How do you make "gains"?

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Plain and simple.

I quit soda and pizza, drink sh!tloads of water, eat lentils, garbanzo beans,bread, and chicken all day.

Quit masturbation for negative effects on mental fitness (as Aspies we just CAN'T skimp on concentration whatsoever) as well as physical energy.


IDK how much rest and alternating between exercise and rest I need.

Well, getting more sleep always helps. I found out one of my biggest problems was I wasn't getting enough vitamin C, and that I actually need probably 4000mg a day. The reason you need vitamin C is for your adrenal glands. If you're just stressed out even without lifting and you're getting overwhelmed, you need vitamin C, but for lifting I might be taking even more, just to fuel the adrenal glands. Your body turns vitamin C into adrenaline. I used to take it a lot, and then sorta...let it slip, but now I need to get back into the habit of taking a lot of vitamin C.

Sleep, get a lot of sleep. Have no social life ever, go to bed at 8, haha.

But as far as training goes, generally what I do is, I don't do a lot of reps. I try to go for lots of heavy singles, doubles, triples. And I try to max out as much as possible, I try to put more weight on the bar and hope I can get it up. It's in essence that simple, to lift more weight...you gotta lift more weight.

The other thing is variety of sorts. Like for squats, right, do back and front squats. If you get a higher front squat, your back squat will go up, and vice versa. Specifically with front squats, they work your abs amazingly well, as your abs are holding you up and keeping you not from bending, I remember after maxing out on a front squat, my abs "hurt" (not really hurt, but were tense like, worked out) for 2 days. For deadlifts, my usual way of lifting is sumo stance, but I do snatch pulls (wide grip, hands about an inch away from the end of the bar) to make it have a higher pull, so when I do the lower pulled sumo stance, I can lift more as I'm used to lifting at a deficit. Doing some power cleans, split leg deadlifts, etc, will help on the deadlift. Also squatting will improve the deadlift, too. For squatting, I'm in the Olympic squatting camp, ie, squatting all the way down like this: http://bretcontreras.com/wp-content/upl ... Squats.jpg. You use less weight that way, but your leg muscles are worked more (though lowbar powerlifting squats work the back muscles more) but I find after doing OL style squats, if I go for a powerlifting style squat, it seems very easy. So even if you don't do those fulltime, you should do them sometimes to add some variety.

As far as upper body stuff, well, I don't bench because I just don't like benching and it's not really needed much in my sport. Usually I do standing overhead presses, split jerks, and push presses. My upper body lift numbers kinda...suck. Usually I do upper body at the end, and I'll do squats/deadlifts for an hour, and then upper body for like 20 minutes. So that's a problem on my end. I've found, for increasing those lifts, again, push press from in front of your neck and behind the neck, split jerks, and strict presses. Change it up. So for benching, you might wanna do incline, strict overhead press, and close grip and benching with a wide grip, and then come back to the bench press later, and see if the numbers improve. Also, pullups help, too. To a point, too, you gotta pick which lifts you wanna excel at. I've pretty much not cared much about my upper body lifts just because I decided to concentrate on my squats and pulls.

So pretty much use some variety, and good nutrition and sleep.

Also, as far as cutting out junk food, well... I have an interesting story for you. I ate probably an entire medium or large Dominos pizza, and had like 3-4 glasses of Pepsi. I waited like an hour or so and went to the gym, broke my clean and jerk personal record that day. So to a point, you can eat as much junk food as you want, but you'll like, get fat and look like this if you keep lifting: http://www.andyboltonstrength.org/wp-co ... h-1003.gif But then again, if he were to diet down, he'd probably be damned good by bodybuilding standards, but he'd lose strength. But junk food isn't really that terrible of a fuel for weightlifting, just you'll get fat. But, so many powerlifters/etc will just hit up a buffet every night and stuff their faces. Just after doing that, if you wanna look good, you gotta have the discipline to diet down.

