Hey guys I pasted some pictures together to show some of my progress over the last 4.5 years. The third picture was taken about 4 months ago.

Impressive. Also got Frontside and legs?
What were your lessons learned for the five years?

Seems like you have added some size. ALso i like how crooked your first two poses are. Great work man. What kind of training and diet have you had? Straight gaining or have you done some cuts in there as well.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I do have some front poses so maybe I'll put those together later today as well. I wish I had taken more pictures on my quest for muscle. Yeah my first poses are so crooked because I have no idea what I'm doing lol.

The pictures make the progress look like it was linear but it really wasn't. I made majority of my progress in the last 2 years. The biggest lesson I've learned is that it's not about working harder or smarter. It's about working harder AND smarter.

You can bust your ass in the gym as hard as you want but if your routine or diet is shit you'll make no progress. Likewise you can know every single cellular reaction going on in the body but you're not willing to push yourself you'll never make any gains either. Once you combine these two things together though your body has no choice but to respond and get bigger.


EDIT: I know the 2D nature of pictures can make progress look less dramatic... so just for reference my arms are 15 inches in the first picture and 17.25 in the third picture.

So what changes did you make when you started going harder and smarter? What did you change in diet and training?

Diet- I started eating a lot more. A LOT MORE. Too much more lol. For awhile I was consuming 6000 plus calories a day. I got a lot bigger and stronger but piled on more fat than I should have. Next time I bulk up I'll keep it around 4,000-5,000 a day. A lot of ppl train hard but only eat around 3,000 a day. That's nowhere near enough to build muscle fast. Don't be afraid to get a little sloppy with your diet.

Training- Progression is everything. At the end of the year when your chest isn't bigger... don't look at how many sets of cable crossovers you did... look at how much your bench press went up. Getting stronger at the basic movements is the backbone of getting more muscular IMO. I'm not saying you have to train like a powerlifter but by the end of the year you should be significantly stronger in the basics. I consider the basics the military press, bench press, chin-up, barbell row, deadlift, and squat. For me pressing movements and pulling movements need to be done twice a week. Squatting and deadlifting only need to be once a week.

Just recently I added a half inch onto my arms in 5 weeks (not shown in the above pictures) by trying something a little bit different and it's how I'm going to specialize bodyparts from now on. I would take 2 bicep exercises (reverse curls and alternating dumbbells curls) and 3 tricep exercises (tate presses, rollback extensions, and overhead extensions) and do 2 sets of each exercise with a very heavy weight. Each workout I would focus simply on progressing in these exercises, usually by going up 5 pounds and trying to hit the same reps. After these heavy sets I would just have fun with it. Because the progression aspect is already taken care of I would try to obtain the most insane pump I possibly could... even if this meant doing 30 rep concentration curls it didn't matter bc my heavy lifting was already taken care of. I did this twice a week and the results were amazing.

This pic was taken 3/31/12... In the middle of a cut right now. Bodyweight was 214 when this was taken.

Fucking sick progress mate. I'm sick of being a skinny lean 160lb. Right now I'm only eating about 3000-3500 calories a day. Can you tell me how you were/are getting in 6000? Meal examples? I think 5000-6000 is where I'm gonna need to be.

[quote]Ghost16 wrote:
... Don't be afraid to get a little sloppy with your diet.


Not to sure if this is what ghost meant, but I think he implied we shouldn't avoid, but rather eat pizza, burgers and, among others, chicken wings, if they are needed in order for someone to meet their cal/macros. (Don't tell me you can't meet 4-6k cal by eating the aforementioned foods).