How To Build Muscle, Honestly and Healthily

Arnie as a teenager (left). Myself as a teenager (right)

I'm blessed with the ability to gain muscle relatively quickly and easily. Ironically, as a fashion model this has been more of a curse over my 10 year career than a blessing. A few weeks of eating and training how I would like to and I no longer fit the sample size 40 suits!

While I'll admit that part of my growth potential is genetic, I think it can largely be attributed to my passion/obsession with food, sleep and lifting heavy things. Also in my teenage years I went through a token megalomania phase where I wanted to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Thankfully I got over that boyish beefcake obsession but it did teach me how to train hard, eat prodigiously and get results fast. 

If you're a "hard-gainer" or simply need to build more lean muscle mass here are my five (no shortcut, no supplement, no bullshit) tips to honest muscle growth in a safe, sustainable and healthy way. 

1. Eat real (Paleo) food - more than you think you need. 

If you are lean, if your current diet sucks, if you're "skinny fat", or if you have been trying to lose weight through calorie restriction (and obviously failing because it doesn't work) the chances are that you are not getting adequate nutrition. 

In all of these scenarios, and even if you are overweight, your goal should be to build lean muscle mass, as this is the only sustainable way to improved body composition and optimal health. 

You need to be eating enough quality food not only to maintain your current state but to build new tissue. That is, you need periods of energy surplus - but only of quality, real (Paleo) foods. Extra calories from crabby carbs like sweetened cereals, protein bars, shakes and juice will screw your metabolism and counter your efforts to grow lean.

So cut the processed, adulterated, modern food out of your diet and eat big, satiating meals of whole foods that are high in quality fats, moderate in protein (you don't need to consume prodigious amounts of protein to gain muscle), and moderate in safe carbohydrates. I have written many articles on nutrition so check them out for more detail. 

But basically you need to focus on nutrient and energy dense foods like pastured eggs, coconut products, oily seafood, sweet potatoes, raw nuts, 85% dark chocolate and (not-too-lean) grass-fed meat and pork. 

If you really want to gain size then incorporate more starch such as white rice, sweet potatoes and whole fruit. And if you tolerate dairy then consider adding in fermented, full-fat, (preferably raw) dairy like aged cheese/sour cream/greek yoghurt/kefir.

Click here for my 'Ideal Paleo Eating Day'

2. Sleep more

This is both simple and crucial. You cannot repair and rebuild if you don't rest and reset. I believe sleep is actually more important than training. 

If you smash the gym but only sleep five hours a night, even if your nutrition is impeccable, you will go backwards and put your health at risk in the long term. 

Sleep eight or nine hours a night. The better the quality and quantity of your sleep, the quicker and easier you will gain muscle mass and shed fat. 

3. Train hard, smart, and not too much

Lifting heavy weights is not the only way to gain muscle, but it's the best, fastest, and most efficient way. 

Exercise needs to be an acute stress to your body - enough that it causes positive adaptation and growth but not so much that it becomes a chronic stress from which you cannot recover.

The effective dose of exercise is actually a lot less than you would think. Given that you train at intensity (that is, complex movements at a challenging amount of weight, until failure, without too much rest) I think that two intense weight sessions per week, such as a circuit of 20-30 minutes if you're not stuffing around, is sufficient to build substantial amounts of muscle without risking injury or overtraining. 

I would suggest adding one sprint session to this per week, along with as much low-level movement or activity as possible (e.g. walking, yoga, commuter cycling) and you're good to go!

4. Avoid "chronic cardio"

Q. What do fitness models, sprinters and bodybuilders have in common, besides having massive guns and less than eight percent body fat? 

A. They don't do hours of cardio per week. 

That's right. If you want to get lean then doing long sessions of steady-state cardio is a very bad way to go about it.

When you're trying to build lean muscle mass a high volume of endurance training or "chronic cardio" will counter your efforts. 

Distance running or cycling, for example, is all about efficiency. Do these singular, repetitive movements enough and your body will strip away non-essential muscle to make you more efficient at running or cycling. Just look at pro cyclists or marathoners! Endurance comes at the cost of physique... Unless you're going for that emancipated look (models)?

I'm not saying don't go for a run or ride if you enjoy doing so, I'm just saying that if muscle is your priority then do as little "chronic cardio" as possible and instead focus on high intensity weights and sprints. Feel free to do as much low intensity movement (e.g. walking, yoga, hiking, etc) as you want though. 

Click here for my full article on the 'cardio myth'

Arnie after a few more years of steroid abuse...