Last edited by 1000Knives on 15 Jul 2012, 12:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It depends on what exactly your fitness goals are. Being vague and having the same fitness goals as 80 percent of the people who attempt to make a change (e.g. "lose weight", "be more fit/lean/ripped ") will just frustrate you and you'll probably end up giving up on it after a few weeks. Once you can define what you want (and possibly why you want it) though it will be easier to take the appropriate steps towards that without making any unnecessary deviations and time-wasters. You could start out with something like "I want to be strong" or "I want to run a marathon" or even "I want to look good naked". Then you can figure a baseline for how much.

I mean you can't make "gains" unless you first define what constitutes "gains", right?

Train in circles. Train as hard as you can. Sleep at least 8 hours (thanks to Arnold for this hint, it is really important). Train everyday. If your training is boring, you're doing something wrong.
If you want to "gain" muscle, you should have at least 2 days of rest between working out muscle groups, better three. If you want to do running, don't go running every day, have at least 1 or 2 days of rest inbetween as well. Eat enough. Get your carbs from vegetables and fruit, and skip on white flour and refined sugar (a tremendously good substitue for white flour is spelt. Little more expensive, but tastes even better in my oppinion and is much better overall). If you eat meat, avoid red meat and subsitute with poultry and fish (I am vegetarian, so if you are as well, protein shakes are really good nowadays). Quitting on masturbation also allows you to control your testosterone levels better.
I stacked on about 35 pounds over the last 6 months, and almost all of it in muscle. You don't need to hit a gym to get in shape, all you need is bodyweight exercises, a set of dumbbells and a chin-up bar.

Check if you suffer from "f*ckarounditis".

Do heavy compound movements instead of isolation exercises specifically for every angle and every muscle. There are a lot of bro-scientists on the internet who do lateral raises and front raises and similar exercises at the cost of compound exercises, but every old school bodybuilder who got big in the pre steroid days (Bill Pearl, Reg Park and so on), did so with compound movements.

Heh, what Kurgan said reminds me so much of stronglifts

Having clear goals is a must, and having a diet plan is great too, good job on that.

If you choose to do heavy compound exercise, three times a week, leaving one day for rest in-between, should be enough.

And what kind of gains do you want to do? Because personally I find gaining weight so hard that I must sometimes drink sodas and eat junk food to add some extra calories to my diet when I don't have enough time for a proper lunch, is that too unhealthy or something?

I would say if it doesn't affect your strength gains, don't bother trying to gain weight for the sake of gaining weight. I've been thinking a lot about Lamar Gant, probably the best powerlifter, 5x bodyweight deadlift, he was like 115lbs and rode a bike 30 miles a day. I see looking at things from a strength perspective of just wanting the highest strength to weight ratio possible. Then again, I'd always wanted to be skinnier, as far as body image goes, so yeah. But, I'd much rather be 130lbs instead of 195, but alas I'd be single digit bodyfat at 170s.

Well, I have a goal weight of 65kg, or 143 pounds, but right now I weigh 60kg, or 130 pounds. Not all of it (although a good part) should be muscle: weight in general is useful to give me more inertia and stability, and fat is useful to keep me warm and make me a bit fuller in general.

Also, even eating good amounts of pizza, pasta, rice, chocolate, bananas and other high-caloric food, my weight gains are still slow, so there.

That's why I wanted to know, what did he want to accomplish

Lol as far as pizza and stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if South America has a better food supply than USA. I know my friend from Sweden, within 6 months of being here gained like 20lbs.

I don't know, I find it confounding how all the "skinny" guys wanna gain weight. Lol, I have an Indian friend who's skinny who struggles to eat over 2500 calories a day, and I can eat that in a meal if I feel like it.

It depends on what your goal is, and what gains you are looking for.

What negative effects of masturbation? I can't think of any medical reasons. Burns calories, strengths muscle, and biologically speaking, it's better to have fresh semen when having sex than stale mutated ones.

As for gains, you need to know what you want. Do you want to loose 20lb, 40lb, 60lb? Do you want to be able to run faster, run longer, lift more?

For example.

My goal is to get to 200lb. I weighed 240 when I began, and 219 now.

That is a gain.

The "negative effects" of masturbation can include having a sucky workout. I notice that if I masturbate prior to working out, the workout suffers. It's better to wait until after.