Questions regarding gaining muscle

Hello!

As the topic states, I'd like to know what the optimal diet or workouts would be to gain muscle. I'm 170 pounds, and have a rather plain body. (I'll post pictures if necessary). I'm a professional wrestler, and my debut is 9 months away.. I want to look phenomenal. So any advice would be greatly appreciated!

May the force be with you.

Didn't your wrestling training school give you advice on this?

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What is your history with weight training?

Do you want to focus on bodyweight training or barbell free lifting (I personally would not recommend dumbbell training or machines)?

@Rickie; Unfortunately no, my head trainer pretty well told me to go read muscle and fitness and good luck lol.

@Connor I've always used machines since I began training. If I don't have access to a machine, I'll do a couple hundred pushups, situps, crunches, hindu squats, and jumping jacks. I also run three miles daily.

@Lightstrider Thank you, I'll definitely give it a read.

Nine months isn't a long time unless your already muscular but it depends how your body works. If your already got a good base, and want to look good with your shirt off, then you might just be talking about cutting, rather then bulking, without loosing strength for the comp.

But I've read not a lot of people can cut their fat down and grow muscle at the same time, as many times to build muscle you'd find an increase in body fat also in that 'bulking' phase.

Of course when cutting you can 'see' more muscle because its not hidden by fat, but in real terms they say muscle grows better when there is an abundance of nutrients which in many people tends to also make em fatter. So often people will do a heavy lifting heavy eating bulking phase, and then cut the food right down and ease the training off to focus on cutting down the body fat to reveal the muscle and look 'cut'.

For me it took ages to build actual permanent muscle tissue and not just fluid pumps. People starting out often get excited about the fast results from temporary fluid 'pumps', which disappear in a week or so. To build actual muscle I needed to focus quite a bit more on it. I had to target specific muscle groups and not try and do too many at once. I just couldn't eat enough to grow all over...

So I'd hit that specific area hard every 2-4 days (depending on how it responded), eating clean and sleeping well in between. Avoiding injury, keep it up religiously for at least 3 months but no longer then 8, then take 3-4 months off lifting (but keep eating and sleeping), and then repeat. After two runs of that, I'd get good long lasting growth which just hangs around no matter how much I starve myself.. so then I switch to a different muscle group.

This way I eventually got progress in different body parts. The more widespread full body workouts so popular with fitness coaches would seem to be good for maintenance more then fast muscle growth, but I guess that depends on training intensity and diet, and the individuals genetic capacity to grow muscle fast.

I found it important to not judge progress on growth, but just judge progress on how hard your able to work it and how well your able to be consistent (without injury) for long periods of time. A lot of the growth seemed to happen during the rest phase when I stopped training it entirely, so when picking it back up it was a bigger new blank slate to build up upon again.

If its a comp that you care about, who cares how you look!? Might be more useful to focus on functional strength and technique more to get some more advantage in the time you have to ensure a win. Explosive movement strength instead of look good love bumps.

Watch the Vegan Gains channel on YouTube. The guy basically shatters all the industry stars and beliefs about supplements, having to eat so much protein, how we don't even really need to eat animal products and that animal products are the number one cause of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc. Many people who eat animal products can still get huge because of good genetics, extreme work and most all of STEROIDS. Regardless of whether or not you eat animal products there is some great SCIENTIFIC info this guy presents and he really pisses a lot of people off so it's really entertaining especially the attacks he gets in the comments. But if you have the time and interest in gaining muscle, watch his videos from earliest to latest.

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