5. Rest, recover and don't overtrain

I've already mentioned the importance of sleep and the benefits of short, intense workouts over high volume training but I think this point bears repeating. 

Smashing yourself at the gym, on the pavement or on the road everyday will be counterproductive to your progress (unless you are 18 years old or devouring anabolics like Arnie in the 70s)

While the precipitous overtraining promoted by hardcore fitness communities [cults] like CrossFit or Barry's Bootcamp does lead to great results initially, I believe that this style of training is both unnecessary and unsustainable for the average person. The risk of injury or burn out is simply not worth the results it if your objective is health and a good physique more so than elite performance.

As a type-A personally who is slightly masochistic I've done my fair share of overtraining in the past. I get it. I loved CrossFit for my brief stint at it. Hard workouts are addictive, especially in a competitive environment or group atmosphere. Yet if your goal is to build muscle in the healthiest, most sustainable way that will enhance longevity rather than hinder it, less is definitely more. 

This is why I suggest spacing out your weight sessions with at least one (and up to four) rest days. 

My ideal weekly schedule will look something like this:

Monday: heavy lifting session

Tuesday: yoga

Wednesday: sprints

Thursday: weights + metabolic conditioning (i.e. circuit training)

Friday: rest

Saturday: Rest/Play (cycle, surf, walk along the beach/river, get some sun, etc)

Sunday: yoga

In NYC (except for winter) I cycle everywhere on my fixed-gear as my mode of transport... Often up to two hours a day. This does not count as 'training' but rather 'movement’. So even though I am highly active almost every day I only consider myself to be doing around one hour of actual intense 'training' per week, split over three workouts.

Check out my 'Fitness' page for more information.

Conclusion

If you want to build muscle honestly and healthily you need ample nutrition, sleep and rest. Training is important but intensity trumps volume. To summarize:

1. Nutrition: Eat as much clean, real Paleo food as you want/need. 
2. Sleep: Aim for eight hours a night, minimum.
3. Train: Train hard, smart and not too much.
4. Avoid chronic cardio: do weights/circuits, sprints and lots of movement.
5. Avoid overtraining: rest, recover and rebuild.

"Form a habit. Forge a lifestyle." 

The Paleo Model

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My Experience With Intermittent Fasting

WARNING: I am not a doctor or health practitioner. Just because I look good in Speedos does not mean you should take my advice or do what I do. What works for me may not work for you and vice versa. Beware of people like me who take an N=1 experiment on themselves and get all preachy as if they have the answer… I'm looking at you, Tim Ferris. 

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Being a huge fan of the Paleo diet and the amazing results I have seen (body composition, energy levels, overall health) in the two years I have been eating in this manner I thought I'd toy with this idea of Intermittent Fasting (IF). In this article I first explain a bit about IF and then go on to describe what happened to me when I tried it for six weeks last year. It ends with some thoughts on who may benefit from IF and who should probably stay clear. 

What, IF?

Basically, Intermittent Fasting is an eating pattern that alternates between periods of fasting and feeding. Ramadan is an example of IF (although you probably won't get smitten by Allah if you don't observe this type of IF strictly). IF may involve alternate-day fasting, fasting one or two full days a week, fasting every day for an arbitrary number of hours or any other combination. 

The form I chose to do it involved a 'condensed eating window' of four to eight hours a day, every day. Some would call this a 16:8 or 20:4 intermittent fast The timing and ratio changed daily but effectively I was not eating anything from around 9pm at night until some time between 1pm to 5pm the next day depending on when I trained. 

I was training in the fasted state. And by training I mean heavy weight training often paired with metabolic conditioning (high intensity interval training ala CrossFit). In hindsight I think this was a mistake, but more on that later.

From when I broke fast after my workout I would eat as much and as often as I liked during that four to eight hour period until starting the next fast. Thereafter it was just water and black coffee in the mornings until my next feeding window. Not that crazy, really. (Is it?? I can be a bit crazy sometimes... Who said that?) It's important to note that I was also eating low-carb at the time. Probably between 50-100 gm of carbs a day, which is very low for my activity levels and size. 

Why the F would you do that?

Good question! Well, firstly I am an inquisitive person and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. IF has become very popular in the whole Paleo-sphere and there have been quite a few (animal) studies over the years suggesting that calorie restriction and/or intermittent fasting could really have some potential health and longevity benefits. 

For example, in multiple animal studies rats that were fasted (usually alternative days of no food) ended up living up to 50% longer than the 'eat whenever you want' control group. It seems like the mechanism was somehow related to fertility - in scarce times when the body doesn't have enough energy to reproduce it will delay the aging process in order to live long enough to reproduce. The fasting rats' telomeres - the ends of chromosomes that shorten as you age - degraded at a slower rate.

