Transcription
step two is finished and you're recovered and adapted. don't worry, we'll figure out how you can tell when you are. you hit step one again and over and over and over. we do this and like little steps up a huge Chinese temple woud on mountain or some shit like that. but as you climb the temple steps, you get more and more jacked, which I guess would make the climbing more difficult cuz you finish the steps, you're like 380 with 0% body.
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at hey folks, Dr. Mike here for Renaissance periodization, and I want to talk to you about how muscle growth works. works in a way that's pretty simple so that we can get an understanding for the process, not the crazy chemistry and physiology. we might dive into that eventually if you guys are interested, but kind of the grand scheme. that if you know this grand scheme of how muscle growth works as a process, you can do two things pretty well. make sure that your program that you're doing checks all the right boxes and make sure that your program or your approach to any kind of the recovery stuff doesn't check any of the boxes we don't want checking. so just keeps you right on the straight and narrow. like if you aliens came to Earth and they're like, how does this highway system thing work? they just explain to them, we see the cars get on and they all go in one direction and they get off when they need to and they loop back around. and you explain the process of how highway works. aliens and be like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. and then potentially, if they figure out how to drive a car, they could get on the road and do their thing. so for muscle growth, why am I making such a fundamental basic video? quite frankly, a lot of people just get this wrong, like crazy or wildly misunderstand. understand. so in any case, P.S. for those of you new to the channel, I'm Dr. Mike Israel. I guess how you read my name. I don't know. I'm impersonating this guy. it's my first day on the job. he's uh unattractive looking and well, I got a lot of surgery to look like this. well, here I am. how did I am I unattractive? comment below. I'm a professor of exercise and Sport Science. I'm a competitive bodybuilder and Brazilian jiu-jitsu grappler, and I want to teach you guys about how to train and eat and all that stuff so you can get jacked and lean and sexy. the sexy part, I just know from theory. so so at its very core, muscle growth is a two-step process. step one is you do training, and that training stimulates the growth processes. if it's hard training, it works even better. so step one, train hard to activate the muscle growth pathways, the chemical sequence of events that actually leads to muscle growth. but that activation switch isn't enough to grow muscle. we need part two. step two. step two is to allow for recovery and adaptation to take place over the course of, well, at least several hours and usually several days, such that you put the plan into motion and then the plan goes. you stimulate the gains with hard training because you don't actually put on muscle in the gym. and then you have to rest and be easy and not take that muscle and train it hard again for at least some time until it heals, it's recovered, it's grown a little bit or a lot of bit, and then you repeat that process again. so it's step one, stimulate. step step two, recover and adapt. when step two is finished and you're recovered and adapted, don't worry, we'll figure out how you can tell when you are. you hit step one again, stimulate, and over and over and over. we do this and like little steps up a huge Chinese temple woud on mountain or some shit like that. some uh Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ass shit. you uh climb up. but as you climb the temple steps, because it's stimulus and recovery adaptation, you get more and more jacked, which I guess would make the climbing more difficult cuz you finish the steps, you're like 380 with 0% body fat. something I typically walk around at.
now there is a term for this phenomenon that's expanded out of these two steps. these two steps are combined into one phenomenon, one principle of training called SR stimulus recovery adaptation. you got to stimulate and you got to give time for both recovery and adaptation. and generally, those two things can be lumped into one step because they happen at a very similar time scale. that doesn't mean the same, but it means very similar. and a lot of the stuff that helps recovery helps adaptation. not all of it, but a huge, huge, huge commonality there. and the structure ends up coding for what's called the session rest session paradigm in sport science. you don't just like kind of train and then kind of not and then kind of train, then kind of not. most people who get into pretty serious training end up doing this thing where they train hard when they understand that's time to wake up, that's time to go do it. and then they just don't train for some amount of time until they really get their mojo back. and then they train hard again. so you have session, rest, session, rest, session, rest. that's the paradigm that unfolds. it is a necessary paradigm because something very special happens when we're training hard that cannot happen at its best rate when we are recovering and resting and relaxing and growing. and also that resting and relaxing, recovering, growing can't happen during hard training because how the hell do you relax during hard training? it's a psychological and physical impossibility. so because we have these two very different things that play with each other, we have to make sure we sequence them one after another, one after another. that is the fun, fundamental way how all training design begins.
