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

by Michael Matthews

You don’t need supplements to build a great physique. You don’t need to constantly change up your workout routine to “confuse” your muscles. You don’t need to “eat clean” to get and stay lean. You don’t need to stop eating carbs and sugars to lose weight. You don’t need to eat small meals every few hours to “boost your metabolism.” You don’t need to grind out hours and hours of boring cardio every week to get six-pack abs. You don’t need to be in the gym hours per day and sacrifice your relationships with your friends and loved ones.

You don’t need to starve yourself with very-low-calorie diets to lose stubborn belly and lower-back fat and keep it off. In fact, this is how you slow your metabolism down and almost guarantee that you’ll regain everything you lose. You don’t need to obsess over “clean eating” to get and stay lean, defined, and energized, and you don’t have to completely abstain from carbs or the “cheat” foods you love most. You don’t need to constantly change up your workout routine to get jacked. All you’ll really accomplish with “muscle confusion” is, well, mental confusion. You don’t need to toil away in the gym for a couple of hours per day doing tons of exercises and sets. As a matter of fact, this is a great way to stunt your gains and get nowhere. You don’t need to grind out hours and hours of boring cardio every week to get a tight, defined core. (How many flabby treadmillers have you seen over the years?) You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on worthless supplements, “cleanses,” or fat loss pills. Supplements don’t build great biceps and bodies, and most don’t do anything but drain your bank account.

Eat incorrectly, and you’ll be overweight no matter how much cardio you do. Eat incorrectly, and you’ll be weak and “shapeless” no matter how much you struggle with resistance training. Eat correctly, however, and you can unlock everything that exercise has to offer, including rapid muscle gain and fat loss, and effortless weight maintenance. You probably know that though. In fact, you might be dreading the inevitable “diet” talk, and for good reason. Nobody wants to be told to starve themselves, give up all the foods they like, or follow strange, complicated, or downright annoying eating regimens. Well, I have good news: you can rest easy because when I say “eating correctly,” I mean something very different from what you probably expect. As you’ll soon learn, you can actually enjoy “being on a diet.”

The next time you hear someone declare that “calories in versus calories out is obsolete,” ask them this simple question: What is a calorie? Dollars to doughnuts your challenge will be met with an empty stare or foolish burbling, because they don’t have a clue what the word means, let alone what “calories in versus calories out” really means or how that metabolic process could possibly work.

How can you possibly gain a full and proper understanding of a subject when you don’t understand the most basic words used to discuss its most important concepts? That’s why learning the precise meanings of key words is the first major hurdle you have to clear when you’re trying to learn something new if you’re going to have any hope of gaining a deep and practical understanding of it.

the humble dictionary is an unsung hero of culture and civilization. It forms the intellectual bedrock upon which all ideas are formed and disseminated.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Don’t underestimate the destructive power of misunderstanding the basics of something you’re trying to learn and apply. It alone can be the difference between success and failure.

Gram A gram is a unit of weight in the metric system. One pound is about 454 grams. Kilogram A kilogram is a unit of weight in the metric system equal to 1,000 grams, or 2.2 pounds.

A calorie is the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. This is also called a kilocalorie or large calorie, and is used to represent the energy value of food.

A carbohydrate is a molecule composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen that can be broken down in the body to release energy.

Metabolism is the series of physical and chemical processes that occur in an organism in order to maintain life. Metabolism involves the production of energy as well as the creation, maintenance, and destruction of cells and tissues.

Anabolism is a metabolic process in an organism by which energy is used to make more complex substances (such as tissue) from simpler ones (such as proteins). This is also known as constructive metabolism.

