If you lay in bed and you feel like there is nothing to do regarding your goals, you’re wrong. There is ALWAYS something to do.

Ask yourself:

• Am I making progress according to plan?
• If yes, what can I do to reach my goal faster?
• If no, what am I doing wrong that is preventing me from making progress?
• What are some of the things I need to work on tomorrow?
• Etc.

Remember, you are working toward reaching a goal that YOU set for yourself. Nobody imposes this on you. Nobody force you to go to bed on time and lift heavy weights three/four times a week. Nobody says you have to do anything. YOU are your own boss. You are in pursuit of your own happiness.

To be able to be the captain of your life and go anywhere you want, that’s the ultimate pleasure in life.

That’s why when you lie down in bed and think about your goals, you are not working. There is no clear distinction between working and playing when it is YOUR own goal that you are working on. It’s both working and playing at the same time. After all, you play just so you can have fun right? Well, now you have fun even when you work.

1. Fix in your mind the exact amount of muscle you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say, “I want plenty of muscle.” Be definite as to the amount.
2. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the muscle you desire.
3. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the muscle you desire.
4. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.
5. Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of muscle you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the muscle, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.
6. Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night and once after arising in the morning. AS YOU READ, SEE AND FEEL AND BELIEVE YOURSELF ALREADY IN POSSESSION OF THE MUSCLE.

The point is, if you want to get bigger and stronger, get ready to eat a lot more and train a lot harder than you do now. And most importantly, you have GOTTA do it PROPERLY.

It’s a daunting task. Most people fail. Most people quit half way. Some people manage to get bigger, but cannot keep their hard-earned muscles when the goings get tough.

To succeed, you need a burning desire (you’ve got it), a big goal (you’ve got it), a great determination to push on through, and a great level of consistency. But how do you keep your desire burning? How can you make sure you will have the determination and consistency to reach your goal?

“The first law of success is concentration – to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right or to the left.” –William Mathews

Yes, that’s the answer. Keep your focus on your goal. Be obsessed with it. Don’t let anything compromise the attainment of your goal. Think about it–first thing in the morning and last thing before going to bed. Make it your top 2 priorities in life… at least for 3 months.

Obviously, then, being gung-ho for one or two weeks or even a few months is not enough to get you big. Especially for ectomorphs, even if you gain some muscles after that short period, you will soon lose it all away if you don’t keep on working hard. After all, nature never intends for your body to have much muscle anyway.

The question now is: How can you be consistent?

By having a consistent lifestyle.

How can you have a consistent lifestyle? By following basically the same routine everyday, with maybe a very slight degree of variation for weekends and holidays. For example, you can vary your meals just enough so that you can stuff enough food down your throat everyday. As we are all busy with thousands of things to worry about, I think it would be best to pretty much eat the same thing everyday. After all, eating is now a JOB, not something you do for sheer pleasure or to survive. Other examples: go to bed, wake up, go to the gym, and eat meals at the same times everyday, regardless of whether it is weekend or weekday.

What are some of the factors that bring chaos to your lifestyle? Friends, family, new activities, new hobbies, etc. In short, anything that gets introduced to your life after you have already settled down with a good routine. As you first start to train seriously, it is best to make training your number 1 priority in life for at least 3 months. You will make progress, understand almost everything you need to know about training, and get into a healthy and consistent lifestyle. After that, slowly and carefully, you can introduce more activities to your life.

RECAP: Ectomorphs like you will NEVER get big unless you are consistent with your efforts and lifestyle. Friends, family, new activities, new hobbies, etc. are all possible sources of chaos to your lifestyle. So be careful.

Source:

1. First photo: yankeeschick.mlblogs.com
2. Second photo: politicalhumor.about.com with my own caption
3. Third photo: clintjcl.wordpress.com with my own caption
4. Fourth photo: pictures-of-cartoon.blogspot.com with my own caption

1. Is the suggestion applicable to my case?

What applies to someone else does not necessarily apply to you. Here are just a few reasons why that may be the case: 1. The other person has a different body type from you (e.g. mesomorph instead of ectomorph), 2. He is at a different training level from you (e.g. advanced vs. beginner), 3. He is at a different phrase of working out (e.g. strength training instead of muscle gaining).

2. Is this just his opinion, or is it one of the principles of training that I don’t know of yet?

Anything that anybody tells you about your training program, be it rest time between sets, rep range or set range, etc., you cannot just listen to it immediately, even if the other guy looks big and seems to know what he is talking about. I am not saying that you should ignore completely everything that people say to you about your program. No, far from it, you must be open to all suggestions. The difference here is, you must conduct careful research to make sure the suggestions are legitimate before incorporating them into your program. The thing is, your current program is already the best one for your body type and your training goal because it is the result of painstaking research. Thus, the chance that somebody can give you any legitimate suggestion should be very rare.

