Building muscle is at once very simple and simultaneously incredibly complicated. If that sounds like something of a frustrating contradiction… well then get used to it! As you learn more about growing muscle and getting jacked you’ll find that almost all the information you come across only makes things more complicated and more difficult. Everyone has a different opinion and no-one seems able to agree on what the best way to get into powerful shape actually is.

When you start out though, it all seems very straightforward. In order to grow, you need to exercise more and eat more protein. When you do this, you start to build more muscle and you see yourself constantly increase in strength. If you aren’t seeing any growth or strength gains, then it might well simply mean that you aren’t going to the gym regularly enough, or working out hard enough when you are there!

And for the most part, this is fairly accurate. No matter what kind of training you are using, lifting weight and eating more meat should result in some muscle mass. Overcomplicating things at this stage will only make it harder to stay motivated and result in poor results.

But over time, you start to notice that you aren’t seeing change as quickly as you’d like. You realize that your colleagues-in-Iron are getting results faster than you and that you’ve ‘plateaued’, whatever that might mean.

That’s when you start to read into training and learn that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

This is when you learn that the best way to build muscle is to lift heavy and for fewer reps. You need to focus on compound lifts so that your strength gains are ‘functional’ and you should support that with a healthy, ketogenic diet.

But then there’s another guy who’s saying something really rather different. This guy reckons that you should isolate your muscles during training and focus on just the one muscle group to cause the maximum muscle damage. And while you’re at it, you need to focus on higher rep ranges because really, the only thing that matters is ‘time under tension’.

Then someone comes over to you in the gym and corrects your technique – even though you learned it on YouTube – and you find yourself just about ready to give up on the whole thing. Training is just too complicated!