If I had to start all over again from scratch as a skinny fat lifter…
How would I have done things differently with my workouts to get where I am quicker?
There are a few big mistakes I made along the way.
Let me help you avoid them.
In order to answer that, let me show you what I did to get to where I am.
The programs that got me here
The first one was a five day per week program.
A random one that I found on bodybuilding.com. I would go to the local rec center and I doubled all the sets. Instead of doing three sets of curls, I would just do six sets of bicep curls.
I smashed it out with absolutely everything I had in my soul.
One night I came home from the gym and had a hard time falling asleep because no matter how I laid down I couldn’t make my biceps comfortable.
They were so sore – no matter if they were bent or stretched out… it was intense.
The Strength Era
Next up was 5×5 – exclusively done in my parent’s garage, with a rusty weight set from Facebook Marketplace.
This program emphasizes squat, bench and deadlift. It also puts a lot of weight into progressive overload, adding some weight each week and just sticking with a few basic exercises over time, which was an important thing for me.
I needed that early on.
This was when I started to notice a little bit of muscle growth, especially on my legs.
I ended up finishing that program with a 275 pound squat at 19 years old.
Super solid stuff for beginners. There’s no complexity. It teaches you the fundamentals of lifting, which is just repeating exercises over time and getting stronger at them and adding weight when you can adding reps where you can.
But it quickly became stale for me.
I also missed out on a lot of muscular development that I would have liked. It doesn’t train your biceps. There’s a lot of triceps work that it’s lacking. Back development too.
I kind of wish I had done a 5×5 plus.
Adding direct arm, shoulder, and back work.
Getting Jacked
Next up was the Renaissance Periodization Male Physique Template.
This exposed me to hypertrophy training. All the volume requirements I was missing out on with 5×5 were definitely met in this program. I ended up doing a session that I won’t forget. It was 14 sets of quad work between high bar squats and leg pressing.
In the gym, literally questioning why I was working out because my legs were so destroyed, pumped, and devastated for days after that session.
I never felt anything like that, especially with that program where you gradually build each week, and you end up training to failure at the end of the block.
But that style of training taught me a ton about training for muscle growth.
The big one was this:
how to add not only weights and reps, but also sets for more growth
My legs have never grown that fast.. since doing that program or before doing that program.
At this point, I was actually kind of starting to look like I lifted, which was cool
Competitive Powerlifting and Beyond
Not long after that the RP program, I hired Canadian national powerlifting champion, Matt Vena.
He coached me in powerlifting. We worked together for just over a year and a half. We took my squat from 355 to 500, and deadlift to the mid 500’s. I competed in powerlifting.
I got a lot stronger, which was just awesome and super fun. I fell in love with powerlifting during that time. After that, I transitioned to building my own workout plans and I just rocked a push-pull-legs style split.
Now I’m training six days a week with a more hypertrophy focused training style.
Similar to the RP style stuff.
This past year I lost 50 pounds.
The combo of those two things has done absolute wonders for my physique.
And it’s been pretty amazing for my joints too.
The first thing I would have done differently…
Is not mixing strength and size training as much as I did.
Look, I love powerlifting. It’s fun and it found me at an awesome time in my life. I just love the excitement of setting PRs on squat, bench, and deadlift.
But I would be lying if I said that I would be able to get to my physique where I am today at the same rate, doing all the powerlifting stuff that I did instead of solely focusing on building more muscle in the gym.
Yes – training for strength will make you more jacked.
Just like training for muscle growth will make you stronger.
But you have to accept that if you’re doing both of them at the same time, you’re going to be getting a little bit less of both than if you were to just focus on one primarily over the other.
We discussed this in detail in a previous letter – I Trained Like a Bodybuilder for 13 Months (Here’s What Happened)
That tradeoff is worth it for a lot of people. I know it was for me for a long time.
But, pretty much anything will work if you’re a total beginner to training.
That’s a big part of why you see people building a crazy amount of muscle on 5×5.
You don’t need anything fancy – you’ll grow quads from a handful of bodyweight squats.
