Episode 33: The absolute best time to grow

Ron Harris

Those of us who have been bodybuilding for much of our lives – well over half, in my case – recognize that our earliest years of pumping iron were very much like the “Honeymoon Phase” in a marriage. In those thrilling days, it’s all fresh and new. You are getting bigger and stronger all the time.

People around you begin making comments about your new muscles, and those who haven’t seen you in

months are typically shocked at the progress you’ve made. You may not even know exactly what you’re doing in terms of training and especially proper nutrition and supplementation, but it doesn’t really matter. Because the stress of weight training is so new to your body, it struggles to adapt. That adaptation comes in the form of ever greater muscle mass and strength. Good times, my friends, those are good times.

There is a cynical saying related to the frequency of sexual relations as it pertains to marriage. Supposedly if you put a penny in a jar every time you have sex during the first year of being married and then take out a penny every time thereafter, the jar will never be emptied. This may be true in most cases, but when the day comes that humans are able to maintain youthful bodies and live for spans of several centuries, I am confident that at least a few couples may finally empty that jar. The analogy I am trying to make here is that bodybuilders will always make their best gains in their first few years of training. The longer you train, the harder it becomes to coax any further muscle growth out of a body that’s been there and done that many times. When you get to the point I am at, being forty years old and having been pushing and pulling weights since I hit puberty (no, not at age 22 as some have erroneously reported – it was 14 thank you very much), putting on a few ounces of new muscle mass every year is cause for celebration, like winning the fricking lottery. I try not to get annoyed when young bodybuilders quiz me regularly about my weight, as if I should be gaining 10-20 pounds or more of new muscle in the course of a few months of off-season training and eating like they do. If I gain twenty pounds in a few months, it will be in the form of an extra chin, some wonderful chunky love handles, and an ass that doesn’t leave a room until several minutes after the rest of me.

There is, however, one exception to all of this. There is one magical time, when even those amongst us who have been training since Michael Jackson had his original nose and skin tone, can make great gains: right after a long, strict diet. I didn’t say contest diet, because plenty of bodybuilders that don’t compete will still get in really lean condition once a year, typically for the summer, and the same principle holds true. When you restrict calories and carbohydrates for extended periods of 10-16 weeks or more, eating totally clean and doing a much higher volume of cardio than normal, you create an environment where your body literally becomes like a sponge to absorb and utilize nutrients. It is primed for growth, as the return to heavier training, less cardio, and larger quantities of protein, complex and fibrous carbs, and healthy fats will produce a temporary state where even grizzled veterans often experience gains that can range from satisfactory to shocking. It’s known among competitive bodybuilders as ‘the rebound,’ and champions like the great six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates always took full advantage of it by getting right back into the gym following a contest and making stellar gains while his rivals were taking a few weeks off from the gym and stuffing their faces with empty junk-food calories. Meanwhile, Dorian looked bigger and better every year of his reign, while most of his peers hardly improved.

Taking my cue from Dorian, in the month following my participation in the NPC Team Universe I had been hard at work in the gym and at the dinner table, moving plenty of heavy iron and putting away vast amounts of nutrients. Parrillo bars and shakes were taking on a critical supporting role. I woke up twice during the night to have a mix of Hi-Protein^™ and Optimized Whey^™, which kept me in an anabolic state while I slept. I kept Protein Chew bars^™ stashed in my car, my gym bag, and up in my home office in case I was ever stuck without something to eat. And after workouts, I had one hell of a monster post-workout shake that included two scoops of Optimized Whey^™, two scoops of 50/50 Plus^™, two scoops of Pro-Carb^™, and 5 grams of creatine. The concoction was so thick I could almost eat it with a spoon, but I would add more water to it once I had managed to throw down a few big slugs. Otherwise I could probably use it to patch up a hole in some drywall.

My sixteen-year-old client Jared was in awe of the size I had put on since the contest. I had competed at 198 pounds and was now nearly 220. To be honest, I had not gained anywhere near twenty-two pounds of muscle. At least half of that was fat and water, but because I had been so extremely lean, my condition at this weight was still quite respectable. Jared still had a little over a month before our high school team took our annual Thanksgiving clobbering and the season would end. Based on the poor record the team had clocked halfway through the season, this final game was shaping up to be a real slaughter. But at the moment, Jared didn’t seem to care a whole lot about any of that.

“Man, I can’t wait to start training like a bodybuilder again in a few weeks!” he announced as I was adding water to my shake for the fourth time and re-shaking it up in hopes of turning it into more of an actual liquid. “I am going to get so big this winter!”

“Yes, I am quite sure you will,” I agreed.

“How much more size are you going to put on, how many pounds, you think?” he asked. I shrugged.

“No idea. I’m going to ride this out as long as I can, but pretty soon I have a feeling my body is going to catch on to what’s happening and go back to its usual rate of growth – which is only slightly better than how much taller I get every year.”

“Don’t people usually get shorter as they age?”

“Don’t remind me,” I replied. I am 5-8 on a good day and the prospect of becoming any shorter than that was not an attractive one. Junior here was already taller than me and probably had a few more inches to go before he topped out, the lucky little cuss.

“How long do you think I can keep making the types of gains I have been these last two years?” he queried.

“My best guess is that if you stay consistent with your training and eating, which I don’t doubt you will, you can probably keep your rate of progress fairly steady until you hit twenty or twenty-one. Things will start slowing down then, and you will probably notice another change around your late twenties. By your mid-thirties, you will find yourself fighting tooth and nail for every new gram of muscle mass.”

“Well that sucks,” he noted.

“Not really, if you think about it. If bodybuilders kept growing forever the way they do in the beginning, you would have guys walking around at 600 pounds, ripped, so big they wouldn’t be able to walk anymore. Do you know how many more cows and chickens would have to die every year to feed these behemoths? And I don’t even want to think about how big of a toilet they would need to accommodate the gigantic deposits of waste they would make a few times a day. I don’t know if the pipes we use for plumbing in residential homes would even be able to support it – Roto Rooter stock would go through the roof.” From the dual looks of disgust and confusion on Jared’s face, I could see that I had lost him while off on my tangent.

“The good news is that even when you have been doing this for a very long time like me, there are still ways to jump-start your growth again. One is simply making a radical change to your training program, and another that’s almost miraculous is to return to heavy training and eating after a long diet, like I have been doing.”

Jared nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t overly concerned. I had just told him that he had a good four or five years to go before his gains started to lessen. To a sixteen-year-old, five years might as well be fifty years.

As for me, I didn’t know how much more muscle mass was in the cards. I had started training at the ridiculous weight of ninety pounds, so to have increased that by 250% wasn’t too shabby. But I wasn’t done yet. I consider myself a bodybuilder, not a body-maintainer, so I would not give up fighting the good fight for a bigger and better physique anytime soon. And in a way I was grateful I wasn’t able to pack on the mass like I used to in my late teens and early twenties. Who’d want to weigh 600 pounds anyway?