10 Golden Rules for Gaining Muscle Mass

¿CómOr increase lean body mass or muscle mass? It’s enough to follow some simple rules.

It’s always a challenge to list the 10 commandments, and it’s hard to expect everyone to recognize healthy guidelines that should always be personalized based on each individual’s characteristics. Therefore, we propose 10 useful rules to increase your lean body mass or muscle mass in order to achieve a well-defined physique.

1. Let your body recover: It’s not true that more is better, especially when it comes to consistency. You can train a single muscle group once a day to use it every 6 to 8 days, but the organs your body uses to recover are always the same and risk becoming overloaded. It’s advisable to have periods of supercompensation along with short, frequent training sessions.
2. Get enough quality sleep: It’s important not just to sleep 7 to 9 hours a night, but also to ensure high sleep quality. Deep sleep promotes recovery and growth. Sleep should predominantly occur at night, a well-known truth for those working night shifts, as daytime sleep tends to be of poor quality.
3. Eat frequently: You should have at least 6 meals a day: breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack, dinner, and a post-dinner snack. Always apply the rule of a 2.5-hour interval between meals. If there’s a long gap between lunch and dinner, it’s important to include two snacks in the afternoon.
4. Eat balanced meals: In each meal, make sure to include all necessary nutrients. Not only proteins but also fats, which are great allies as hormonal mediators and provide effective calories for improving recovery.
5. Avoid prolonged training sessions: Intense and/or constant training should be approached with caution. In some cases, they may be valid stimulants, but overdoing it inevitably leads to chronic stress and the catabolism that follows.
6. Think positively: The mind is a great ally for optimizing our metabolic system; positivity helps the hormonal system recover from the negativity generated by daily obstacles and setbacks. It’s essential to identify our goals (including short-term ones) that will allow us to enter the gym with a clear mind, aware of the good training that awaits us.
7. Focus on basic movements: Squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and slow movements are fundamental; it’s not possible to gain mass by overusing lateral raises, crossovers, or curls. Dedicate yourself to these exercises by varying the order, repetitions, and recovery methods. There may be times when supplementary exercises are needed to protect the joints and achieve different types of intensity.
8. Don’t just focus on specific muscle groups: It’s important to build a solid foundation and avoid the common tendency of many beginners to concentrate on one or two muscles after just 6 months of training.
9. Use the right supplements: Be cautious; don’t overdo it—just choose the essentials: good proteins, BCAAs (branched-chain amino acids) or a pool of amino acids, glutamine, creatine, joint support, and HMB. These are sufficient to support and complement your nutrition, which should follow the correct guidelines.
10. Choose a gym that motivates you: It should be well-equipped, especially with what you really need: plenty of dumbbells and bars, and two squat racks. Typically, this kind of environment allows you to meet fellow gym-goers with whom you can share training sessions, goals, and discussions.

There are many other points to discuss, but if you manage to follow these 10, you will have made significant progress.

Success is built from the ground up, optimizing all components—not just focusing on training and nutrition, but also on all factors that contribute to achieving your goals.

Arnold used to say that what’s needed for growth is “training for mass, food for mass, and mindset for mass.”