The Brutal Truth About Building Muscle That Most People Don’t Want to Hear

Why are you going to the gym? That answer usually occupies one or more of several reasons: Your doctor said if you don’t start exercising regularly and lose weight you’re going to die before your daughter’s wedding. Or maybe you’re a soccer mom of three intent on regaining your once-toned physique. Or you’re a sports-minded weekend warrior, a hardcore bodybuilder, an old-school lifter pushing back Father Time, or you’re 12 years old and think muscles are cool. In any one of, or combination thereof, all of us have one thing irrevocably in common: We’re trying to do something to our muscles—refine them, define them, make them more efficient and functional for our demands, or anything else you want to call it. Even CrossFit. All require that your body repair and build muscle. There’s no two sides to that.

You Can’t Flex Fat: The True Purpose of Strength Training

If you want to call it toning, sculpting, tightening, contouring, whatever, ultimately, you’re asking your body to build and repair muscle tissue.

Whether or not you actually get to see the result of tightening, toning, sculpting, whatever, is a matter of how much body fat you have covering the muscle. Ever hear the expression, “You can’t flex fat?” Well, you can’t. Only muscle flexes. How much of that muscle’s definition you get to see when it flexes is directly related to how thick of a layer of body fat you have covering the muscle.

So, before you begin down this road, for whatever reason, you must agree that the reason you’re going to the gym is to improve your fitness and wellbeing by, in some way, overcoming gravity repetitively, progressively and consistently, and then allowing yourself to recover from the stimulus. So, in other words, you’re there to build muscle. Period. End of story.

Now, once you’ve cleared that hurdle you have to accept the fact that while you may want a 20-inch arm, Mother Nature does not. Anything beyond lifting a fork to your mouth is, to her, a waste of metabolically active tissue and she doesn’t want you to have it. So, you have to convince her that the 12-inch arm she gave you is insufficient for the continuous gravitational stress you’re applying to it. Maintain that stress and progressively increase it and the muscle will grow because you’re forcing Mother Nature to adapt. But let off that stress for any length of time and Mother Nature starts taking back what you built.

If you have any doubt, stick a 20-inch arm in a cast for eight weeks. You think you’re pulling a 20-inch arm back out? Psst… I have news for you.

The point is simple. You either use it or lose it. Weight training that supports any kind of visible, measurable result is a long-term, near-daily commitment. If there is anywhere in life where you can expect the greatest delayed gratification, it is in trying to make and maintain notable positive changes in your physique and fitness.

And that brings us to the two things nobody thinks about before they start.

First: This is forever

The biggest mistake beginners make is assuming fitness is a temporary assignment. Lose twenty pounds, get beach ready, add a little muscle, tighten up for summer, then somehow maintain it all by occasionally looking at a dumbbell from across the room. It doesn’t work that way. The body only keeps what it believes it needs to survive. Stop training, stop creating demand, and the body immediately begins dismantling the expensive tissue you worked so hard to build. This is not a six-week project. It is a lifestyle contract you are signing with yourself, and the fine print says for life.

Second: Nutrition matters more than you think

You can stimulate muscle growth all day long, but if the raw materials to repair and rebuild tissue are not available, nothing happens. You are literally damaging muscle fibers in the gym and expecting your body to repair them bigger and stronger afterward. That process requires protein, calories, hydration, micronutrients and recovery. The gym is simply the trigger. The actual progress happens outside the gym, usually in your kitchen and in your bed while you sleep. Ignore that fact and you’ll spend years wondering why your body never changes despite all your hard work.

So before you begin, understand what you’re really signing up for.

Fitness is a Lifelong Commitment?

You are entering into a long-term agreement with biology itself. You are going to repeatedly stress your body in ways it does not particularly enjoy, force it to adapt against its own energy-conserving instincts, feed it what it needs to recover, and then do it all over again tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

The iron doesn’t care what your goals are. It doesn’t care about your excuses. It simply responds to consistency over time.

Before you begin, make sure you understand that.

Because once you start…

There is no finish line.