The glycemic index (GI) is a numeric system that ranks how quickly the body converts various foods into glucose. Foods are ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 depending on how they affect blood sugar levels once eaten. A GI rating of 55 and under is considered low on the index, while a rating of 56 to 69 is medium, and a rating of 70 or above is high. Simple carbohydrates are converted into glucose quickly and thus have high GI ratings. For example, sucrose’s rating is 65, white bread’s is 71, white rice’s is 89, and white potato’s is 82. Complex carbohydrates are converted into glucose more slowly and thus have lower GI ratings. For example, apples’ rating is 39, black beans’ is 30, peanuts’ is 7, and whole-grain pasta’s is 42.

as far as your body weight is concerned, how much you eat is far more important than what you eat.

The key to understanding how this works—and to understanding what really drives weight loss and gain—is energy balance, which is the relationship between energy intake (calories eaten) and output (calories burned). Various foods contain varying numbers of calories. For example, nuts are very energy dense, containing about 6.5 calories per gram, on average. Celery, on the other hand, contains very little stored energy, with just 0.15 calories per gram. If you add up the calories of all the food you eat in a day and then compare that number to how many calories you burn in the same period, you’d notice one of three things: You ate more calories than you burned. (Do this often enough and you’ll gain weight.) You ate fewer calories than you burned. (Do this often enough and you’ll lose weight.) You ate more or less the same number of calories as you burned. (Do this often enough and you’ll maintain your weight.)

So, the bottom line is: A century of metabolic research has proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that energy balance is the basic mechanism that regulates weight gain and loss.5 All that evidence, however, doesn’t mean you have to count calories to lose weight, but it does mean you have to understand how calorie intake and expenditure influences your body weight and then regulate your intake according to your goals.

The formula for a fad diet is simple: “It’s not your fault you’re overweight and unhealthy.” “Jerks keep saying it’s because you eat too much junk and food in general and move too little, but they’re wrong. You’re not lazy and undisciplined. You’re a victim of bad science and worse food.” “New research shows you what to blame.” “And we’ve strung it up like a pinata for you to bludgeon into ribbons. Strike it down with all your hatred and your journey to the dark . . . er, light . . . side will be complete.” “Avoid this thing at all costs and you’ll live happily ever after.” “Celibacy is the only way to escape this bogeyman’s wrath. Renounce it and take charge of your destiny.”

If you consistently consume fewer calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight, regardless of how much carbohydrate or sugar you eat. There’s a corollary here, too: No individual food can make you fatter. Only overeating can. If you consistently consume more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight, even if those calories come from the “healthiest” food on earth. Look around for easy proof of this one. How many people do you know who are overweight despite their obsession with “clean eating”? Well, now you know why.

The number one reason most people “inexplicably” can’t lose weight is they’re eating too much. Seriously. That’s the climax. The big reveal. The way out of the haunted house. The rub, however, is they often don’t realize it. For starters, studies show that most people are really bad at estimating the actual number of calories they eat.12 They underestimate portion sizes, assume foods contain fewer calories than they do, measure intake inaccurately, and, in some cases, simply lie to themselves about how much they’re actually eating.

The worst type of cheat meal is one that is very high in both calories and dietary fat, which is chemically similar to body fat and thus requires very little energy for conversion into body fat (between 0 and 2 percent of the energy it contains).16 Protein and carbohydrate, on the other hand, are chemically dissimilar to body fat, cost quite a bit more energy to process (25 and 7 percent of the energy they contain, respectively), and are rarely converted to body fat under normal conditions.

fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. You create the proper environment (a calorie deficit) through diet and exercise, and your body reduces fat stores all over, with certain areas leaning out faster than others (more on why this occurs later). This is why studies show you can do all the crunches you want, but you’ll never have defined abs until you’ve adequately reduced your body fat levels.

A number of other studies have echoed that finding: if you want to lose fat quickly and not muscle, then you want to include resistance training in your weight loss regimen.35

Weightlifting isn’t a popular way to lose weight because it’s a bad way to lose weight, but it is a fantastic way to speed up fat loss and preserve muscle.

exercise is physical activity done for its own sake—to burn calories or improve energy levels or mood—whereas training is a systematic method of exercising done to achieve a specific, longer-term goal, like increased strength, muscle definition, or athleticism. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exercise (it beats sitting on your keister), but only training can give you the ripped type of physique that most guys really want. Exercise can make you healthier, but it guarantees nothing in the way of fat loss or muscle gain, the two biggest physiological levers you need to know how to work to build the body of your dreams.