now on the margins, there's a lot of variation in there. you can train ultra hard and then you need plenty of rest, and then you recover and grow a ton. you completely heal or heal enough to go again, and then you go again. it could be four, five, or six days after you trained. very good results like that. you don't train too often, but you train so hard that you stimulate a crapload of gains. on the other hand, you can train pretty hard but with a not so voluminous session, just not a lot of stuff, maybe 30 minutes of working out or 45 as opposed to an hour, an hour and a half. and then you stimulate robust, but the amount of adaptation you stimulate isn't as much, and the recovery doesn't take as long. so you can have harder workouts less often with plenty of time between to rest and recover and adapt, or you could have workouts that are very hard but not as voluminous, not as much of them. you could call them less hard from a how much stuff you have to do perspective, smaller workouts that occur more frequently. still time to rest between all of them. you're not just training all the time, but it ends up being because the workouts that were not as difficult, that were not as large, didn't require as much time to get all the gains from them and to recover, you can do them more frequently and get actually very similar results. and a lot of the results in between, on the margins, are are very, very similar indeed. so do you have to train chest six times a week for it to grow the most, or is two times a week the best? well, it's actually the two lead to very, very similar gains as long as your two time a week chest workouts are pretty gnarly and have lots of all kinds of chest movements in them. and if you're training chest six times a week, maybe it's like two sets each time, not a ton of stimulus, but also not a huge recovery demand. so you can restimulate every day of the week. similar growth is from occurs from all of them in either one of those scenarios. and however you lay out your training, you are trying to avoid one of two states. you don't want to get into either of these two states.
the first state you don't want to get into is if you're trying to train hard again after resting, recovering from some time when you're clearly not recovered yet. how would you know that? huge sign, and there are two of them actually. first big sign is your strength is still down. if you leg pressed on Monday and you want to leg press again on Wednesday, but you leg press again on Wednesday and your quads are tired and you can feel it and you can't hit the same number of reps that you did on Monday, you're not recovered yet. your strength is down. how are you supposed to stimulate the newest, best gains possible if you're stimulating from uh an underdog position? you're not even recovered enough to do a great job in training. look, training is all about pushing the body well, getting close to its limits. and if you can't even get very close to its limits, oh man, like you might not gain a whole lot of muscle. you're better off taking a longer time to rest or next week doing a shorter session on Monday so that you can recover very robustly on Wednesday and have your strength be at normal or even slightly higher than normal levels. that's awesome. but if your strength is down substantially and whatever it is you're doing in the gym that day, it's the message is not getting through nearly as much as it could. it's a loss in efficiency. and another way to tell that you're not recovered is that you're still sore. so if you have delayed onset muscle soreness in your biceps and you have to train them again, that happens every now and again, it's not a big deal. but if it happens consistently, that means that the very processes that are supposed to recover you have not come to fruition yet. they haven't completed yet. it's like your parents take you to Chuck-E-Cheese and like it'll be the time of your life and you're like, amazing. and just when you're having your first slice of pizza, it's, it's first bite is in your mouth and you're sitting across the table from Chester E. Cheese, the the in mouse character, the whole thing, whoever the guy in there is, probably a chain-smoking 55-year-old man, and you're just having an unreal time and you're just like, yes, I hope this never ends. and your parents just yank you out and you're on the freeway, you're crying, you got pizza crust oil on your hands and just memories of Chuck-E-Cheese and how amazing he was for those several minutes. damn you, Mom and Dad, why did you pull me away like that? well, that's how your muscles feel when you beat them up and get them nice and sore, and they're absorbing nutrients and growing, and you're like, hey, guess what? muscles? they're like, we get to say it Chuck-E-Cheese longer. like, nope, you got to go and get trained again. they're in the car. your muscles are crying. you guys know the story already. so if your strength is down, probably not a good idea to train again for muscle growth. if you're still sore, like you really feel it, probably not a good idea to train again. so whatever training frequency you pick has to be a slightly more expanded in that case.
