Muscle Build Experiment

Hey folks,

So Summer’s on its way and I’m getting restless.  I’ve been going to the gym for a while now and I’m seeing some progress, but I want to see what I can achieve when I really focus on muscle building.  I happened to come across this article, which got my brain going on the possibilities that I could achieve.  The guy who wrote it is selling a “how I did it” guide on his site, but he posts up a lot of free info on the process that he used to build muscle.  Enough for me to fill in the gaps.

He described it as an 8-week process, which I feel is a reasonable time frame.  So I decided to use the first two months of my Summer vacation to try my own muscle gain program.  I’m going to kick it off on May 1st.  I’m still shopping around for the best ideas that I can combine into a program that will be all my own, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know.  I’ll post updates along the way, and then a conclusion article to summarize the experience.  Here are my main guidelines:

1. No drugs

No steroids, no testosterone supplements, no hormones.  I don’t even want to go into creatine or vitamin supplements.  I want to do this only using the nutrition from straight-up real food.

2. No living at the gym

I want to do this on a normal schedule that anyone would be able to do.  My plan is to hit the gym three times a week max, for 45 minutes max each session (15 of that being for cardio and warm-up).

And that’s pretty much it.  As I’ve searched for more ideas, I came across this muscle gain article by Timothy Ferriss on the very same topic.  I respect the work Tim has done with effective time management in the Four Hour Workweek, so I’ll apply some of his principles to my workout program as well.

For now I’m planning to focus on a high-meat protein diet, pushing myself to the max at each exercise, and recording my workout results so I can have solid numbers to track this experiment by.

Until May 1st I’ll be fleshing out this workout plan, so if you have any tips or suggestions now would be the time to make them!

Oh, and here’s some pics of my current physical state (and keep in mind that I hope to be a lot tanner by the time this experiment ends )