Heavy weightlifting produces large amounts of mechanical tension in your muscles. As you’ll soon learn, producing more and more mechanical tension in your muscles over time is the single most effective way to stimulate muscle growth. Heavy weightlifting causes greater activation of muscle fibers. Research shows that this results in a greater effect across a larger percentage of the muscle tissue.

The payoff for weightlifting is also tremendous. It delivers a number of health and fitness benefits that you simply can’t get from other types of sports and exercise. Here’s a short list of what a well-designed weightlifting routine can do for you: Stronger, healthier joints7 More muscle mass8 Better heart health9 Improved brain health10 Greater longevity and quality of life11 More bone density12 Lower risk of fracture13 Faster metabolism14 Improved flexibility

If you’re new to weightlifting or are just getting started again, you shouldn’t have any trouble building muscle and losing fat at the same time. If you have at least six to eight months of heavy weightlifting under your belt and aren’t coming off a long break, you probably can’t do both and will have to optimize for one or the other (muscle gain or fat loss).

You can change up your workout routine every week—heck, every day—and hit a plateau because “change” doesn’t stimulate muscle growth. Progressive overload does, and more so than any other single training factor.19 Progressive overload refers to increasing the amount of tension your muscles produce over time, and the most effective way to do this is by progressively increasing the amount of weight that you’re lifting. In other words, the key to gaining muscle and strength isn’t merely changing the types of stimuli your muscles are exposed to—it’s making your muscles work harder. And this is exactly what you do when you force your muscles to handle heavier and heavier weights. This is why your number one goal as a weightlifter should be to increase your whole-body strength over time,

free weights give you the most muscle-building bang for your buck.

One of the biggest fitness mistakes people make is underestimating the importance of compound exercises. They deserve a lot of your time and effort for several reasons: They train many muscles at once. The more muscles you can effectively train in a given exercise, the more muscle you can gain as a result. This also makes for more time efficiency. One compound exercise can do the work of several isolation exercises. They allow you to lift heavier weights. The best compound exercises put dozens of muscles and multiple joints through large ranges of motion. Consequently, they enable you to move more weight than isolation exercises and thus better progressively overload your muscles. This means faster muscle growth. They significantly raise testosterone and growth hormone levels. The magnitude of postworkout elevations in anabolic hormones is influenced by the total amount of muscle involved in the workout. This is why research shows that compound exercises produce larger increases in both testosterone and growth hormone than isolation exercises.23 These effects don’t influence muscle gain as much as some people would have you believe, but they do have other benefits as well. I attribute much of my success with my physique to the fact that, after learning about the power of compound exercises, I’ve made them 70 to 80 percent of the work I do in the gym.

We recall that progressive overload refers to increasing the amount of tension your muscles produce over time, and that it’s the primary mechanical driver of muscle growth. This sounds simple enough, but how do you actually accomplish it? Most people don’t. Instead, they go through more or less the same motions for weeks and months on end and wonder why they have so little to show for it. You must do three things if you don’t want to be one of these people: Follow a proven progression model. Track your workouts. Adjust your diet and training as needed.

When it comes to improving your body composition (how much muscle and fat you have on your bones), cardio is a double-edged sword. It burns energy and thus contributes to your fat loss efforts, but it can burn up muscle too. This detracts from your ultimate goal of building a lean, powerful physique, because that requires gaining a fair amount of muscle. Furthermore, if you want to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, then you want to limit your cardio for two reasons: In the short term, cardio can interfere with strength and muscle gain by making you more generally fatigued, which makes it harder to progress in your weightlifting workouts.26 In the long term, cardio can interfere with strength and muscle gain by disrupting cell signaling related to muscle growth.27 That doesn’t mean you should completely shun cardio, though. It does have significant health benefits—some of which you don’t get from resistance training—and it can help you burn more energy, which means faster fat loss and easier weight maintenance.