however, you can make the opposite mistake. so mistake number two that you can make is being already well recovered, but uh, you're not training again yet for some reason. now, look, there's a buffer zone. if you are as strong as you've ever been and totally not sore for one or two extra days after your workout, you just heal really completely and have a really amazing next workout, and the scales balance out. if you train just after you barely got your strength back and barely healed from soreness, yeah, you're not going to have the greatest workout ever, but it'll be good enough. and because now it's so frequent, because it's right after that session healed, then you get more sessions in the week and you have amazing results just the same. what you don't want to do is legitimately wait three or four plus days after your strength is already back to normal and your soreness is healed to train that muscle group again. now, you can if you want, totally. you will not get your best results like that. somebody could come up to you in the gym and be like, what, you train today? and you're like, yeah, man, just came in to do some cardio. I didn't want to hit anything. I'm kind of, kind of still recovering. they're like, okay, so you like your chest is sore and and tired? you're like, damn, man, chest feels strong, man, and I'm not sore at all. you're like, okay, so you just, like, healed? you're going to hit tomorrow? like, no, man, I healed three days ago. you're like, okay, why aren't you training your chest right now? there should be a compelling answer there. so a lot of times people will train, you know, they'll really want their forearms to come up and get bigger, and they'll train forearms once a week. you can bash the dog shit out of your forearms. that's right. I'm talking about.com. Scott, are we allowed to mention these website names or are we getting canned for this? maybe we'll edit that out. go to all your favorite adult film sites, but use weights on your hands. you guys, I'm not teaching you, but you teach me how to do this. I follow you guys for this kind of stuff. your forearms might get sore for a day and a half, two days if it's your first time doing it, and they might get tired and your strength might be down for two or three days. but if you train forearms once a week, I could ask you the question of like, why did you spend five days with your forearms totally healed, totally strong, totally not sore, totally ready to hit another robust muscle growth stimulus, great workout to begin recovering again? why, why did you just wait instead? there's not really a good answer there.
so here's the real secret sauce to building muscle. stimulate when your strength returns back to normal or even a little higher than normal, and when you're no longer sore and you feel fresh and really good. pretty soon after that, that day, a day later, maybe two days later, usually a day or so, hit it again. hit another kind of workout. doesn't have to be the same one that hits that same muscle group. and that is the fundamental logical core of training. deviate in any direction from that, and you will get worse gains. you'll still get some decent gains, maybe some good ones too, but not the best gains that you are capable of getting under the circumstances.
now, these are the two steps that make muscle grow the most. stimulate, recover, and adapt. that's the most direct underpinning theoretical construct for how muscle growth training actually gets you jacked. but there are at least a few other factors to talk about that are kind of um underlying factors that feed into these, that support these things. there are at least two of them that are in their own category because that's how important they are. here they are. you can apply them to whatever extent you can, and they magnify or reduce how much actual results, how much muscle you get from applying that training, resting, training, resting process.
the first one is eating. believe it or not, you may be crazy if I told you this, but muscle is made of stuff. and if you don't eat the stuff from the outside world, your body can't magically make stuff out of nothing. that violates at least a few laws of thermodynamics, last I checked the physics textbook. so you should be getting enough of a certain number and kind of nutrients. and if you download my nutrition app, it'll, I'm just kidding. I'll save you guys that shit. we'll talk about it in a little bit. really, it's three very important things, and everything else matters, but to a much smaller extent. one is eating enough protein. your body needs enough protein to have the excess amount of protein to do the luxury building of muscle that's extra than your body needs to survive. your body doesn't like really want to build a ton of muscle. it doesn't really care because as long as it's keeping you upright, it's totally fine. so extra muscle than you're genetically supposed to have by training is kind of bonus. so your body has to be, look, look, if we're going to do bonus shit, we have to have bonus money lying around. money, and in this case, the currency is amino acids, the building blocks of protein. so you have to eat plenty of protein. how much? we got tons of videos on that, but something like a gram per pound of body weight per day. so if you weigh 150 pounds, like 150 grams of protein is with some wiggle room in there, up and down, is a really good start. if you eat much less than that, your body literally doesn't have the raw materials to build as much muscle as it can. that's like you're building a skyscraper in Manhattan, and the foreman's like, so when are we going to build it? you're like, fucking hit it now, fellas, let's do it. you know what I'm saying? 2029, we got a build date, we got to, we got to open. like, dude, there's no glass and steel though on the premises. what are we supposed to build out of? you're like, there's a couple beams here. get, get, get, go, get going, chop, chop. and they're like, we need 10 times more glass and steel. I think it's supposed to be 110 stories. and you're like, sorry, you know, I didn't, didn't buy the protein cookies at the fucking store today. so you got to eat plenty of protein, otherwise you're literally just not supplying the physical raw materials to build muscle. and here's the thing, you could be training hard as fuck, you could be recovering like a maniac, just everything, you live in a fucking, I don't know, like a fucking steam room, sauna combination where people massage their feet, other things get massaged, you only sit in a bidet. Scott, video guy, can you imagine never having to get up to defecate or urinate? you're just like, a bidet is a super comfortable chair that you kind of Professor X style float around in. paradise, paradise. you could do all that. if you don't have enough protein coming in, you could get very underwhelming gains, or technically speaking, if you under protein enough, no gains at all. that would be terrible.