You have to understand that the majority of people at the gym train wrong. Some of them maybe wrong about only some small aspects of training, while more than half of them are doing everything horribly wrong. Moreover, most people are not ectomorphs; they don’t know NOTHING about training for an ectomorph. What works for them will NEVER work for you. Therefore, you cannot expect to be doing a popular program. That’s first of all.

Second of all, people, for some reason, are super stubborn when it comes to their program selection. I think that has to do with the fact that people hate being wrong. Anyway, the point is, even for people who are sooooo skinny, who have been working out for years without making any noticeable difference to their body, they still think their programs are the best one in the world.

I have a friend who have been skinny for years, who goes from 123 pounds to 127 pounds (5 feet 10) even after 3 years of working out. Yet when I tell him anything about his program, he still thinks that he knows more about training than I do. So the lesson is, don’t bother explaining your program to most people. Don’t expect it to be popular. And also don’t expect people to approve your program (random people at the gym). Just do what you gotta do, and forget about the world.

RECAP: People may have different opinions about your training method. Ask yourself the right questions and conduct careful research before incorporate their suggestions into your training. Most of the time they are wrong though.

However, I do think more motivations are needed once you start to train properly for more muscle mass. After all, training then eating then eating then eating then eating some more then sleeping then training, and on and on, who doesn’t feel overwhelmed once in a while (and I haven’t even included school work and social life yet)? It is at these crucial moments that you need more motivations to push on through.

You need some motivation that makes you sooooo excited you cannot wait to go the gym to pump some iron. You need something that makes it super vivid to you the thrill of actually having a great physique, the pride you will get from having hot women checking you out and men envying your awesome body.

For example, after watching any of the three Bourne movies, do you wish you could be like Bourne (speak 4 or 5 different languages fluently, look awesome, kick some bad ass in just a few moves, drive around like crazy, read maps in 2 seconds, and always know exactly what to do, where to go, how to move, etc)?

Even though it is impossible for us to be like Bourne, the movie still makes us WANT to take some action to be like Bourne. Do you have a good motivation source that make you want to train for a bigger physique?

For me personally, Brad Pitt in Fight Club is greatly inspiring. Sometimes photos of people like Edward Norton, Taylor Lautner, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, etc. are all motivational because these celebrities all transform their body from scrawny to brawny in amazingly fast periods of time.

One more thing, daydreaming is good… as long as it is about your goals. It is the best source of motivation. It is when you stop daydreaming about getting a bigger and stronger physique that you should worrying. When we daydream about something totally unrelated to the task at hand, that is bad because we lose our concentration. But when we daydream about our goal, we become more motivated to achieve our goal, and we focus much more on reaching it.

RECAP: You need to find some sources of motivation that make it super vivid to you the thrill of actually having a great physique, the pride you will get from having hot women checking you out and men envying your awesome body.

(to be continued…)

Remember, you want to make progress in your training, each and every single day. Even standing still is not good enough, not to mention falling backward. Yet, that is exactly what happens when major incidents like those happen. If you only learn something after such events have taken place, you will never reach your goal. Why? Because these incidents were never supposed to happen in the first place.

In order for ectomorphs like us to gain some serious mass, there are a lot more to worry about than just these major events. Pay attention to every little thing you do, because it’s all the little things together that counts. An ectomorph will not gain a single pound of muscle until he has gotten every single aspects of training right (from exercise selection, exercise techniques and forms, to proper nutrition and sufficient rest). Thus, we don’t learn from major events like injuries or sickness (they must never happen). No. But we do pay careful attention to and learn from the little things like:

• When it is time to switch from 5 pound increment in squat every session to 3 pound and then from 3 to 2.
• When it is time to up your level of calories intake (e.g. from 3000 to 3400) to keep the muscle gain coming
• When you should stop stuffing more food into your mouth (before you throw up. This will be a problem for some of you)
• The perfect combination of cereals to eat day after day without making you wanna puke (you will have to eat a lottttt of cereals)
• Quick motivation tips to get you through a hard exercise (e.g. when squatting 20 reps (in one set), I want to stop squatting when I get to only 8 reps. Thus, the urge to miss the last one or two reps is unbearable. I make sure I finish 20 reps every time by logging down into my log book that I have squatted 20 reps even before squatting. For me personally, that works!)

Training should not take up your whole life, but it WILL definitely take a large chunk of your life. It’s not a question of how you can spend less time on training and still get awesome result. It’s rather how you manage to achieve other goals in life while still gaining serious muscle mass. And the only way to do that is to start paying attention to every little aspect of your training. Ask yourself questions like: Why am I doing this, or Is this the best way to do this (how can I improve)? Try to take lessons from the little things, you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn just from asking the right questions.

Read How many goals should you have beside your training goal? and Every day matters

RECAP: For ectomorphs to gain massive muscle, you have to pay attention to every single aspect of your training (forms, nutrition, rest). Ask the right questions and take lessons from every little thing, and you will learn more from it than to wait till some major events like injury and sickness happen.