For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer. —ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

energy balance alone dictates your body weight. Eat more energy than you burn for long enough, and you’ll gain weight. Eat less, and you’ll lose weight. Period.

Insulin tells your body whether it has food to burn or must rely on fat for energy.

Water retention is another issue that can throw many dieters for a loop. When you restrict your calories to lose fat, especially when you do it aggressively, your body tends to retain more water. The reason for this is that calorie restriction increases production of the “stress hormone” cortisol, which in turn increases fluid retention.

If you want to lose fat and not muscle, or gain muscle and not fat, then you need to pay close attention to both your energy and macronutrient balances. In this context, a calorie is no longer a calorie because a calorie of protein does very different things in your body than a calorie of carbohydrate or dietary fat.

Study after study has already confirmed that high-protein dieting is superior to low-protein dieting in just about every meaningful way.10 Specifically, research shows that people who eat more protein: Lose fat faster11 Gain more muscle12 Burn more calories13 Experience less hunger14 Have stronger bones15 Generally enjoy better moods16 Protein intake is even more important when you exercise regularly because this increases your body’s demand for protein.

There’s simply no denying that eating too much added sugar can harm our health and that reducing intake is generally a good idea. That doesn’t mean we need to reduce or limit our consumption of all forms of carbohydrate, however. In fact, if you’re healthy and physically active, particularly if you lift weights regularly, chances are that you’ll do better with more carbs in your diet, not less.

Never cease chiseling your own statue. —PLOTINUS

there are three primary “triggers” or “pathways” for muscle growth:1 Mechanical tension Muscle damage Cellular fatigue

Mechanical tension refers to the amount of force produced in muscle fibers. When you lift weights, you produce two types of mechanical tension in your muscles: “passive” and “active” tension. Passive tension occurs when your muscles are stretching, and active tension occurs when they’re contracting. Muscle damage refers to microscopic damage caused to the muscle fibers by high levels of tension. This damage requires repair, and if the body is provided with proper nutrition and rest, it’ll make the muscle fibers larger and stronger to better deal with future bouts of tension.

Cellular fatigue refers to a host of chemical changes that occur inside and outside muscle fibers when they contract repeatedly. When you repeat the same movement over and over again to the point of near failure, this causes high amounts of cellular fatigue.

mechanical tension is the most important of these three pathways for muscle growth.2 This has been confirmed in a number of other studies as well.3 In other words, mechanical tension produces a stronger muscle-building stimulus than muscle damage and cellular fatigue.

Heavy, lower-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle strength and results in higher amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but less cellular fatigue. Lighter, higher-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle endurance and results in lower amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but more cellular fatigue.

to get stronger, and especially on key whole-body exercises like the squat, deadlift, and bench press. The more weight you can push, pull, and squat, the more muscle definition you’re going to have. That isn’t to say that lighter weights and other training methods have no place in your workout routine, but if your goal is to gain muscle as quickly as possible, the best way to do this is to gain strength as quickly as possible.

The discipline of desire is the background of character. —JOHN LOCKE

they give little attention to the inner game, which is arguably more important, because simply knowing what to do is never enough. You then have to be able to actually do it, and keep doing it every day, week, month, and year. If you ask me, mastering the outer game of fitness is simple and straightforward. Half of it is knowing how to press the right physiological buttons to achieve your intended results, and the other half is just showing up every day and rolling up your sleeves. Mastering the inner game can be much trickier, however. It’s what sets the “fitness elite” apart from everyone else. Building and maintaining an outstanding physique requires a disciplined, orderly approach to not just your diet and exercise, but your life in general.

Motivation and discipline are the biggest inner-game barriers, of course. Every week, guys and gals leap into fitness programs with full tanks of resolve and energy, but it doesn’t take long for their enthusiasm to flag.