Harold Winslow

How I Propose to Get Jacked

Sarcopenia is bad news bears, especially for someone with a small bone structure like myself. That means that you want to stack muscle mass before it's too late, and 'too late' is probably somewhere around 40 years old. This doesn't mean that you or I need to be permabulking until age 40, as you can probably gain 90% of your muscular potential with 5 solid years of training. It just means that you need to identify opportune times when they arise so that you get in your 5 years by 40.

Right now I have plenty of time to train on the weekends and at least one weekday. I have enough money that I can purchase prepared or easily-cooked foods which will taste good enough that I actually eat a lot of them. And I have a membership to a gym with quite a few machines, cables, and free weights. I am the least stressed that I have been during any period in the last 9 years. This will be one of my 5 years.

Not that it will be straightforward to gain muscle. I have a niggle in my knee that makes squatting and lunging irritating. One of the vertebrae in my back often feels out of place until I pop it, and this makes deadlifting a dubious proposition. If I were a dog taking obedience classes, my owner would describe me as not very food-motivated. These are the constraints I am working with.

What to do? First, we need to define success: gaining muscle. That is easy enough to measure. But I need something upstream of weight to measure so that I know if my actions are on track, not just my outcomes. That thing will be the number of 'hard' sets I do each week - i.e. sets taken to failure or very near it.

I have already started my training, with very low volume. A true beginner's level of volume might be 3 sets of 3 different exercises 3 days per week, for a total of 27 sets per week. Arnold may have done around 200 sets per week in his prime. So the range of what the human body can handle is immense. In my first week of training, I performed an exceedingly paltry 23 sets. I expect this number will have to quadruple to gain the 10-15 pounds that I would like. But the nice thing about starting with such low volume is that I can fully recover between workouts, and thereby assess each workout on its own terms. If you enter a workout already fatigued, and the next day you are tired and sore, it's hard to know how much of that effect is from the workout itself and how much is residual from previous workouts. I hope to take advantage of these good experimental conditions by trying out a few new exercises in the coming weeks, hopefully identifying some movements that target particular muscle groups better than my staples.

I am also starting my training with long rest periods of 4 minutes. I have never rested so long between sets before; I hope this will help me keep intensity high throughout my workouts. Eventually volume will get too high and I will have to reduce them.

Anyway, the plan is roughly this. Increase volume gradually, preferentially adding it to muscle groups that are no longer getting sore. Assess each workout after it occurs and write down adjustments for next time - to add weight, to look up a different exercise to try, to try adjusting the seat on the machine up or down, etc. Try isometrics for knee-friendly quad work and hammer back extensions like nobody's business for the posterior chain. Have at least 1 scoop of protein powder and a banana before each session, plus the same immediately after. Stock up on pre-made burgers, puffed rice cereal, sweet potatoes, and other foods that I like. Repeat for many weeks.

This sounds dumb when written out because it is so simple. So dumb that it might actually work. We will see how it goes.

Update 1 (10/9/2022): I have now done 9 weeks of training with progressively higher volume each week, culminating in 42 sets in the past week. I added a third session midweek to help accommodate the extra volume. Change in bodyweight is negligible so far, but I'm doing more reps and/or using more weight on all exercises since I started. I suspect that my training volume over the last 9 weeks has just been too low relative to my training history to induce any gains; it may take more like 60 sets per week before I notice significant changes. My general strategy when adding sets has been to add a new exercise once I've reached three sets of every other exercise that I'm regularly doing. At some point I will increase to 4+ sets per movement, but for now I think adding variety is wise for injury prevention and muscular balance purposes. My knee and back discomfort remain largely unchanged; I am going to try wearing knee sleeves and try some stabilization exercises to see if those help. I have been biking a steep hill near my house once per week and it is becoming noticeably easier. I elected to take a deload week this week after experiencing overwhelming fatigue in my most recent workout; 9 weeks of increasing volume is a lot. I'll use the deload week to do some extra stretching, foam rolling, stabilization exercises, yoga, biking, and general messing around.

