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I have a few questions about building muscle (read details)


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Hey, I'm a 22 year old guy and I've been working out on and off for about a year or so. I've got a few questions in terms of building muscle.

 

Question 1.

Is it going to sabotage me building muscle if I wait a few hours to eat after weight lifting?

 

For example, if I worked out at 1:30PM and ate a meal 2 or 4 hours later, would I lose the results from my workout? Is there a certain amount of time you should eat after a workout?

 

Question 2.

Why are my arms smaller than and not growing as fast as my torso?

 

When I look at myself in the mirror, I notice that my torso seems to grow faster than my arms from working out, and I feel like my arms aren't as big as they should be. I'm currently 146 pounds. How do I get my arms to grow faster?

 

Question 3.

 

Is it possible to gain 5 to 10 pounds in 2 weeks to a month? If so, how do I?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Nah man. There's solid studies that show your body holds plenty of amino acids in the bank. It was like 90g or something. So if you wait a few hours instead of eating and using the amino acids, it just pulls them from your bloodstream and liver or something then takes the food and puts the amino acids back into the bank to replenish what was lost. It's like you have $1000 in the bank. Does it matter if you spend $200 then go deposit a check for $200 or deposit the check first then go spend $200? Nope. Thats why it doesn't matter either to have complete proteins in the same meal. Say you work out at 9am but your morning breakfast is heavy in legumes and the dinner is heavy in grains. In the morning after your workout you will pull the lysine from your body and use the methionine from your meal so you get a complete protein. In the evening you will be good on methionine but low on lysine so you eat your grains and replenish what got used earlier. Then your body keeps pulling methionine to use with the lysine you ate and you refill your methionine bank in the morning when you get your beans in again.

 

Hopefully this makes sense. Your body has a bank of amino acids and glycogen it can call upon at any time so if you don't eat right away you will still have tons of amino acids and glucose to pull from your body bank. This is really over-simplified concepts but hopefully you get the idea. Unless you are hungry your body is doing just fine using what it has in the bank. It's mostly only important to get in a meal if you are in an already fasted state since you won't have a good amount of energy or amino acids left in the bank to use. But as long as you've eaten sometime before your workout and are not on a caloric deficit it isn't a problem to go a few hours before eating after a workout.

 

The only thing you do miss by not eating soon after a weight lifting session is the opportunity to suck up over 100% glycogen. What happens when you exhaust muscle glycogen is the next meal opens pathways for insulin to shuttle glucose back into the cell. If you don't eat gradually you will get it back up to 100% over time. But if you carb up a bunch when the muscle is in a depleted state it shuttles almost all the glucose into the cells so you can get maybe like 102% to 105% more energy for next workout. It's called carb-loading and is a natural immune response. For more information please research carb loading in bodybuilding and athletics. The basic idea is that by depleting the carbohydrates you can then put back more than 100% of it's capacity temporarily. For example a regular person might hold 1800 calories worth of glycogen in their liver and muscles. Over time and training they train their bodies to store more and more glycogen in one go so eventually they will have 10, 20 or 30% more energy to work with than an untrained individual and be able to use it more efficiently as well.

 

Again, I'm not going to explain it completely because the research and studies and articles are a mere google search away.

 

QUESTION 2

Small arms is either genetic, bad technique or bad exercise programming. I have no idea what program you are using, sets, reps, rest period, what your max reps or weight is, tempo, exercise selection, frequency, or technique and load sharing is. There is no way for me to know what is causing your Roger Federer syndrome (the skinny left arm!). Please share your full workout routine per 3, 4, 5 days or week or whatever cycle you are on so I can give you actual advice that will be helpful.

 

QUESTION 3

NOT A CHANCE IN HELL. 10 pounds = 35,000 calories extra in 2 weeks = 2,500 calories extra per day. That isn't going to help you it's just going to make you fat or bloated and hurt. Your body can only gain so much weight at a time. Even experienced bodybuilders will only be able to gain about 10 clean real lbs in a year. We're not talking about dirty bulking. Trust me, I've been through what you are going through before. I was 147 lbs and had super skinny arms and everything really. It's a damn slow process that was 10x slower because I didn't know what the hell I was doing or what I wanted. I know just about everything as of now and I would say you would gain MAX 1lb per week if you had the absolute best training program and best recovery and best exercise selection and periodization and perfect diet and etc.

 

Again, please post a full routine so we know. Videos or links would help as well to see your form and dissect what is going on or not going on.

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