• Squat: It is not easy to Squat. In fact, none of the exercises listed here are easy to perform. They all require at least 3 sessions of practice with careful supervision from an experienced trainer (can be personal trainers or friends who know the techniques well). You will also have to read about the techniques before even practicing any exercise for the first time (because not all trainers know the right techniques; you cannot just follow them blindly. Also, unless you pay for a personal trainer, no friend will have the patience to show you all the techniques). There are no other way around it. You HAVE to do these exercises to get big. And because of that, you HAVE to get the right techniques to prevent injury (with such heavy weights that you can lift with deadlift or squat, injury from bad forms may last for years or maybe forever).
• Deadlift: You can lift extremely heavy weights with deadlift, but you can also mess up your back so badly you can never walk normal again. The thing is, with the right techniques, you can train with these exercises well until your late 40s or 50s. Doesn’t it feel good to be able to lift massive weights? You are training to get big, but you are also training to be stronger. After all, that’s the reason why most of us at least at one point or another bench press 225 pounds when our spotters were doing most of the lifting instead of ourselves.
• Benchpress (or dips): You already have enough experience with bench pressing. Dips is a bit harder in technique but it is a great exercise when you are stuck with your bench press. If you think bench press is important, squat and deadlift are both way more important in terms of helping you get stronger and bigger. If you feel great for being able to bench press 180 pounds, you will feel even better for being able to squat 300 pounds and deadlift 320 pounds. Overall, benchpress receives more attention and energy than it deserves. If you want to train right and train smart, then make squat and deadlift your priorities instead of bench press.
• Press: Have you seen some guys with big arms but small shoulders? They are everywhere. That’s because they pump up their biceps too much while ignoring to do any press. You don’t look good with big arms and small shoulders, but you look great with big shoulders and moderately big arms. Just look at any great physique and pay some attention to the proportion of the arms to the shoulder, and you will see what I mean. And press is the best exercise to train for bigger shoulder.

These four exercises are called Compound Exercises. They work multiple muscles of your body so that not only will you gain a lot of muscles with just these four exercises, you will also become a lot stronger (and by stronger, I mean “functionally stronger,” being able to lift much heavier objects of all shapes). Of course there are other assistant exercises like calf-raises and bicep curls, etc, that you must also perform in order to have a completely great physique. However, in terms of importance, these four exercises MUST be the ones that you focus most of your attention and energy on, especially early in your work out program. In other words, if for some reasons you can only work out once a week for a month or so, then it is these four exercises that you must perform in that one session instead of anything else.

There is no way this short post can do justice to the importance of these exercises. But if you do some more research on these four exercises, the reasons for why you HAVE to include them in your program will become clearer. Also, these exercises MUST be performed with barbell in their traditional variations. Easier variations or variations with the dumbbell for the sake of easier techniques will give you no result, or if any at all, much smaller benefits than the correct variations will (in some cases, certain variations can be done if the trainer has some injury or abnormal body structure. But these cases are extremely rare. You should not be among that group).

Read this “Starting Strength” is your Bible for training. It is a great book that will show you all the right techniques for these four exercises. You should be able to train like a pro after that.

RECAP: The four compound exercises: Squat, Deadlift, Bench Press (or Dips), and Press must be included in your training program if you want to get bigger and stronger. There is simply no exercise more important than these four.

I am confident that most of you don’t fall for that crap. It is all just marketing. It’s not real.

In this post I want to help save you a lot of time by telling you straight off how to gain muscle:

Progressive weights with perfect form. Make sure you have plenty of rest (eat enormous amount of food and sleep at least 8 hours).

Simple? Yes, but only in theory. How many of you have been able to do just that?

Follow this faithfully for ONE WEEK, and I would be damned if you don’t gain a pound of muscle.

Of course you still need to know a bit about what exercises to do, calculate how much food you need to eat everyday. But all of that is easy and takes only 30 minutes to set up. What is most crucial is being able to keep up that level of consistency for an extended period of time. As I said just now, follow that statement and you will make progress immediately. But it is only 1 pound. You need to gain 40-60 pounds, that’s about 40-60 weeks of living a well-disciplined lifestyle. And I swear to you that this is the only hard part of getting big. Nothing else.

Getting big takes time. But it should be time lifting massively heavy weights in the gym (cool hah, I know!), eating good, healthy food, and enjoying a wonderful 8-hour sleep. You don’t have to care about all the glossy magazines or any of the “new, ground-shattering discoveries” that do nothing else but eat up all your precious time and money. I am sure there sometimes maybe some good, interesting articles in these magazines. But rest assure that you are missing out on nothing as long as you are following that PRINCIPLE of training.

So it depends on you. If you care deeply about what is going on in the training world, then read on. But if you just want to gain massive pure muscles and look awesome while living a busy life, then you can safely forget about all these craps now. Just remember:

RECAP: Progressive weights with perfect form. Make sure you have plenty of rest (eat enormous amount of food and sleep at least 8 hours). How many of you have been able to do just that?