Do you want to know how to keep making gains in the gym? It depends if you are just starting, have been going for a couple of years, or is known as a gym aficionado. Check out how to reach your goals with the help of Jeff Nippard.
Jeff Nippard is a natural professional bodybuilder who shares tips and training programs on his YouTube channel. In the following video, Nippard explains how to keep making gains in the gym, regardless of your fitness level.
“What do you need to do in the gym as a beginner, intermediate, and advanced level lifter to keep driving progress forward,” Nippard says.
First and foremost, you must have your diet in sync with your goals. If your objective is to keep gaining muscle, ideally you are in a caloric surplus.
3 Important Rules on How to Eat to Gain Muscle
Nutrition set aside, now we get into the logistics inside the gym. So how to keep making gains regardless of your lifting level? Check it out below:
How to Keep Making Gains as a Beginner Lifter
- For those training for approximately 1 to 2 years
- Muscle gain for males during this phase: 10-25 pounds (4.5 to 11.5 kilos)
- Muscle gain for females during this phase: 6-15 pounds (3 to 7 kilos)
As a beginner, focus on 3 things: technique, linear strength progression, and proximity to failure.
Learn the proper technique on a variety of machines and free weight exercises to properly apply tension to the target muscle.
Secondly, you want to add some amount of weight each week to your “primary exercises,” or solid compound movements such as squats and bench presses.
It is important that you also learn what getting close to failure is in a variety of exercises. If you don’t know how to push yourself, you won’t know how to judge your own effort and you risk training not hard enough when you begin entering the intermediate level.
How To Keep Making Gains as an Intermediate Lifter
- For people training between 1 to 5 years
- Muscle gain for males: 10-20 pounds (4.5 to 9 kilos) for all years combined
- Muscle gain for females: 6-12 pounds (2.5 to 5.5 kilos) for all years combined
Three things to keep in mind as an intermediate lifter: progressive overload, rotate exercises, and fine-tuning your proximity to failure.
You will soon learn that only adding weight to the bar or machine will not work all the time as it will compromise your technique. To continue with progressive overload, your best trick here is to add one rep per week utilising the same weight for several weeks. You can also add an extra set, which adds the volume of how much you lift.
Periodically, you want to rotate the exercises you are doing. But don’t do it too often. Consider changing most of your exercises every 2 months or so.
By this time you need to learn what it means to have 1, 2, or 3 reps in the tank. For recovery purposes, it isn’t best to take every set to failure, but you need to be sufficiently close.
How to Keep Making Gains as an Advanced Lifter
- For people training more than 4-5 years in the gym
- Muscle gain for males: 1-2 pounds (0.5 to 1 kilo) per year
- Muscle gain for females: 0.5-1 pound (0.25 to 0.5 kilo) per year
Three strategies for advanced lifters on how to keep making gains: specialisation phases, intensity techniques, and adjust your training frequencies.
Specialisation phases are when you dedicate 1-2 months of training to developing only 1 or 2 body parts by blasting them with more volume than usual. Keep the volume on other muscle groups on maintenance to make sure you are still recovering properly.
Intensity techniques refer to drop sets, myoreps, or eccentric-accentuated reps.
You may also want to experiment with different training frequencies. While hitting each muscle group twice per week is usually enough on average to maximise growth, the optimal frequency can vary from person to person.
Jeff Nippard’s Video Explanation
Read More: Top Training Programs to Gain Size and Mass