Doing Less Variety
As you can see, I’ve done several different training plans.
Those are only really the big milestone ones that I did. In between those were interspersed tons of different programs. With all kinds of different exercises.
It’s great to experiment with lots of new stuff as you’re getting into training, or exploring new methodologies.
But after a while, you need to ‘try something on‘ and make it fit well enough.
You can tweak it as needed.. But just sit down and stick with that for a matter of months or even years.
As long as it’s working, that’s amazing.
That’s all you really have to find is something that works.
Ideally, it’s something you can tolerate or even enjoy!
As long as it’s working, just plug away at it and stop switching things up all the time.
On top of all this, I was big into outdoor sports at the time.
- Rock climbing.
- Week-long backcountry ski trips
- Mountain biking.
- Trail running.
I was doing all kinds of arduous, extended periods of intense adventure sport.
Keep in mind that if you are really pouring your soul into something (especially a physical pursuit) that isn’t lifting – that’s going to draw on your ability to get stronger and build more muscle
Just like strength and size compete with your training, so too does everything else that you do physically. All the other sports that you do, and all the other stressors in your life, they’re all competing for recovery resources.
I’m not saying you have to quit doing all the sports you love.
If you love playing pickleball, you love going for bike rides and all that stuff, that’s amazing.
Just consider that if your primary goal is to build muscle and get stronger in the gym, you should probably just focus on those things for a bit and dial down the rest of everything else if you want your absolute best results possible.
And definitely avoid doing a bunch of random burpees, HIIT and random circuit training bullshit to burn more calories.
That’s a terrible way to burn fat.
This is exactly what I teach in On-Demand Fat Loss.
That won’t work for almost anyone.
Nostalgia, fellas… this feels like a whole other lifetime.
Each one of these pictures comes with a story you wouldn’t believe.
Simple Progression
Simplicity goes so far early on in your lifting career.
Repeat exercises that work for you, beat your log book week after week, add some weight or some reps or some sets where you can and push your performance higher over time.
If you push hard in the gym with solid technique for an extended period of time while applying those principles while you’re in the gym, you’re going to make better progress than you might imagine.
More Total Work
I was always shy about doing too much training.
I was worried about over training. Can you believe that? How ridiculous is that? I was chronically under training.
Doing three sets of bench press twice a week is probably not going to lead to overtraining, right?
But I can guarantee you that after a while it’s not going to lead to a juicy set of watermelon pecs.
Instead of blaming my genetics when my arms weren’t growing, I should have stopped doing these half-assed two sets of bicep curls at the end of my upper body workout once or twice a week.
I would have done more sets
I would have done those sets harder
I would have trained each muscle group more frequently
All that leads to more high-quality work throughout the week.
Which means more muscle, ja?
Honestly, even 10 sets per week for my biceps or my chest is still a pretty modest amount of work.
Most guys can still definitely add some more sets from there and continue to benefit and grow from it.
Don’t just jump into doing 10, 15, 20 sets a week right away today.
But if you slowly add sets over time, you might find that your performance continues to increase, you continue getting crazy pumps in the gym, and your biceps are growing like all kind of crazy…
Maybe you hit 15 sets per week and you think:
You know what, I can still recover from this and handle a little bit more work, I’ll add one more set next week and see how it goes.
That might just be the ticket to all the gains that you ever wanted, which was 100 percent the case with me.
Consider this the ‘devil on your shoulder’ message from your uncle Matteo to do more sets on the muscles that you want to grow, if you need to.
Keep training hard.
Keep training consistently.
Never stop learning.
What you accomplish over the next ten years is going to absolutely blow your mind.
Thank you for reading this week’s letter.
Matteo
PS: Fifty for Fifty re-opens tomorrow, Feb 25th, to a limited number of guys.
If you want to lose 50 lb this year, keep it off, get added support and motivation from a group of guys with amazing energy – email me at matteo@marrastrength.com with the word FIFTY in the subject line.
I’ll send you the details today before anyone else sees them.