Update 2 (12/4/2022): Since my last update I have done 7 weeks of training at the same level of volume as before, although I have been lengthening my bike rides and have introduced medicine ball snatches as a form of cardio one day per week. I swapped my mid-week bodyweight session for a mid-week band session, which is lower volume but allows for a great pump in some smaller muscles. I find this substantially easier to recover from and enjoy it more. I can also do direct neck work, which is minor for weight gain purposes but may be aesthetically impactful and is worthwhile in any case as someone who spends quite a bit of time on two-wheeled vehicles.

As mentioned in the previous update, I tried using knee sleeves, but they didn't seem to do much for me. However, I have learned that I can do isometric leg curls with substantially less discomfort than doing reps. I have also found that properly foam rolling my quads is helpful. My quads used to feel like solid lumps but now if I roll them before and/or after leg work they are noticeably more pliable.

My weight is stable but my lifts have generally made progress. For several of my movements I started this cycle at basically the same weight that I started the previous cycle, but attempted to add reps, and this has generally worked. I am now taking another deload week which will consist mostly of cardio, stretching, and foam rolling. After the deload is over I will continue adding volume to my two cardio days, as each of these are stil below an hour, there is still loads of room for improvement, and I enjoy them. For my lifting sessions I am going to reduce between-set rest times by 30s each week (starting at the current length of 240s) until I feel in need of another rest week or I reach 30s, whichever comes first. My longest lifting day pushes 90 minutes right now, which is fine but doesn't leave any room to add volume, so it's time to increase density.

Some other observations: I noticed that at my current height and weight, my BMI is smack at average, which was revelatory. I still thought of myself as a thin person, and indeed, by modern standards I am quite thin. But medically or historically, I am very average. I purchased an air fryer recently and it has been instrumental in dinner preparation - it is now straightforward to reliably produce good chicken, potatoes, carrots, beets, or some combination of these. I've also started keeping a greater variety of carbs on hand - cream of wheat, cream of rice, grits, bagels, pasta. I don't eat a carb-heavy diet; if anything I typically eat too little starch, and so it's nice to have these things around the house. Overall I have gained 2-2.5 lbs in the past 17 weeks, which I'm quite pleased with. I may not gain any during the next cycle since I'll be working on increasing density, but it should set me up for gains in the following cycle.

Update 3 (4/15/2023): my previous plan of reducing rest times by 30s per week did not pan out. In the first week I realized how much of a difference 30s made and so I decided to stay with a given level of rest for a few weeks - basically until I no longer noticed the rest periods feeling short. Next week I will use 120s rests, and plan to continue reducing my rest times every several weeks until I reach 30s. For the sake of time, I now do just one lifting session per week (26 sets at present) and one 60-minute bodyweight circuit. This is not a lot of volume, but it's what I can recover from well at the moment. I am eating a lot of potatoes - sweet potatoes, chips, fried potatoes, mashed - and seem to suffer through fewer meals where I don't know what to eat as a result.

Update 4 (9/10/2023): I have continued reducing rest times down to 30s. For every exercise where it is viable, I have also switched to a unilateral version. This acts as a further reduction in rest time (no rest between right and left sides) and also serves to balance out some asymmetries I noticed I was developing in my upper body. During the week I switched from doing my bodyweight circuit to doing mobility and physical therapy exercises - I believe I've finally correctly diagnosed my knee and back ailments (due to weak glute medii and poor thoracic mobility, respectively), and so I'm working on rectifying those problems. I've seen clear progress in the past couple of months, but there's probably a couple more months of work to do before I can put those on maintenance. Due to my decreased rest times, my weekend lift is now nice and short, so I'm going to start adding in an extra set every few weeks. I'll focus on upper body pressing and then lower body once my knee permits. Although it's been over a year since I originally posted this and I've gained maybe 2 pounds, I do feel like I've made a lot of necessary preliminary progress.