I later found out that the latest research was suggesting that this longevity effect is somewhat overstated and nowhere near as prominent in primates/humans. In particular, one primate study suggested that severe fasting (one week on/one week off) for your whole life may increase life span by up to seven years for a human. Hardly worth it for a life of misery in my opinion! The theory is that unlike rodents, large mammals with long gestation periods (like humans, elephants etc) require relatively less energy to rear their young than, say, mice, for whom rearing young requires a greater proportion of their total available energy. Thus the longevity effect of fasting is far less for humans than rats. 

The other, perhaps more enticing suggested benefit of IF for a body-conscious sucker such as myself is an overall improvement in body composition (maintain lean muscle, lose fat) that IF proponents push. Basically, by fasting large portions of the day your body will naturally switch into a ketogenic (fat burning) state, which should enable stored body fat to be burned for fuel rather than all the readily available glucose from that big bowl of sugar-nothingness known as cereal and large glass of refined fructose (Orange Juice) us fat Westerners have been told constitutes a “healthy breakfast”. 

My experience with Intermittent Fasting

So you're wondering how not eating most of the time worked out for me?

The Good

I did IF consistently for about six weeks last year while living in London. After the first few days I actually found it easy to not eat in the mornings. I was drinking a lot of black brewed coffee and actually felt really mentally alert during the fasted period. Kind of like when I was a kid playing football or doing Athletics and you have that semi-nervous, super-alert feeling when you are about to run out on the field. This is probably a good indication that my sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) was dominating during the latter part of the fasted state and not giving my parasympathetic nervous system (rest and recover) enough field time.

Anyway the first few weeks I was performing well in the gym, and was really growing to like the feeling of not eating for hours on end. It is strangely addictive and definitely gives you a buzz. It makes sense to me that our Paleo ancestors often went very long periods with no food and would often have to hunt in the fasted state and so I guess there may have been some evolutionary pressure on the ability to ramp up alertness when we are very hungry. 

Also, It is quite liberating knowing that you don't have to think about preparing food or snacking every few hours. I think it can help with productivity too. Sometimes around midday I would get quite strong hunger pangs that lasted for about an hour but they would always pass and I would feel great again. As soon as I started training I would feel very energetic - "on the hunt" I guess you would say. 

I have no doubt that we as a people these days do not embrace hunger enough. Instant gratification, greed and relative prosperity have made being hungry a frowned upon and unnecessary condition. It's a shame. Furthermore, I find the natural/Primal hunger you feel during a fast or when in the ketotic state is subtle and tolerable. Contrast this to the modern hangry (hungry + angry) food craving cycle most Westerners face every couple of hours when their blood-sugar plummets shortly after consuming a sugary/grainy meal or snack. I think the 'six small meals a day' myth is defunct for the average person.

The Bad

While my performance was good in the gym for the first few weeks it kind of plateaued after that. I also seemed to lean out a couple of kilos in that initial period but by around week three or four I was back to my normal size/weight again. It started to become obvious that IF wasn't going to turn me into a freak that could walk around at 5% body fat with veins popping out of his abs and bench-pressing 200kg. Don't worry, I'm fully aware that these are unrealistic goals and I not particularly desirable! But I was hoping that this would be a kind of cheat to being super-ripped all the time while also being able to gorge, drink booze and eat a bit less clean than usual. Spoiler alert: It isn't… for me at least.

When you fast for 16-18 hours everyday and it finally comes time to eat, you overdo it. At least I certainly did. I'm always a big eater. I'd say I average 3000-4000 calories a day. I'm very active and I eat high quality whole foods and relatively low levels of carbohydrate so I can get away with an energy-dense diet. When you are trying to get in all your daily calories in just a few hours you really have to eat a lot. 

I am a bit of a fat-kid at heart so I kinda like gorging myself. I think many people would struggle to get enough calories in for the day in just 4-8 hours which is probably why IF is so often heralded as a great weight-loss tool. By default people fall into a substantial calorie deficit and the weight just comes off. But for me it just meant I was eating massive meals and grazing for the rest of the eating window. 