here's another thing under that category of eating more food, calories, just straight up food. your body can absolutely take protein that you eat and a portion of to muscle growth. but if your body is an insufficient number of calories coming in, it's going to take most of that protein and just burn it for energy and for vital functions. if your body has to make a selection, but between, okay, do we feed the neurons that are literally the brain, or do we feed your skeletal muscles for extra inch on your biceps? they make that decision very quickly, and it's the same way every single time. your muscles get the middle finger, and your brain gets, thank God, its neurons maintained. so you want a decent level of calories to be able to grow muscle. now, how many calories do you need exactly? 2,951, and it's the same number for everyone. all right, that was great. see you guys next time. no, wait, wait, that's total lie. what you want is enough calories in most cases to at least maintain your body weight or even increase your body weight slowly by, oh, something like a third of a pound to a whole pound every week on average. so you have to collect averages and stuff. the RP diet coach app, uh, that we do promote because it's our app, does all of that for you, but and it'll also determine your calories for you and tell you. but you can run the math yourself, and it's really straightforward. so if you're a really big person, you might need 4,500 or 5,000 calories a day to gain that little bit of weight that you need to optimize the process, or at least maintain it. if you're a really teeny person, you may need a thousand calories a day, and that's plenty enough for you to grow muscle. can you grow muscle if you eat so few calories that you're losing weight? yes, if you're losing it slowly, you can still gain some muscle, especially if you're like a new beginner to this whole thing. a couple of other um, you know, unusual situations for most folks, their best muscle growth will be at a slight surplus. so for many people, that's an extra, oh, 250 to 500 calories per day than they normally eat. and then you ask the question of calories of what? and that's my third part of that whole uh uh eating situation. is mostly healthy food. now, I didn't, do not mean all healthy food. if you eat a cookie, your muscles do just melt off your body unless that cookie had like salmonella in it, and then absolutely that will happen. but typically, 75 or something like that, 75% three-quarters of most of your food should be like from good healthy sources. what does that mean? that means veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean proteins, healthy fats, things like nuts, nut butters, avocados, olive oil, things like that. the kind of stuff you see in healthy food TikTok reels. it's not rocket science. we have tons of videos on the RP channel about what healthy food is. doesn't have to be all healthy food. you can have an ice cream cone here and there, as long as your protein is good and it's mostly healthy food, you're good to go. so if you have enough protein, plenty of calories, at least uh, in most cases, just a little bit more calories than you need to maintain your weight, and you get mostly uh, your healthy food that way into your body, and a little bit of junk is totally fine, then you are checking that huge green check box of eating. and here's the emotional part of this all. that hard training and super dedicated recovery you're doing is multiplied in its effect because you're supplying the process. it's a little bit of a tragedy when you see someone just crushing it in the gym and their diet is so bad or so inconsistent that they barely get any gains. it's like, but that you're paying for nothing. it's like going to Chipotle, ordering a burrito, poking your fork at it, and throwing it away. someone's like, that wasn't good. you want another one? you're like, no, I got, I got a really good experience out of this, right? I'm at Chipotle, I took a picture on Instagram, I told my friends it's great. like, you know, you're supposed to be eating a burrito. get the fuck the fuck out of here. oh shit, I just spent fucking $11 on seemingly nothing. that same thing can absolutely happen to a very similar extent if you train hard as nails and you screw up your eating. and let me put this in one last way. eating well is not like, oh, well, yeah, but it's not one of those. it's like, yeah, this has to happen. this must happen in order to fuel that process. and the better it happens, the more for the same level of effort in the gym, you grow the more most muscle. and you guys are probably trying to grow muscle. that's probably why you're watching this video. so I just want to cut you the real deal.
