Why You’re Not Gaining Muscle

A lot of people who ask me for help with their workouts are frustrated because they’re not getting as strong or muscular as quickly as they want. While some of people just have unrealistic expectations (contrary to the hyperbolic claims of the muscle mags you can’t gain twenty pounds of new muscle in a month), a lot of people simply aren’t gaining muscle because they’re not following a few basic but important guidelines.

Train as intensely as possible

Your results from exercise will be proportional to the effort you put into it. Everybody thinks they’re training intensely, but over the past twenty years I’ve had a lot of people come to Orlando to have me put them through a workout and every single person has told me they’ve never worked so hard before. Most of them thought they were already training hard, too, but were doing all sorts of things during exercises that reduced their effectiveness and stopped before they reached momentary muscle failure. However hard you may think you’re training, always believe you are capable of contracting harder and try to do so. Don’t stop when the exercise starts to feel too hard, stop when you couldn’t get another rep (in proper form) if your life depended on it.

Don’t Overtrain or Undertrain 

The more intensely you exercise the less exercise you should do to avoid overtraining. For most people this means limiting their workouts to one set of one or two basic exercises for each major muscle groups and a few exercises covering smaller muscle groups, done two or three times a week on non-consecutive days. Some people may need more rest days in between. A few people may even need to limit their workouts to just a handful of exercises once a week, but not most.

Drew Baye before and after gaining 30 pounds with HIT

Drew Baye, before and after following these basic guidelines

Ultra-brief, once-weekly workouts can be a time-efficient and effective way to train for general strength and fitness if you’re really pressed for time, but if your goal is to gain as much muscular strength and size as quickly as possible you want to stimulate as much muscle to grow as often as your recovery ability allows. When in doubt you’re better off erring on the conservative side with your workout volume and frequency, but don’t cut back so much that you are barely working each muscle group a few times a month.

If you suspect you may be overtraining consider whether you are failing to eat and rest properly to support recovery and adaptation before cutting back your workout volume and frequency (for more on this read High Intensity Workouts.)

Eat Enough Protein and Calories

No matter how effectively you train, if you don’t give your body enough protein and calories you aren’t going to recover and grow. Some people have claimed you don’t need a lot of protein because a muscle only contains about one hundred grams, which is not a lot. However, this ignores the huge cost of protein required just to repair all of the microtrauma occurring in your muscles during a workout before any size increases are produced. Some people’s bodies do this more efficiently than others, but most people who strength train require close to a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass per day to meet the increased demands for recovery and growth. When in doubt you’re better off getting more protein than you need than not enough (Bandegan A, Courtney-martin G, Rafii M, Pencharz PB, Lemon PW. Indicator Amino Acid-Derived Estimate of Dietary Protein Requirement for Male Bodybuilders on a Nontraining Day Is Several-Fold Greater than the Current Recommended Dietary Allowance. J Nutr. 2017;147(5):850-857.)

All this repair and growth requires extra calories, too. Depending on how hard you are training, how much muscle you’re working during each workout, and how fast you are capable of building muscle you may need several hundred calories above maintenance per day. Your body can get some of that energy from your fat stores if you’ve got a bit to spare, but if you’re already moderately lean you’ll need to eat more if you want to gain muscle. While eating more sounds easy to most people, part of the reason some people have difficulty gaining muscle is they just don’t have much of an appetite. Keep track of your food intake, your measurements, and your body composition, and gradually increase your calorie intake until you are steadily gaining muscle but not too much fat.

Get Enough Quality Sleep

Sleep deprivation makes it difficult for people to both build muscle and lose fat, and unfortunately this is a problem for a lot of people. If you’re not getting enough sleep you will have increases in cortisol and decreases in testosterone and growth hormone, making it more difficult for your body to recover from your workouts and build muscle. Even if you’re doing everything else right getting too little sleep can slow your progress down, and if you’re chronically sleep deprived it can grind it to a halt. If getting bigger and stronger is important to you then you need to make a commitment to getting to bed early enough to get seven to eight hours of sleep per night. If you don’t want to do this, or if you can’t due to odd work hours, the birth of a child, or other factors, then try to take one or two long naps later in the day if possible.

In conclusion…

Before you start worrying about details like the specific exercises you’re doing for each muscle group, repetition methods and advanced training techniques, or whether you need a particular bodybuilding supplement (the answer is probably “no” for the majority of them), as yourself if you’re consistently applying the above. Train intensely, do enough exercise often enough to keep stimulating your body to get bigger and stronger but not so much you overtrain, eat enough calories and protein to support recovery and growth, and get plenty of sleep. Do these consistently and you will continue to get bigger and stronger until you’ve reached the limits of your potential.

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  • John Shalvey May 5, 2017 @ 14:53

    Great advice about the sleep Drew. Your neck, traps, and thighs really blew up in the pics! Bad ass back in the day!

    • Drew Baye May 31, 2017 @ 0:36

      Thanks John,

      Glad I found HIT, I can’t believe I wore shorts before then with those skinny legs.

  • Markus May 6, 2017 @ 6:15

    Drew, I am 53 training HIT for a long time. In the mornings I feel very achy and fatigued (after 7-8 hours good night’s sleep waking up naturally) but within 1-2 hours that feeling goes away and I feel ok. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

    • Drew Baye Jun 2, 2017 @ 13:33

      Hey Markus,

      Assuming your mattress isn’t the problem you might benefit from performing some light physical activity first thing in the morning to warm up.

  • Bent Nissen May 6, 2017 @ 13:17

    I am 56 years old and after 6 weeks HIT training , I get easily irritated, sleep poorly at night and do not even want to work out. I take one week of from training and train 4 weeks low intensity.