I would routinely eat a whole 100gm block of 85% cocoa dark chocolate in the evening, after already consuming a can of coconut cream, sometime a whole chicken (they are small in the UK) and copious amounts of vegetables, salads and fruit. Ironically, I think I was eating more than I used to eat when not doing IF. More troubling though, I was eating more of the energy-dense foods that I try to limit such as the dark chocolate, coconut cream and nuts. It makes sense that I was probably going to these foods to get the calories quickly and easily as my time frame for eating was restricted. (There are only so many salads and vegetables one has time to prep and eat in 5 hours). I didn't gain weight but I started to feel sluggish.

The Ugly

Around week five or six I started to feel pretty flat. I wasn't sleeping well, my performance was declining in the gym and I started to feel more anxious. It became clear that the honeymoon period had ended and my body wasn't so happy with this new normal. When I couldn't get to sleep at night I knew something was wrong. My body was under stress and not recovering as it should. 

My sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) was in overdrive. I knew it was probably a cortisol issue, adrenal fatigue, a slow-down in thyroid function or most likely a combination of the three. All of these physiological responses are very typical of type-A personalities (me) who push themselves too far, overtrain, under sleep, go too low-carb and are generally addicted to adventure, stress and stimulation… and caffeine!

I was becoming mildly addicted to the buzz of the fasted state, but then obsessing over food more than usual. I had the gut feeling that this wasn't a sustainable or healthy endeavor for me. 

IF's and buts

I stopped IF and went back to a more normal routine, eating breakfast most days. I think my issue was probably with the fact that I was eating too low-carb, training too intensely and trying to do IF all at the same time. When you do intense CrossFit type workouts that are very glycogen (muscle glucose) dependent you really need enough carbs in your diet to replenish the glycogen stores or you will literally run out of gas and start to feel like crap and get all those symptoms I mentioned above (poor sleep, fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, etc). It seems obvious but sometimes you just have to learn for yourself, the hard way!

I've learned my lesson now and when I train intensely I make sure I get enough starchy carbs from things like sweet potato and occasionally white rice. This seems to be working really well for me right now and I'm looking, performing and feeling great - as Robb Wolf would say. (Love that little guy).

I still do the odd IF day now and again but would never do it for prolonged periods of time. It can be a good tool for some people, with the following caveats…

Who should definitely not use IF:

IF is probably not a good idea if you are: highly active or a professional athlete, a person prone to eating disorders, pregnant, highly stressed, suffering adrenal fatigue, diabetic or otherwise metabolically deranged. 

People who could get away with IF a few days a week:

I AM NOT RECOMMENDING INTERMITTENT FASTING. However, if you are healthy, moderately active but not an athlete, sleep well, eat well but are a bit overweight and need a new simple strategy to lose some fat then this could be an option. If you are lean and want to try IF, ask yourself why? Make sure your motives are genuine. 

Take aways from my dabble with IF:

• Hunger is good, natural and largely absent in our society
• Don't do IF with low-carb and high intensity training. This is a recipe for disaster! 
• Used wisely IF can work well for some people
• I believe IF would work best as a random, sporadic practice rather than doing it every day for extended periods of time. Randomness breeds adaptability, resilience and robustness. 
• Take everything I say with a big pinch of iodine-enriched salt as this is purely an N=1 experiment. We are all unique snowflakes who require unique lifestyle guidelines. 

12-month update:

About six months ago I began to do what Dave Asprey calls “Bulletproof Coffee Intermittent Fasting” (BPCIF) This involves the same 16:8 intermittent fast that I was doing except with the addition of consuming one ‘bulletproof coffee’ in the morning. Dave proposes that you get most of the benefits of IF (cell autophagy, insulin sensitivity, improved body composition etc) due to the fact that you are still fasting from carbohydrate and protein. However, the fat from the butter and MCT oil gives you the fuel necessary to get you through the morning and optimize brain function and performance. I personally find that BPCIF works very well for me. I do this most days of the week. I don’t think it is good to keep exactly the same routine when it comes to meal frequency and size. I try to mix it up to keep my body guessing. 

Check out my post on Bulletproof Coffee. 

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Some links from sources I trust on IF and potential benefits and problems:

http://chriskresser.com/to-intermittent-fast-or-not-to-fast-that-is-the-question

https://www.bulletproofexec.com/a-bad-combination-for-women-intermittent-fasting-and-paleo/

http://robbwolf.com/2012/06/14/restricted-feeding-window-4-months/

http://chriskresser.com/intermittent-fasting-cortisol-and-blood-sugar

The mice study:  Hatori, Megumi (2012). 'Time Restricted Feeding Without Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High Fat Diet'. Journal of Cell Metabolism, June 9, 2012.

Image Source: http://agrenlay.deviantart.com/art/Il-buono-il-brutto-il-cattivo-168619986