Want to learn how to build muscle most effectively? Good news: I’m bringing you exclusive insights from 7 of the world’s smartest hypertrophy scientists. Using their research on muscle growth, I’ll create a step-by-step blueprint that will serve as your ultimate muscle-building hack. Without further ado, here’s the best way to build muscle.

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MUSCLE BUILDING EXPERTS:
Dr. Mike Israetel: https://www.instagram.com/drmikeisraetel/
Dr. Brad Schoenfeld: https://www.instagram.com/bradschoenfeldphd/
Daniel Plotkin: https://www.instagram.com/danielplotkin/
Josh Pelland: https://www.instagram.com/josh.datadrivenstrength/
Dr. Milo Wolf: https://www.instagram.com/wolfcoach_/
Dr. Eric Helms: https://www.instagram.com/helms3dmj/
Alan Aragon: https://www.instagram.com/thealanaragon/

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So, when it comes to how to build muscle, the first piece of the puzzle is exercise selection. Dr. Mike Israetel provided his insight. He says the number of exercises to build muscle you should have in your plan for muscle growth is something like 2 to 4 per muscle. He also emphasizes that you shouldn’t change exercises every week. Instead, you should only switch things up if your exercise is hurting your joints, it’s boring you, et cetera, and there are other good candidates around.

Dr. Brad Schoenfeld then came in to explain volume and frequency. On the number of sets needed to optimize hypertrophy: it’s somewhere in the range of 10-20 sets per muscle group weekly. However, there may be a benefit to specialization cycles where high volumes can be beneficial for a given muscle group. Beginners should not be focusing on volume for hypertrophy. The first several months should just be focused on learning your movement patterns and very basic type routines. There does seem to be a modest hypertrophy benefit in training a muscle more than once a week when you exceed 8 to 10 sets per muscle or more per week. Brad recommends an upper lower split.

As for how heavy you should lift and the rep range you should use to build muscle, Daniel Plotkin says that for most people, between 5 and 15 reps, which is usually a moderate load. Then, during each set, apply a progressive overload technique called double progression. This is where you focus on increasing your reps before adding more weight. For example, if you can do 8 reps with a certain amount of weight, aim to do more reps with that same weight the following week. Keep going until you get to 12 reps per set, which is when you should you consider adding a small amount of weight, continuing the process.

And on whether training to failure is truly the best way to gain muscle, Josh says although training to failure may lead to more growth when you look at just 1 set in isolation, it also creates more fatigue. That’s why he recommends training 2 to 3 reps in reserve for all your sets except for the last set, where you’d just take it all the way to failure.

Dr. Milo Wolf then shares a hypertrophy hack: lengthened partials, which seem to produce more, or at the very least, the same amount of hypertrophy than a full range of motion. He recommends instead of doing a full range of motion on a given exercise, try using about 50% or about half reps in that lengthened position.

Now, it’s time to learn more about the other half of the how to build muscle equation, nutrition. Dr. Eric Helms explains calorie intake. Basically, you want to scale your calorie surplus and your rate of weight gain to your experience level. So if you’re a beginner, gaining 2% of your body weight per month, which would roughly track with that 300 to 500 calorie surplus is a good idea. And then if you’re an intermediate, probably something closer to 1% of your body weight per month is a decent target. That’s probably gonna be between the 200 to 300 calorie surplus.And then if you are advanced, we’re probably talking a 100 to 200 calorie surplus at most and gaining like 0.5 to 1% of their body weight per month.

Finally, Alan Aragon explains protein intake. Here’s what he says: of first importance, get total daily protein straight, which is 0.7 to 1.0 g/lb bodyweight, that’s the cake. For the icing on the cake, spread it out relatively evenly over a minimum of 3 protein doses over the course of the day. As for the best protein sources, Alan recommends getting a mix of protein sources throughout the day.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – 7 Experts
0:55 – Best Exercises Per Muscle
6:04 – Volume/Frequency
8:33 – Progressive Overload
10:40 – Training to Failure
13:33 – Lengthened Partials
16:06 – Nutrition (CALORIES)
18:56 – Nutrition (PROTEIN)
22:19 – Full Routine

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Deadlifts can be scary, especially if you don’t know how to deadlift with proper form. Here’s how to deadlift for beginners in 5 easy steps.

Step 1: creating the pillar. Proper deadlift form starts with your feet. Walk up to the bar and align it right over your shoelaces in the middle of your foot. Widen your feet to about hip-width apart with your toes facing forward. Next, your hips and ribs. Deadlifting with the hips and ribs misaligned is the most common reason for back injury. They should remain stacked like a pillar and stay that way as you lift. To do that, let’s start with the hips. Think of your hips as a bowl full of water. Tilt your pelvis back so the bowl is flat. You can think as if you were trying to bring your belt buckle to your chin. As for the ribs, flatten them by engaging your core. At this point your ribs and hips should be stacked evenly on top of each other. But to keep them locked in that position, squeeze your glutes and inner thighs together and feel yourself getting taller as you do so. And finally, make a fist in each hand and push them down towards the ground to straighten your arms and activate your lats.

Step 2: grabbing the bar. When you perform deadlifts, keep the pillar we created in step 1, and start pushing your hips back while keeping your fists pushing straight down under your shoulders. Imagine you had a bag full of groceries in each hand and you’re trying to close the car door with your butt. You want to continue pushing your hips back as far as you can WITHOUT your big toes coming off the ground. Once you reach that end point, bend your knees and bring your shins to the bar to pull yourself down those last few inches. Keep going until you can hook your hands onto the bar just outside your knees.

