#048 Your Blueprint to Build Muscle in 2025

Will 2025 be the year you find out what your body is capable of?

Author

Boats & Logs
December 29, 2024

Welcome back to the 48th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

Today’s newsletter will be the only one you need to build muscle next year. I will tell you exactly what to watch out for, and if you follow these instructions for the next 12 months, I’m sure that you will make great progress!

It doesn’t require much, but you need a lot of discipline.

Nutrition

Let’s start with nutrition because it’s the most important factor in whether you will be successful or not. A bad workout program with a good diet will still generate decent results, while a perfect workout program with a bad diet will generate next to no results.

You will make no progress if you fail your diet part, so make sure to be as consistent with your diet as you are with your workouts if you don’t want your workouts to go to waste.

But the good thing is that, realistically, you only need to worry about 2 factors to build muscle: Calories and Protein.

You know, I’m a fan of carbs (important for energy!), but there are also plenty of people who have achieved very impressive physiques with low-/no-carbs. So don’t worry too much about that, and consume carbs however you like.

If you are currently not on a consistent diet that hits your protein and calorie goals, I want you to focus purely on that and nothing else. And I know for a fact that most of you are failing here.

For protein, it’s very straightforward: Consume 0.7-1.0g of protein per lb of body weight (or 1.6-2.2g per kg). (Disclaimer: If you are heavily obese, 0.5-0.7g per lb of body weight (or 1.2-1.5g per kg) should be enough).

You don’t need to worry about the timing or source of your protein or how much protein you need per meal. Simply hit your protein target, and you will be fine.

For calories, it depends a bit on your current state:

Below 12% body fat: In that case, you are rather lean, and it makes sense to eat in a calorie surplus to gain weight and muscle. Important here is that you are doing a slight calorie surplus of 200-500 calories. There is a limit to how much muscle you can build in 24 hours, and having a 2,000 calorie surplus compared to a 500 calorie surplus will have little to no additional muscle gain while adding a lot of unwanted fat.

Above 12-15% body fat: In that case, I’d advise you to focus on losing fat. If you start bulking now, you will quickly go to >20% body fat. A range that we want to avoid. It’s bad for your hormones, and you feel bad. Instead, cut down the fat by eating in a calorie deficit. How you do that is totally up to you, but make sure that you are still hitting your protein targets. You may lose a few muscles during this process, but this is nothing to worry about. You will regain these muscles in no time once you start bulking again.

As you can see, this is a cycle. You are in a small calorie surplus until you get to around 15% body fat. During the bulk, you make the majority of your gains but will also add some fat. You then cut down the fat until you are around 8-10% body fat. Then, you start bulking again and add more muscle mass.

Whether your goal is to build muscle or to lose fat, I highly encourage you to plan your meals at least one day in advance. This way, you make sure that you’ll hit your calories and protein and fulfill your goal.

If you are like me and are oftentimes a bit too lazy to plan your meals in advance, I’d highly encourage you to check out the app I’ve built that generates meal plans for you!

(Shameless self-promo end)

Training

For some reason, people started to overcomplicate the easiest part of building muscle and watch hours and hours of content on how to train best, hoping they would discover a tactic or exercise that would let their muscles grow huge in weeks or months. But this is not how it works.

Let me break it down for you:

You train to force an adaptive response out of your muscle so that it grows.
How you generate this adaptive response doesn’t matter!

You could literally go to the gym, do a few random exercises you feel like doing, and leave. This would very likely be enough to create an adaptive response as long as you train hard.

Training hard (which means training to failure) is the most important thing. If you don’t train hard enough, you won’t create an adaptive response.

However, adding a bit of structure makes sense. So here is a practical approach:

  1. Pick any plan you like: There are plenty of good plans out there for free. Pick one that you like and stick to it. YOU DON’T NEED TO PAY FOR A PLAN

  2. Be consistent: It is important that you don’t skip. Never. Because once you start skipping, you increasingly accept skipping the gym and will do it more and more. Therefore, I’d pick a plan that doesn’t require you to hit the gym more than 4 times per week. Everything more is unrealistic for most people.

  3. Progressive overload: Applying progressive overload means that you increase the weight, number of reps, or form of an exercise every week. By doing this, you ensure that you are training hard enough because you need to push to failure to be stronger than you were last week. If you continuously get stronger, you can be sure that you are building muscle. Track all your lifts to be sure that you are improving.

But most importantly, IT TAKES TIME! If there were an easy way to build muscle, it would be known. If you want the results, you have to work for them. Not for weeks, not for months, but for years.

If you apply the methods I’ve shared above, you will make gains and see results in 2025. I hope that you will see what your body is capable of.

Again, you’d support me a lot if you could check out the app I’ve developed. We are still small, so every written review in the AppStore and PlayStore would help me tremendously.

Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.