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

by Michael Matthews

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.

Progressive overload is the primary driver of muscle growth, not fatigue or pump. • Working primarily with 80 to 85 percent of your 1RM optimizes strength gains and muscle growth. • Recovery time is just as important as training time, and studies have shown it takes the body two to seven days to fully repair muscles subjected to weight training.

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. • Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. • If you store just as much fat as you burn every day, 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. • Doing a bunch of cardio isn’t enough to get lean. You simply can’t outexercise a poor diet. • The best diet is the one you can follow. This is why a flexible approach to dieting is the only one that works in the long run. • The key to preserving strength and thereby muscle while losing weight is to lift heavy weights. • 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.