Imagine you’re building a great new house for you, your family, and your growing collection of garden gnomes. Why you keep accumulating all these garden gnomes, I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither does your family. No one knows.

Regardless, the garden gnomes keep coming. Day-after-day, month-after-month, your collection continues to grow.

Now it’s at a level where you must make a decision.

Either you get rid of your family, you get rid of the garden gnomes, or you build a great new house to accommodate them all.

You’ve decided on option three.

You’re gonna build this great new house!

You start with bricks, and with concrete, and with wood, and brick-by-brick, you actually build this thing.

It takes forever, but you do it. 

First off, good job!

Your wife is happy.

Your kids are happy.

Your garden gnomes are happy.

You are happy!

Time goes by…

The seasons change.

A year passes. Then two. The garden gnomes multiply. “They’re like gremlins,” your wife comments one evening.”

They sorta are, you think.

Sometimes they seem to multiple by night. You go to bed, there’s two on your nightstand, you wake up, eight porcelain eyeballs stare at you expectantly. You’ve begun to put them in the bathrooms. In the kitchen cabinets. In your daughter’s closet. 

It’s time to build more space. To add on to your great-big-house. You decide to build an extra room. A garden gnome room. Maybe even a full garden gnome storage shed. 

Back to Home Depot you go.

You get more concrete, more bricks, more wood.

And you do this because it is impossible to build more house without more materials.

In regard to our bodies, and our goal of building muscle, this same principle applies. add more of anything if you don’t add 

By now you may be wondering what in the good name of God any of this has to do with building muscle.  full sto your building supplies are not with brick, or wood, or concrete, but to build muscle your primary building material at our disposal is calories. Yep, I’m talking food. Just as you couldn’t possibly build an additional room to your house without first gathering all the proper building materials, neither can you add more muscle to your body without also first gathering all the proper building materials.  There’s a hurricane. A tornado. A fire. summer heat turns to but the collection keeps growing. time goes by. a hurricane happens. a tornadoe. a fire. time happens. a few of the bricks on the house have begun to crack. one is chipping. you decide to replace the ones that need replacing. it’s a house after all, and as it gets older, it needs to be maintained. let’s pretend that your muscles are bricks and your brick muscles are what make up this powerful structure that is you. Do you know what happens when you add two tons of water to a fire. muscles must be fed protein. building blocks. Do you know what happens when you try to attach a hundred pounds of concrete to a thousand pounds of high-density polyethylene without using any type of joint compound or any type of glue or any type of adhesive whatsoever?  Calories. yes you will gain fat. creaking open the fat spigot. you cannot make anything bigger by taking things away from it. if you regulate size. if you won’t allow it to get bigger. 

you must tell your body that you want to either keep musle This may seem obvious, 

use your muscles (progressive overload for gain), eat more than your body burns, provide your muscles with a sufficient amount of protein, time.  

Now it would be great if any of this was an exact science, but it is definitely not.

  

Normies would beat feet to the gym iYou may be thinking this is because my workouts are slacking

 after I lost merely accepting the   at that level because it was so we can either maintain a weight we are proud of, or body is never completely one hundred percent fixed. It is always seesaw, swinging one way or the other. leaning towards a – tiptoeing the line of calorie deficit. sometimes maintenance requires building adding muscle

At some point, I was going to have to change things up so that I could maintain my weight or I was going to have to change things up in order to begin building muscle. 

weight requires a different strategy than building muscle. i am not eating enough calories. I am not consistently in progressive overload. If you’ve already journeyed over FatBoy Mountain to get here, then you know that weight loss and losiong fat easy, simple, no bullshit explanation of how muscle is built, maintained, and lost. need surplus of calories, sufficient protein, progressive overload.  

My goal is (at a minimum) to regain my earlier strength so that I’m at least On monday I was only able to complete 8 repititions rather than the 10 I was doing a few months ago. No Bueno. 

 

Let’s recap to make sure you’re now skipping along on the lush, thick, pleasant path that leads to the kingdom of a fitter, healthier, and happier you!