    • Drew Baye Jun 2, 2017 @ 13:30

      Hey Brent,

      Assuming you don’t have any other health problems you shouldn’t be experiencing irritability or poor sleep on a high intensity training program if your exercise TUL and workout volume and frequency are appropriate for your body.

  • DJ Jazzy Cornelius May 6, 2017 @ 14:34

    I cannot stress enough what you say about protein intake. Especially in high-intensity circles, there is some bad advice out there derived from the N=1 data of Mentzer and others, from which people conclude that the 0.8 g/kg RDA ought to be sufficient. This neglects the fact that AAS have significant effects on protein metabolism, not least of which is drastically improving nitrogen retention. For natural trainees, the 1.8 g/kg recommended in Menno Henselmans’ 2012 literature review is a much better target than the RDA. On the RDA I had spun my wheels making modest gains for years, but when I started tracking protein and hitting 1.8 g/kg/day, I improved much faster. Also, for those following lower-carbohydrate diets, about 50g CHO/day will spare protein from excessive oxidation via gluconeogenesis, and an additional pre-workout bolus is also a good idea.

    TLDR: If you’re serious about strength training, you have to be serious about hitting your macros. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.

    • Drew Baye May 30, 2017 @ 23:34

      Hey DJ,

      I usually go even higher, preferring to err high than risk being too low since individuals vary in how efficiently their bodies use protein. I aim for at least 1 g/lbs/day (2.2 g/kg/day) and clients that get this much protein consistently seem to do much better with both muscle gain and fat loss.

  • Ahmd May 21, 2017 @ 2:00

    Fantastic article, Drew, and two things caught my eye:

    ***Your body can get some of that energy from your fat stores if you’ve got a bit to spare, but if you’re already moderately lean you’ll need to eat more if you want to gain muscle***

    So If a person still has a couple of inches to lose around the waist, does that mean if he eats less the couple of inches (the little excess fat) will be used for muscle building? So one can eat less and gain muscle, then?

    ***For most people this means limiting their workouts to one set of one or two basic exercises for each major muscle groups and a few exercises covering smaller muscle groups, done two or three times a week on non-consecutive days.***

    One set of JUST one exercise, I understand. But Is it advisable to do two exercises for the same muscle group? One hard set of pullups to failure followed by another hard set of rows to failure … wouldn’t that be overkill for the back muscles?

    • Drew Baye May 30, 2017 @ 23:25

      Hey Ahmd,

      Yes, if a person still has a good amount of body fat their body can use some of that energy for muscle building, but it’s always slower on a calorie deficit.

      Different individuals may be able to handle more or less workout volume, and two exercises per muscle group is not too much for most people, especially if they are not done back to back.

      • Ahmd Jun 1, 2017 @ 2:33

        Hi Drew, I get that, we can do two. But my point is, since one set is normally enough if done to failure, wouldn’t adding a second exercise to the same muscle group be like doing two sets to failure? That’s my point, you normally say a second set is unnecessary if the first set is done to failure. But two exercises for the same muscle group (done to failure) would be similar to doing two sets to failure. I hope I am making sense.

        • Drew Baye Jun 1, 2017 @ 14:28

          Hey Ahmd,

          No, because the relative involvement of the muscles varies between different exercises and certain muscles may be worked more effectively in some movements than others.

  • JR May 26, 2017 @ 0:52

    Great post, but it’s somewhat disheartening hearing that everyone that has trained with you has discovered that they weren’t training as hard as they thought. If one is training alone without a trainer, how do we know we are training hard enough to stimulate maximal gains? Should we do a second set to fill in the gaps just in case the first set wasn’t truly done to maximal effort, even if we feel like it was a maximal effort? If your clients already felt they were working hard, but in reality could work harder, what can the solo trainer do to ensure they’re doing enough?

    • Drew Baye May 30, 2017 @ 14:07

      Hey JR,

      Doing more exercise will not make up for a lack of intensity. Focus on using the best form possible and on only stopping when an exercise becomes physically impossible to continue in good form no matter how uncomfortable it becomes. I will be covering this in a lot more detail in the book Elements of Form.

  • Julien May 31, 2017 @ 3:26

    Drew ,
    Good post. I know you have very similar posts like this one , but these reminders keep people going.

    Question, Do you ever use formulas that predict someone’s muscular potential such as Casey Butt’s formula?(I bet you have heard of that) on your clients?

    Are these formulas a good way to evaluate how much progress one can still make and know they are doing everything according to the suggestions of this article?

    Thanks!

    • Drew Baye Jun 1, 2017 @ 14:31

      Hey Julien,

      No, because there are many different factors that affect potential for muscular strength and size. Also, formulas based on competitive bodybuilders would be skewed too far to the right of the bell curve for muscular potential to provide a realistic estimate for genetically average trainees.

  • Ahmd Jun 4, 2017 @ 8:39

    Hi Drew, what if we’re only able to do three or four reps for an exercise. Would a second set be advisable so we can do at least 7 or 8 reps in total (so that TUL would be adequate)? I am talking about cases where we can’t reduce weights instantly, like calisthenics etc. Or is failure training not advisable in such cases (because doing 3 reps to failure would be a little odd)?

    • Drew Baye Jun 5, 2017 @ 15:31

      Hey Ahmd,

      Although you can’t change the load used for bodyweight exercises you can reduce the resistance by changing other factors like leverage, load-distribution, and timing. I explain how to do this in Project Kratos.

  • David Nov 26, 2017 @ 15:21

    I am 64 years old, do Crossfit and lift, so I am in decent shape. Is it possible for men my age to gain LBM that have been working out for some time? I hear and read that yes you can or no you can’t all the time. I realize food, rest, following through on good training programs are important, but is it possible to gain more muscle mass in the developed muscle areas of your body at my age?