Step 3: creating the wedge. The wedge is a powerful position that will prevent your lower back from being compromised as soon as you lift the weight on the deadlift. To create it, drive your knees out against your arms. Then, take a deep 360 breath as if you were wearing a belt and trying to push air against all sides of it, and then brace your core as if someone were about to punch your stomach. Next, think about extending your chest and getting tall from your hips all the way to your head. And finally, activate your lats by squeezing your armpits as if you had oranges in them and you were trying to make orange juice.

Step 4: push. This is actually the simplest step, but it’s also where most people screw up their proper deadlift form. They think how to deadlift as a “pull” and end up breaking out of the position we worked so hard to create. To avoid this, a deadlift technique to use is to imagine your arms were ropes with hooks at the end of them just hanging onto the bar. Then, to lift the weight, rather than going from 0 to 100 and jerking the weight off the floor, keep the tightness we created in step 3 and think about pushing the floor away with your feet harder and harder until the bar lifts off the ground. When done correctly, your hips and chest should rise at the same rate. Continue pushing the floor away until the bar passes your knees, and then think about thrusting your hips forward or humping the air in front of you to meet the bar at the top of the lift. To avoid injuring your back at the top, your shoulders should not be behind your heels and your low back should not be arched. To prevent this, as you come to the top imagine you’re about to get punched in the stomach and keep your glutes squeezed together. At the top your hips, ribs, shoulders, and chin should all be stacked like parallel floors of a building.

Step 5: descent. We want to control the weight down, but we need to do this with correct deadlift form. Now this will look very similar to what we did back in step 1, the only difference now is that you have a bar. Many people tend to let the bar sway forward in front of them which causes a lot of stress on the low back. Instead, push your hips back and slide the bar down as close as possible along your thighs. As soon as the bar passes your knee caps, that’s when you can bend your knees and slide the bar along your shins to get the bar back over your mid-foot. But to avoid losing tension and leaving gains at the table, avoid bouncing the weight up off the floor. Instead, stay tight and gently touch the floor with the weight before your next rep. And … congrats my friend! You’ve just learned how to deadlift properly! Not so scary after all, right?

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If you want to improve your push up form – and do more push ups, this video is for you. We’re going to show you how to (finally) push up properly by covering how you can optimally set up your body position, stabilize that position by activating the right muscles, and finally, combine it with a few modifications (i.e. push up variations) to unlock its maximum potential. After this video, you can be sure to get better push ups. Your push-up strength and the muscle growth you get from performing it will be taken to a whole new level.

First, setup. Getting this right is crucial to if you want to improve your push up form. We’ll start with hand placement. In general, you’d want it such that if you were to look down from an overhead view, your elbows should make an “arrow” shape. To find your sweet spot hand position, lie down on the floor with your hands at the level of your mid-chest. Take a look at your forearm and elbows. Move your hands until you find the hand width where the forearm is positioned directly over the wrists and the elbows are tucked into that arrow position (roughly a 45 to 60 degree angle). Most of you will end up with a hand placement at the mid-chest level and placed just outside the shoulders. Keep your hands on the floor. Then get onto your hands and knees, with your knees right under your hips.

This step is where we’ll focus on turning on several muscles that’ll help better stabilize your body as you perform your push-up, avoiding what’s called “Energy Leaks”. In turn, helping you do more push ups. Start by pushing your knuckle down into the floor and spreading your hands such that there’s space between each of your fingers. This will help us incorporate more of our powerful chest muscles. Next, slide your shoulders down and away from your ears. You should feel your lats turn on as you do this. Then, while maintaining this activation in your lats, push the floor away to open up your shoulder blades to integrate the serratus anterior. At this point, your head will likely be protruding forward. Adjust this by pulling your chin back to draw your head back in line with your body. This helps avoid stressing the neck and also puts our mid-back muscles into a better position for stabilization.

At this point we’re done stabilizing the upper body and are ready to move to the lower body. We’ll start by setting your hips in the right position. To do so, think about tucking your tailbone. Once you’ve made it here, you’re ready to step back. Take a breath in, engage your core, and then extend one leg back. Dig your toes into the floor and squeeze your thigh really tight to fully extend your leg. Hold that, then step the other leg back and squeeze the other thigh tight. Now you know all the basics of how to push up properly.

To perform your push-up, we’re actually going to start by pulling and then pushing. So from the top position we established in step 2, do not just let gravity flop you to the floor. Instead, to get better push ups, think about using your back muscles to pull yourself to the floor as if you were performing a row. Your body will have to travel forward slightly as you do so in order to keep those elbows directly over the wrists like we talked about in step 1. Then, while squeezing your butt and thighs, push away from the floor to the top to open up your shoulder blades again as we did during our setup. At this top position your head, hips, and feet should make one straight line. Maintain this as you proceed to your next reps.

Now that we’ve nailed down your perfect push-up, it’s time to modify it and use the appropriate push up variations based on your current strength level and body type. If you struggle with push-ups and can’t do more than 10 good push-ups, you can either do leg-banded push ups or incline push ups. For those who instead have “mastered” the standard push-up and can perform more than 20 good reps with them, it’s time to increase the difficulty. The most convenient way is to just slow down the reps. Instead of taking 1 second to go down, extend it to 3 seconds. Do the same on the way up. Once that becomes too easy, incorporate a 1-2 second pause at the bottom as well. My personal favorite, however, is banded push-ups.

If you want to maximize your growth and strength, it’s important to apply this same level of detail and execution with all of your exercises, not just your push-up. For a step-by-step program that shows you how to do just that, with in-depth tutorials for each and every exercise included in your program, then take our free quiz below to determine which of our programs are best for you and your goals:
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