BUILD
The PERPETUAL Step-by-step to build muscle.
LEVEL 1 : Basic Knowledge
LEVEL 2 : Good Knowledge
LEVEL 3 : Expert Knowledge
PHASE 1 : EATING IN A SURPLUS
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To build muscle, you need to eat more calories than your body burns (caloric surplus).
Aim to eat 200-500 calories above your maintenance level every day.
Include enough protein: 1 gram per pound of body weight daily.
If your weight is increasing by about 0.5 kg per week, you’re on the right track. If not, eat a little more.
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Ok, lets go more in-depth.
The surplus ensures your body has the energy to grow muscles.
Therefore, you must eat in a surplus every day.
When it comes to protein I tend to use 1g per lb of bodyweight as my minimum. So go for it with protein, the more the merrier.
Just be consistent.
Use a calorie calculator to estimate your maintenance calories. Then add 200-500 on top, that’s your goal each day. While these calculators aren’t 100% accurate, they’re a useful guide.
Monitor your weight:
Steady gain of 0.5 kg per week means you’re not gaining too much fat while building muscle.
If the scale isn’t moving, increase your calorie intake slightly.
As your muscle mass grows, your caloric needs will increase, so adjust your intake accordingly.
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Here I’ll talk about more niche information.
These are if you are totally serious and are willing to dedicate a lot of time to building your physique.
The principles covered in Level 1 & 2 still apply, stay consistent with those.
Space your meals out, eating 4-6 meals a day.
Focus on food quality, eating protein from mainly animal based sources, like eggs and meat.
I found my best results came from when I ate the exact same 5 meals every day.
Find what works for you, in terms of convenience and how your body responds to the food.
For me that was ;
Eggs on toast
Chicken and Rice x 3
Skyr and Oats
Remember, this is only the training section of the website, the Nutrition Section contains everything…
PHASE 2 : PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD
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Training during a bulk is exciting because you have plenty of energy and can see results quickly, especially if you’re a beginner.
The key focus in every session is to gradually lift more weight or do more reps, which is called progressive overload.
Keep your FORM consistent.
While you might not improve every single week, always go into your workouts aiming for progress.
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Bulking provides the perfect environment for muscle growth, with energy levels high and faster recovery making workouts enjoyable. The main goal during training is progressive overload, where you aim to lift heavier weights or perform more reps while keeping your form consistent. Focus on maintaining the same number of reps each week, gradually increasing either the weight or the reps over time. This consistent progression challenges your muscles, forcing them to adapt and grow. While progress isn’t always guaranteed every week, maintaining a mindset of striving for improvement will keep you on track for long-term success.
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For optimal muscle building, you need to maintain a consistent caloric surplus of 200-500 calories above your maintenance. This surplus is vital for providing the excess energy required for muscle repair and hypertrophy.
Prioritise protein intake at 1 gram per pound of body weight daily, which is essential for muscle synthesis. Balance the remaining calories between carbs and fats to fuel your workouts and recovery.
Use a calorie calculator to estimate your needs but treat it as a baseline. Adjust based on real-world progress since calculators can’t perfectly account for individual variability.
Track your progress using the scale:
A weight gain of 0.5 kg per week strikes a balance between building muscle and minimising fat gain.
If weight gain stalls, increase your caloric intake incrementally until you see consistent progress.
Recognise that as your muscle mass increases, your maintenance calories will rise. Plan to gradually increase your caloric intake to continue supporting growth.
Keep in mind that precision and consistency are key—track your food intake, weight, and strength gains to fine-tune your plan.
PHASE 3 : VOLUME & INTENSITY
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Now, I could get very specific in this section, and I will, but we’ll start with the basic knowledge.
Intensity over volume. Doing 4 sets on every exercise then doing 4 exercises is way to many sets for the best growth.
Doing between 1-3 sets per exercise, then doing 2-3 exercises (depending on the muscle group) whilst taking sets close to or at muscular failure will get you the best results.
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Now with that being said, there’s a slight misconception with the relationship between volume and intensity and muscle growth. Because it’s not one size fits all, the answer can be quite personal.
Here’s what we’d advise. Start with lower volume, higher intensity. 2 sets per exercise, 2 exercises per muscle, taking each rep close to or at muscular failure (unable to perform another rep with the same form).
You want to see how you react to this. If you’re growing, good, keep doing it, keep progressively overloading.
If after a few months you want to experiment, add a 3rd set and see how you react to it, are you getting stronger than you were week to week, are you getting bigger?
Some people respond well to slightly higher volume than others.
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Volume and intensity also change when it comes down to the muscle group.
You can get away with higher volumes on smaller muscles that recover quicker, that’s the reason higher volume doesn’t work for most people because whether you know it or not, you’re not actually recovering from all the sets you’re doing.
As bigger muscle groups take longer to recover from than smaller muscle groups, you may think they need more volume to grow because they’re bigger, but that’s not the case, rather it’s the opposite, they need more time off to recover.
My favourite approach for volume is a Top-Set, Back-Off-Set approach.
Each exercise I perform one top set at a heavier weight around the 6-10 rep range.
Then one back-off set at a lighter weight around the 10-15 rep range.
Coupled with some intensifiers such as a drop set on my back off set, this is my favourite volume method of training.
PHASE 4 : TRAINING FREQUENCY
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Frequency is how many times per week you train each muscle group.
There isn’t much to learn about frequency but it’s worth going over none the less.
You will experience more gains training each muscle groups 2 times per week as oppose to just once.
The most common and simplest way to do that is by having an upper-lower split, or push-pull-legs and repeating that twice.
If you are short on time during your week, at a minimum train 3 x.
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However, as you get more advanced, a bro-split style, where you only train each muscle group once per week can still get you good results as long as you keep the intensity high and you’re still progressively overloading.
This can be done if you don’t have too much time to train but still want to make some good progress.
As you get more experienced and in our case addicted to training, you’ll want to be in the gym as much as possible.
The issue is, the body can’t really take the stress of training the large muscle groups more than twice a week.
So, training one muscle group per day is a viable option if you’re in the gym 5+ days a week.
However, the PPL or UPPER / LOWER splits are still very effective when repeated twice in a week.
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What we’ve both done, is extend that week window.
So instead of push-pull-legs rest repeat, which can be a lot to recover from and often too much.
It can be changed into push-pull-rest-legs-shoulders and arms-rest-repeat. So you hit every muscle group twice every 10 days or so.
This can be a good blend, especially if you want to add in an extra day, like arms.
Why would you do this ? Well, if you want to focus something more and bring them up, like I said earlier, smaller muscle groups recover quicker so you can get away with more frequency.
As you get more experienced, your training style and frequency will become more individual and suited to you.
PHASE 5 : THE C-WORD
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Be Consistent.
I can’t stress the importance of this enough, stop thinking so much, you know everything now.
So just go do it.
Take action.
Imagine where you can be in a couple months if you start right now.
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Be consistent.
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Be Consistent