number two, underlying factor that we have to mention is rest, relaxation, and sleep, aka the recovery process. enough sleep, which means generally for most people, 7 to 9 hours a night. or tons of videos on the specifics of how much sleep you need. the way you know you're not getting enough sleep is if your eyes are groggy through the day and you need caffeine to stay awake. you can probably sleep longer. sleep is critical because sleep, it's probably the most anabolic, muscle-growing thing you will do that actually grows the most muscle, especially if you're eating enough food. sleep just is what the time you grow muscle and every single part of your body recovers in a huge, ultra-complete way. just would not occur if you never got any sleep, even if you're relaxing, wrestling all the time. sleep is a non-negotiable. again, similar to eating. you like, um, back when I was an undergrad, I would train really hard, I would eat okay, and I would sleep very poorly. and if I could teleport back in time, first of all, I'd bitch slap the fuck out of myself clear across the lecture hall. but when my older version of me, or earlier version, got up, maybe was still alive, I'd be like, you better start getting sleep, you little bitch, or I'm gonna come back and do that shit again, but harder. zap. and I disappear off into the ether. and my old self is like, okay, we have message received. Jesus Christ, also, is that me in the future? God, I lost all my hair. fuck, I sure hope I'm getting late. at least the answer is, I don't get late. training for muscle growth is never going to be the same. so in any case, enough sleep is a big deal. regular relaxation, probably one to two hours a day at least. I don't want to say at least and have you guys quit your jobs and go. it's not, it is the more the better. but a core of one to two hours a day, usually at the end of the day, where you can really just woo on relax, watch some bullshit Netflix crap, have a few snacks, really chill on the couch, take a walk with a significant other, take a walk and listen to emo because you know you'll never have a significant other and the emo gives you emotions that you typically can't feel in real life because no one talks to you. uh, shit like that. anything that relaxes the living crap out of you. not just fun. so scrolling, doom scrolling does not uh, count. debating uh, Russian troll accounts doesn't count. you got to do something relaxing for a few hours a day, and that's huge in actually dropping that fatigue so you can come back strong as shit for your next training session. that's a big deal. and lastly, this one's a tough one. as the little stress as you can realistically manage. now, look, you got a job, you got pets, you got a significant other, which is a lot of stress. you don't have a significant other, which is a lot of stress. and either way you slice it, work, school, blah, blah, blah, traffic, you know, like you're gonna have to fucking live your life and do your shit. understood. we're not all professional athletes, me included, and we've got shit to do. I got to do this and fucking record the shit talk. you guys think I like doing this? I fucking hate this shit. I hate being on camera, hate being social, hate the sound of my own voice. I'm just full of hate. but I do it anyway because uh, somebody gets paid. Scott, who gets paid off of this? Nick Shaw, CEO uh, of RP, he says that eventually, if I do this long enough, I can see my family. he's a nice man. he's so reasonable. in any case, yes, do your work, do what you got to do. I'm not saying quit your job, but there's a difference between necessary stress and extra stress. so if you're driving to go to work, yelling at people, um, their commutes because they don't understand the laws of the road, gives you extra stress. maybe if you can chill out, you can save that yelling for yelling at the weights at the gym, which actually gets you jacked, or at least scares the weights enough that they feel lighter when you lift them. so as little extra stress as you can imagine, which can mean that, you know, it could be good stress or bad stress in a sense. if you're really serious about muscle growth, and you go out with your friends Friday and Saturday every week because you're young and that's what you fucking do, amazing, God bless you. but if your friends are like, hey man, Thursday night, you want to fucking go out and get drunk and get crazy and go dancing? maybe if you're really serious about muscle growth, a couple weeks, couple months, you could be like, you know what, fellas, I'm just going to catch you on Friday, Saturday. I don't need any extra. even if it's positive, it's going to tire me the fuck out. it's going to make my workouts not as productive. so I don't want to do it. and obviously negative stress, uh, things that are experiences that stress you out, there aren't that fun, is also something you want to minimize in your life. one of the really core things about hanging out with professional athletes, and I've been in a few locker rooms in my day, some of that, a couple of those lawsuits are still pending, my lawyer says don't, don't enter the state of California until anyway. um, professional athletes are really interesting people because you almost expect them to be like super eye of the tiger, and they are in the gym. and then one thing that really baffled me when I first started interacting with professional athletes is a lot of them, not all, but a lot of them are so chilled out the rest of the day. they like, kind of barely do anything, and they're really easy at just not getting roused up or like they're just like, whatever, they're chill. and they just play video games, they talk to their friends, they just sit on the couch, they eat, they recover. that's a fucking big deal. they're not trying to go out and get extra stress in their life. and some of them, when they do have extra stress, it affects the process big time. they are bodybuilders who have done not done well at shows because they had like emotional girl drama. they're on the fucking phone yelling at people all the goddamn time. I told you Cynthia, never again. click. shit like that. and that drains you. so as little extra stress, because if you really care about muscle growth, you understand that the processes of stress cause a degradation of the processes of muscle growth. it really is up to you to figure out, okay, how much just yelling at my Uber driver for arriving five minutes late get me in real life? nothing. and he's upset, and I'm upset. no one wins. I could just rate him. I rate every Uber driver I'm ever in one star because I'm, I'm a kind of motherfucker that thinks like, you can always do better, right? dress for the job you want, not the one you have. so I just give everyone one star. but in any case, if you just didn't yell at your Uber driver, you would be able to save some emotional energy, lower your stress, and grow more muscle. so that'll be even better, right? so those are huge. eating, and then rest, relaxation, sleep, aka the recovery process in general, is really, really big. that's about it as far as the processes of muscle growth works.
