Muscle building for beginners

marcg868

marcg868

marcg868

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Joined
16 Oct 2016
Posts
421
Location
East Lancashire
Looking to gain some muscle and bulk up a bit. Only thing that puts me off is I cant spare the money to join a Gym currently so looking to see if i can make gains at home.

I'm 5ft 10 and seem to fluctuate between 69kg and 73 kg. Aiming to bulk out slightly maybe to 80kg.

I did previously reach that weight back when I was 21 (13 years ago) when I was a Scaffolder, a mixture of eating 5 times a day and drinking 6-8 pints a night.

Now I work in the NHS and spend half my life pacing up the ward.

So looking for some advice on exercises, equipment I could use at home and what foods to eat (no egg, cant stand them).
Cheers.
 
You're going to need some form of equipment even if you train at home, because the principle behind building muscle requires that over time you expose it to greater amounts of tension and workload - and that's why gyms are the easiest way of doing this because if you can churn out push-ups, you quickly get to a point where it becomes an endurance exercise and to grow more you have to start balancing weights on your back or doing increasingly acrobatic variations to make it harder. If you go down the calisthenics route (check the Reddit sub 'Bodyweight Fitness community'), you still something to do pull-ups, dips etc from so you spend money either way. If it's just weights, you're going to need to invest in equipment.

As for diet, it's pretty simple - you need to eat enough that you gain scale weight consistently at a speed that won't make you fat quickly, combined with training hard enough that your body actually uses this surplus of calories to build muscle: the evidence suggests for a beginner, you want about a 1-1.5% increase of your total bodyweight per month; so if you're 70kg after the first month ideally you'd be between 70.7kg-71.1kg.

Where this food comes from isn't complicated - eat plenty of protein at every meal, spreading out your intake over the day (between 3-6 seems ideal), make the core of your diet nutrient-dense, as in lots of whole foods, eat plenty of carbs and try and get your fats from actual sources of fat rather than from things like baked goods, treat food or ready meals etc.

Use something like this as a guide to building meals according to your preferences (because there's no such thing as a perfect diet, and a diet you can't adhere to is rubbish even if it looks good on paper).
 
I'm the same height as you 5ft 10in and 7 months ago weighed 72kg

I'm now 81.6kg and only increased my bodyfat by 2%

No idea how you'll managed that by not going to the gym though. I basically go to the gym 4 times a week and increased my calories to 3,200 per day

Unfortunately during that time I had two injuries (carrying one right now, my shoulder) so I'm out of action for 2/3 weeks :(
 
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