If it drops too low (below 1 gram per pound of body weight, in my experience), the loss of strength and muscle is noticeably accelerated.

As you can imagine, not all protein is metabolized in the same way. Different proteins digest at different speeds, and some are better used by the body than others. For example, beef protein is digested quickly, and 70 to 80 percent of what’s eaten is used by the body.6 On the other hand, the protein found in eggs is digested much more slowly than beef, but the body uses it even more efficiently.

The general rule of protein intake is that you want to stick to proteins that are easily digested and that supply plentiful amounts of the essential amino acids required by the body. To determine what these proteins are, we can turn to the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAA) of various types of protein, which assigns ratings on a scale from 0 to 1 to indicate the overall quality of the food (with 0 being the worst and 1 being the best possible score).

On the other hand, if you exercise regularly and aren’t overweight, your body can deal with simple carbohydrates just fine. You’re not going to get diabetes or ruin your heart by having a bit of sucrose every day.

The glycemic index (GI) is a numeric system that ranks how quickly the body converts carbohydrates into glucose. Carbs are ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 depending on how they affect blood sugar levels once eaten.

So, to repeat, my recommendation is simple: get the majority of your daily carbohydrates from nutritious, unprocessed foods, which will incidentally be lower on the GI, but don’t be afraid to include a few higher-GI foods that you like.

Remember that the overriding factor in weight loss or gain is energy balance. No hormone can magically produce the surplus of energy required to “fill up” fat cells and make our waistlines grow. Only you can provide this by regularly feeding your body more energy than it burns.

The problem is the low-carb diets in these studies invariably contained more protein than the low-fat diets.

In fact, better designed and executed studies prove the opposite: that when protein intake is high, low-carb dieting offers no special weight loss benefits.

Why is protein intake so important when restricting our calories for fat loss? You already know the answer: because it’s vital for preserving lean mass, both with sedentary people and especially with athletes.

As you can see, when you want to lose fat, your number-one goal is to preserve lean mass, and eating an adequate amount of protein every day is vital to achieve this goal.

So long as you maintain a proper calorie deficit and keep your protein intake high, you’re going to maximize fat loss while preserving as much lean mass as possible. Going low-carb as well won’t help you lose more weight.

Any food that contains hydrogenated oil or partially hydrogenated oil contains trans fats.

Instead, I much prefer getting my pre-workout carbohydrates from food. My favorite sources are rice milk (tastes great with whey protein!) and bananas, but other popular nutritious choices are instant oatmeal, dates and figs, melon, white potato, white rice, raisins, and sweet potato.

In terms of numbers and timing, I recommend eating 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates 30 minutes before you train to feel a noticeable improvement in your performance.

That’s it for pre-workout nutrition: 30 to 40 grams of protein (and whey is best), and 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrate 30 minutes before training is all you need.

Specifically, we’re going to learn how to create three types of meal plans: one for “cutting,” one for “bulking,” and one for “maintaining.”

You should make these lists in a spreadsheet on your computer with separate sheets for each meal type and then columns for food, amount, protein, carbohydrate, fat, and calories, like this: Build these lists out using www.calorieking.com or caloriecount.about.com to look up the various foods you like.

And that’s why the Bigger Leaner Stronger program has a simple method of progression: once you hit 6 reps for one set, you add weight for your next set. The standard increase is a total of 10 pounds: 5 pounds added to either side of the barbell, or a 5-pound increase in each dumbbell.

The results: after six weeks of training, the subjects doing the intervals had lost significantly more body fat. Yes, four to six 30-second sprints burn more fat than 60 minutes of incline treadmill walking.

Therefore, I recommend that you separate your weightlifting and cardio sessions by at least a few hours if at all possible.

Out of the hundreds and hundreds of exercises you could possibly do, four reign supreme. If you neglect them like I did when I started lifting, you’re guaranteed to never reach your genetic potential in terms of size, strength, and performance. These exercises are the squat, deadlift, bench press, and military press, and their timeless power has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt by over a century of bodybuilders, strongmen, and athletes.

Generally speaking, you don’t need to perform more warm-up sets in a workout beyond the four laid out above. For instance, if you start your workout with the flat bench press and then move to the incline press, you don’t have to do a new round of warm-up sets.

Sir William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, was an ingenious physicist and engineer, and he said that when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it, but when you can’t, your knowledge is lacking.

You can use an app such as the…ahem…completely awesome one I’m developing called Stacked (www.getstackedapp.com).

To protect yourself as a consumer, always check ingredient lists, serving sizes, and amounts of protein per serving before buying protein powder.

If a product has maltodextrin (a filler) or any other ingredient listed before the protein powder itself, don’t buy it. That means there’s more maltodextrin, creatine, or other fillers in it than protein powder.

A high-quality whey protein is easy to spot: whey concentrate, isolate, or hydrolysate will be listed as the first ingredient(s) and the scoop size will be relatively close to the amount of protein per scoop.