Muscle for Life

When I started working out, I was just over six feet tall and weighed about 155 lbs. I was your average skinny dude. After about 1.5 years of traditional “bodybuilder workouts,” I was … shall we say … a little less skinny. I had gained about 20 pounds since starting in the gym (~175 pounds), which isn’t very impressive considering most of it was gained in the first 10 months — the “newbie gains” phase. After 7 years, I weighed around 190 lbs, and was about 16% body fat. A big change from where I had started, of course, but that means that in 5 to 6 years, I had gained just 10 to 15 pounds of muscle. Again, not very impressive considering how much time and work I had put into my training. Well, this is where I decided to get serious about educating myself on the science of muscle building and fat loss, and I quickly discovered that I was making a lot of mistakes. For example, I was working exclusively in the 10 to 12 rep range and doing a lot of isolation exercises instead of compound exercises, and I thought