Although you may think that the first steps to developing a training program are the hardest, it is actually quite the opposite. Since an unfit person is quite out of shape, they're new exercise program will jumpstart and take effect immediately. Due to their unfit condition, any form of exercise will begin producing results. This quick start is what some may call the newbie effect.



The science behind the newbie effect is that unfit people beginning exercise will regain their normal condition very quickly. Males can gain 5-15 pounds of muscle while losing 5-15 pounds of fat in only two months, and females can lose the same amount of fat while gaining 2-5 pounds of muscle. Your body will soon regain shape regardless of the training regimen you choose. Your body is only getting back into regular, fit condition, so it should be relatively simple. This is why all the training programs out there offer training for at least 2 months. However, this is also the reason that after 2 months many people stop seeing results and hit a wall. This is because the program is poorly designed after the newbie effect has worn off.

If you've had the same experience of "hitting a wall", this book will help you "break it down". This novel will revolve around the 3 keys to building muscle, losing fat, and just feeling and looking great. They're time-tested, come from my 7 years of experience in fitness and weight-training research.

If your goal is to gain muscle, you've got to realize one thing: you want to gain weight. To gain weight, you need to eat more calories than you spend. Building a pound of muscle requires enormous amounts of calories. Where will you get those calories from? From food.

This is a good analogy: if you are building a house, you will need bricks, wood, mortar, stone, and other materials. The larger the house is, the more materials will be required. In the same way, when you're building your body up, you're going to need more materials (food) to build the extra muscle.

Simply put, the more you eat, the faster you build muscle. There's only one problem: you've got to find the sweet spot where you eat enough to fuel muscle growth, but not so much that you're also putting on fat.

For example, say Bob's weight (180 lbs) is stable at 2,000 calories per day (three big meals plus a snack). Bob wants to look good naked, so he starts training. After two months, he's gained 10 lbs of muscle and lost 10 lbs of fat: he still weights 180 lbs, but he looks reasonably better. He trains another month and gets no results: still 180 lbs, not any more muscular.

Bob finds some good advice about how to build muscle and finds out must he eat some extra food to build it. So, he eats an extra 200 calories per day, increasing his intake to 2,200 calories a day. When he goes back to the gym for a few weeks, he adds some more muscle and barely any fat. Bob is quite happy with the results.

The next month, Bob decides it's not enough: he wants to gain muscle faster. He starts eating more and is now at 2,400 calories per day. After two weeks, he notices he doesn't gain muscle any faster and that he's slowly putting on fat. That's not what he wants, and he reverts to the 2,200 calories a day diet. Bob's sweet spot is at 2,200 calories per day. He wasn't growing at 2,000, and was putting on too much fat at 2,400.

The morale of this story: you need to find your own sweet spot.

Try this:

1) Weigh yourself every other day for a month on a body fat measuring scale.

2) Track if you're gaining weight, and if yes, see if your body fat percentage is increasing. If it is, cut back and consume less calories. If it's not, you have found your balance!

If you're not gaining weight, eat another small meal daily. This can be before or after a workout. Keep tracking your weight until you find a sweet spot.

If you're not gaining weight, add more small meals every day until you are gaining weight in the form of muscle.