now, if you apply this process, how much muscle you get out of it, because everything I talked about so far is under your direct control. you control how much you train and how often and how hard. you control what goes into your body eating wise, at least when Scott, the video guy, is around. I have mostly control of what goes into my body. but in any case, I'm should shut up now because he's right over there. he gets very testy if I talk about him. he doesn't fucking like it. you control at the end of the day, to a large extent, how much rest and recovery and sleep that you get. here are some things you don't control, but maybe have some modicum of control around them. usually not really. these are things that just have to happen or things that are conditions that kind of determine how much muscle you grow at any one given time. the first is hormones. like you can't just go like this and your testosterone goes up. it doesn't, it doesn't work like that. um, how much do hormones matter? well, one of the main, not the only, but one of the main reasons why men are more jacked than women on average is that men have more testosterone by a factor of like 40 or some shit like that. and so like, yeah, it's tough when you don't have hardly any testosterone to gain a ton of muscle. you can gain plenty, but not as much as you would if you have lots of testosterone. and another one is, okay, well, that's just genetic differences. uh, what about if we inject the testosterone? ah, now you're asking the right questions. enhanced versus natural. you guys have been on the internet for shit. this apparently you're on the internet right now. and if you look at people who are on tons of steroids, I wouldn't know any, versus people who are drug-free, there are very big differences in how much muscle that one has gained versus the other because that stuff absolutely matters. now, it doesn't replace any of those other factors. it just augments them over time. so if you like start doing a crapload of steroids and someone's like, dude, I noticed you don't sleep. what's up with that? you're like, man, fuck sleep, bro. I don't need that shit. I'm on trend. you're like, they don't, they don't think. I think if you're on trend, the more sleep you get, the better. that's correct. so if you're enhanced or if you have more testosterone just because you're male, the harder you train, the better you recover, the more you eat, to a point of course, so the higher quality your diet is, all that stuff, the better your sleep is, magnifies your results. it's all an additive and a multiplicative process. it's not either or. so these things don't trade each other out. that's first, hormones. they're a big deal. so sometimes people will be like, man, this motherfucker is just preaching the basics. like, I get it. like rest and eat and train, but like, that doesn't explain your results. you huge weird-headed YouTube freak. agreed. hormones are a big part of that, but they're a big part that the icing on the cake that rests on top of that. look, sometimes it's a lot of icing. you know, you know, one of those cakes is a half icing, half cake. that's me. but uh, it's sure as shit important to stack as many of those things together as possible.
