Consolidating Your Muscle Gains: Advanced Program

After sticking with the intermediate’s program for the last 1-2 years, you have surely experienced noticeable muscle gains. However, lately your progress seems to slow down, or even halt. You keep training hard and your nutrition and rest are adequate, but you have hardly gained any muscle during the last months. Facing this situation denotes that you have to go one step further in your training and enter into the advanced level. This post provides the basic guidelines for designing an advanced program.

Surely you remember how easy was gaining mass during your first months in bodybuilding. Unfortunately, being an advanced bodybuilder, you have to work hard for gaining each additional pound of muscle. As we commented in previous posts, this occurs because your muscles evolve to work more efficiently, and for this reason, you require to increase intensity for further progress. As a consequence of this, the primary goal in an advanced program should be achieving constant muscle stimulation and maximum intensity. As you know, the key to constantly stimulate your muscles is introducing periodization in your training, switching regularly between heavy cycles (mainly compound exercises and low rep range) and light cycles (isolation exercises and high rep range). In addition, it is also mandatory to vary your workouts every 4-6 weeks by altering one or more factors (i.e. number of reps, sets, tempo, exercise selection, etc.). In this sense, it is important to avoid doing always the same exercises, or performing the same number of sets or reps, since the muscles adapt to this workload and then stop growing. For instance, you can alternate the 3-day split introduced in the intermediate’s program, with a 4-day or even a 5-day split.

Intensity can be achieved by staying focused, reducing the rest between sets and giving the maximum in all your sets and using the maximum weight that allows you to maintain strict form. In addition, you can also include in your workouts high-intensity techniques such as supersets, pre/post-exhaustion, descending sets, negative reps or forced reps (I’ll go in detail on each one in later posts). These techniques are great for increasing the intensity of your workouts and stimulate in this way muscle growth. However, they should be carefully used, since they are very demanding on the muscle and can contribute to overtraining, which is always threatening natural bodybuilders when training to the limit. For this reason, watch carefully for overtraining signs (I’ll also go deeper on this in the future), and use adequately high-intensity techniques.

With respect to nutrition and rest, you are probably on the right way, since the same principles provided with the intermediate’s program rule here. Stick eating several small meals throughout the day (every 2.5-3 hours) including enough protein (1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day), drinking plenty of water and sleeping at least 8 hours per night. Be also careful of regularly monitoring your metabolism in order to adequate your caloric intake if needed. You have to take into account that muscles are active tissues that continuously burn calories. For this reason, if you gain muscle, your metabolism will go up, thus you have to adjust your daily caloric intake upwards to meet the demand. Finally, this is probably the right moment for considering supplementation in your program. The basis should consist of a multivitamin/mineral stack and some protein supplement. Then you can experiment with other supplements such as creatine, glutamine, and BCAAs and see what works better for you.

These and other guidelines for developing your advanced program can be found in the article “Advanced Bodybuilding Program” by Matt Danielsson and also in the article “Progression of Training” included in the I.C.E. Training Program developed by Big Cat.