Here's an interview with Jason Ferruggia, creator of the famous Muscle Gaining Secrets muscle-building course. He has a new course out called Triple Threat Muscle that is on sale now for $47 through Thursday. Friday, the price goes up to $77.

At either price, it's a fantastic bargain. Jason provides real-deal muscle-building info.

Most guys are being told to follow bodybuilding splits, train multiple times a day, and other non-sense training tactics that don’t work. What tips do you have for people looking to build muscle as fast as possible?

The key to making consistent size gains is making consistent strength gains (in a hypertrophy rep range) while eating enough food and allowing enough time for recovery. You need to constantly be doing more weight or more reps. The body will respond to any given stimulus one time and one time only. If you place the same demands on it a second time (like pressing the same weight for the same reps) nothing will happen. You must always be forcing it to adapt and thus you must always ask it do something it isn’t used to.

The easiest way to do this is add more weight or do more reps with the same weight.
Aside from making consistent strength gains the next most important thing to consider is training frequency. To improve anything in life you need to do it frequently. Building muscle is no different. So you want to train a muscle as frequently as possible, while it is in a fresh and recovered state. This means that you should be training each body part once every 2-5 days, and not once a week like a lot of the muscle mags recommend. That’s too little frequency. The more times you can stimulate growth throughout the year the better. Obviously 104 growth stimulating workouts per year for each body part would be a lot better than 52.

I have seen the phrase “stimulate, don’t annihilate” on your blog in reference to training. Can you explain what you mean by this and the relation to training volume?

To elicit a training response you need to present the body with a stimulus that it isn’t used to. This stress will cause the body to adapt. The body adapts by building itself up bigger and stronger.

Where people go wrong is that they think they need to annihilate the muscle in order to elicit any type of response. This is completely counterproductive. When you annihilate the muscle with tons of sets and reps and intensity techniques like drop sets you drastically increase your recovery time. And as I mentioned previously, frequency is very important. So when you increase your recovery time you have to decrease your training time. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The key is to do just enough to stimulate size and strength gains but not annihilate yourself so that it takes forever to recover, or worse- that you put yourself in a state of overtraining.

Triple Threat Muscle is your new program. What separates this program from all the others and can you tell our readers why you created it?

My Muscle Gaining Secrets program is specifically geared toward skinny guys, hardgainers and beginners. This is more of an intermediate/advanced program that is more athletically based. So while the main focus is still on building muscle there is also a shift toward a bit more speed work, mobility and conditioning in Triple Threat Muscle.

The new program was created for the typical weekend warrior or Average Joe who wants to look and train like an athlete but doesn’t actually have the time or recovery ability to spend more than a few hours per week in the gym.

I spent the last two years experimenting on a wide group of individuals to come up with the most effective and fastest way to do this. Triple Threat Muscle is the result of two years of hard work and is based on all of my findings.

And finally, what general tips can you give to our readers who want transform their bodies?

• Strength train 3-4 days per week.
• Lift heavy and keep most of your sets in the range of 3-10 reps.
• Don’t go to failure.
• Train each body part 2-3 times per week.
• Don’t do more than 12-16 total sets per workout.
• Always strive to get stronger.
• Eat natural, organic foods and avoid anything processed.
• Sleep 8-10 hours per day.
• Minimize stress.
• Get out in the fresh air and sun more often.

If you order Triple Threat Muscle through this link, I will send you a special bonus package that consists of the following awesome products:

1. Lifetime Platinum Membership to the Muscle-Build User Forum (check it out here – there are a TON of benefits to joining and joining is FREE but only if you order through my link) (Conservatively valued at $27 because one of the many benefits is free access to the entire Muscle-Build.com electronic library)
2. Hardgainer Manifesto, the definitive bible to gaining muscle when nothing else works (a $37 value)
3. Mega Arms which will show you how to build up to a half-inch of upper arm muscle in one day (valued at $10)
4. Body Tracker Software. This is a killer tool that tracks your workouts, diet, and progress.
5. Muscle-Building Meal Plans. These cover various daily caloric intakes for different gain weight goals.

Due to the volume of questions I get through email, I have decided to share your questions and my answers with all of the Muscle-Build.com readers. I’ve put together  a FAQs page to facilitate this — please check it out and if you have any questions, ask them there (it’s super-easy — you simply fill out a form with your question. That’s it.).

After you ask a question, I’ll answer it right away.

I certainly hope this is a new feature of Muscle-Build.com that you’ll find very helpful.

Is it possible to cure back pain in 7 days? As a long-time sufferer of chronic low back pain, I was curious when I read about the 7 Day Back Pain Cure. Once I got the book, though, I was a believer. After only a few days, I have seriously less back pain than I’ve had in years.

Really.

As you may guess, especially if you’ve been here before, I like to lift weights. I’ve recently gotten the “heavy bug” too, so having lower back pain has really put a damper on my enthusiasm for lifting heavy. Especially my newly beloved deadlifts.

But now I can.

When I was 12, I strained my back doing some hokey homemade hack squats. When I was 14, I could barely walk after a flare up. I distinctly remember gym class, trying to run pass routes during football games. It was horrible.

About 10 years ago I had a bad injury from poor form on some really heavy leg presses. In fact, I was nearly off my feet for 8 months. I was diagnosed with a bulging disk and spinal stenosis (a narrowing of the spinal column). Short of surgery, there was no cure. At least according to the “experts.”

I’ve had quite a few bouts with these types of painful episodes over the past 30 years that I cannot remember a day without back pain. Until yesterday.

I am so pissed, actually, that I didn’t seek out this book sooner. But I guess I couldn’t, since it was just published this year. The author, Jesse Cannone, gives a complete analysis of all the things that could be wrong with your body, mind, and diet. And then he tells you how to deal with very specific back problems.

This book is literally worth its weight in gold. Actually, that’s way off the mark. It’s a paperback, so it doesn’t weigh much, but it sure is worth a ton of money. But by clicking this “back pain cure” link, it’s free (you pay for shipping and handling).

I really dig this book. It simply talks about the issues, the causes, and the cures. Stuff you won’t get from your doctor, therapist, or chiropractor.

NOTE: The links above are MY affiliate links. I liked the product so much because of what it did for me that I became an affiliate. I simply want to pass this information onto as many people as I can. Buy it from me or don’t. But buy it.

I just uploaded another free bodybuilding report. This one is called 19 Tips on Muscle-Building and it’s from Marc David (No Bull Bodybuilding). To gain access, sign up.

If you’re already a member (and membership is free), you know the password! So just go check it out.

Hi, whenever I do muscle workouts for my pecs (bench press, pec deck etc) I can only feel the muscles in my arms hurting (especially left arm for bench press). I know I have the technique right but can anyone answer why I can’t feel my pecs making an effort??

Thanks a lot.

This is perhaps a perfect application for the Pre-Exhaust principle – with this method, you pre-exhaust the pecs by performing an isolation exercise and then immediately follow with a compound exercise for mass building.

For your chest, it might work like this:

• Flyes – 10-15 reps, immediately followed by
• Incline Bench Press – 6-8 reps

Do NOT rest at all between the two exercises. After you finish the compount exercise (in this case, the Benches), you can take a rest.

Give this a try and tell me what you think in the comments.

After-Before?

I also call it, “Diet and Exercise are your one-two punch against the paunch!”

About the Author

Bill is the creator of Hard Gainer’s Manifesto, a bodybuilding system designed specifically to address the particular needs of hardgainers.