next, another determinant of how far you go in your muscle growth journey at any given time here is real talk. it's genetics, right? and genetics actually more important than hormones in most cases, right? so if you have like Nigerian super person guy, um, sometimes some people are just built better, right? and they start lifting weights and they just, shit just happens. where some people have like Harry Potter genetics where they live for a couple months and they're like, I think my bicep maybe got sore once and maybe grew a little bit. and you're like, look, kid, pick up racquetball or some shit like that. no kidding. that's at the extremes, and everyone's somewhere in between. but genetics are a big deal. and some people who you think know things about training and know the process, they just are really, really good genetics and they're on, well, a ton of hormones, and they eat plenty, and they sleep okay, and they don't know the details, but like, those are such important factors. so genetics is a big deal. genetics in this conversation, we've had a few videos, we're going to be making some more about how genetics has a role in the actual results. but genetics even codes how you respond to hormones. so if you have a high level of naturally produced testosterone, but your genetics for the sensitivity of your muscle cells to testosterone is poor, you could have like all the signs of high testosterone, like higher blood pressure, receding hairline, but you're not jacked. and people are like, but you don't have low testosterone. you get it tested, it's very high. the doctor's like, you don't need TRT, that's for sure. and you're like, damn it. your genetics could be such that you're very low sensitivity to testosterone. you could have the other side of the genetic coin where you don't produce a ton of testosterone. your doctors actually say you're technically hypogonadal. your testosterone is like 250 nanograms per deciliter, which is just below the 300 cut off of what's considered mostly normal in most cases. but you're like, pretty fucking jacked. people like, how the hell does that work? you just have a crazy androgen sensitivity in your muscle cells. when they expose to testosterone, they're like, fellas, drop everything you're doing and grow. and that's what the cells do. that is hugely genetic. which is why a lot of people will take exogenous hormones, like they'll get on TRT or they'll, you know, get on their local drug dealer TRT and just get steroids. I don't know what it is. Scott, the video guy, where people get steroids behind the dumpster at the GNC? yeah, that's that's where I get mine. so uh, JK. um, some people take a bunch of steroids and not much will happen, or something will happen, but it's not very obvious that they grew a ton of muscle. and you're like, what? and it's because a lot of times their own genetics for response to the androgen hormones, specifically testosterone and all of its related hormones that are all the steroids, is just not that great. when you have other people who will take like a little bitty something, a little little pill of Anavar or something, they just boom, they'll blow up. and you're like, how? and it's because of their genetics. genetics is a big deal. and at the end of the day, you don't choose your genetics. yet, hopefully, we can change that in some time. but until we can change our genes, you just have to do the best with what you have and apply that process. and don't look at people who have good genetics that are not doing a good job with sleep or training or something else and be like, what can I learn from them? you can learn from them that you can have really great gifts and just piss them away. you don't have to look into this much further.
lastly, the last factor that can magnify your results is the biggest factor that can magnify your results by far, and it's time. it just takes time applying your serious hard training and recovery and eating to gain a lot of muscle. one of, I get two questions very often when I'm out and about traveling and stuff, going through, walking through airports, sitting on airplanes, talking to people. I get two really common questions. one of them is a little bit of a, uh, as to how anyone's learning anything from this. and the other one is actually a very good question that really does hint at what's going on. sometimes people will like observe that obviously I'm a little bit more muscular than average, and they'll ask the question of, how many days a week do you train? or how many times a week do you train? like I say, whatever, like six to eight, depending on on the situation. and, oh, interesting. and I, I don't know what they think they're learning from that. uh, do they want to be this jacked? yes, you might have to train that much, but sure shit, not going to happen in a couple of, a couple of weeks of training. that's not going to happen. but other people ask another question, a much more pertinent question. they go, how long have you been at this for? and then I go, yeah, 25 years. and they're like, okay. they learned something very, very important. to get really your best level of jacked, it's not weeks, it's not months, it's years. now, in months, you can do some really cool transformations, but in years is where you slab on real pounds of beef. so you take all the stuff that we've talked about so far, making sure you are training hard, making sure you are resting well, making sure that your next training session is an appropriate time, just after you finished recovering from the last one, being consistent with that. then, kind of more or less out of your hands, hormones and genetics. but what is in your hands completely as time. because time is only measured when you're consistent. when you're consistently training, your measurement clock of time starts to wind up for you. and that time measures how that clock measures how much time you spent actually gaining muscle. and because muscle growth happens very slowly, if you run that clock for a few weeks, cool shit happens, but then not much for a few months. much cooler shit happens. you train for a few years, you'll really see what your body's capable of. you'll finally become more muscular. then finally, that one girl in college who never sat next to you because maybe you smell, maybe you didn't, uh, she might talk to you even and remark about how big your arms are. beginning a whirlwind affair that ends in Romeo and Juliet style tandem suicide. I got fucked up real quick. in any case, if you're interested in training that automatically chooses how much of training, how hard the training is, and times your training out, doses it out through the week exactly to fit your recovery, the RP hypertrophy app does that for you for like a dollar a day. and if you're interested in getting that entire diet situation completely sorted for you, the RP diet coach app is also just a click away. it costs even less than the hypertrophy app and it will do all that stuff for you. do you have to get the apps? no, fuck no. no, you can do this all by yourself, just with a paper and pencil, just like grandpa taught you. but if you want, download our apps. they get me paid. and Scott, the video guy, has a really, really nasty several types of drug addiction that cost money. please support Scott's habits. buy stuff. click on things. see you guys next time.