---
title: 'How To Build Muscle (Explained In 5 Levels)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=lu_BObG6dj8'
video_id: 'lu_BObG6dj8'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 1315
---

# How To Build Muscle (Explained In 5 Levels)

> Source: [How To Build Muscle (Explained In 5 Levels)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lu_BObG6dj8)

## Summary

This video explains how to build muscle across five levels of increasing complexity, from a simple overview to the molecular pathways involved. It covers the basics of lifting and protein, the importance of progressive overload, key training variables like effort and volume, the physiological drivers of growth, and the cellular signaling that leads to muscle protein synthesis.

### Key Points

- **Basic Formula: Lift + Protein** [0:35] — Building muscle requires lifting weights and eating protein. Protein provides amino acids, the building blocks for muscle.
- **Progressive Overload Defined** [1:54] — Progressive overload is the gradual increase of stress on muscles. This can be done by adding weight, reps, sets, or improving technique.
- **Optimal Protein Intake** [3:01] — Optimal protein intake is 1.6-2.2 g/kg of body weight per day (0.7-1 g/lb). For high body fat individuals, use 1g per cm of height.
- **Effort: Train Close to Failure** [4:51] — Effort is the most fundamental variable. Sets should be taken close to failure (within 2-3 reps), but not necessarily to absolute failure.
- **Volume Sweet Spot** [6:04] — Volume has a sweet spot (10-20 hard sets per body part per week). More volume is not always better and can be counterproductive.
- **Rep Range Flexibility** [7:11] — Reps from 3 to 30 can all build muscle if taken close to failure. The 6-12 rep range is practical but not mandatory.
- **Tension is the Primary Driver** [11:02] — Mechanical tension is the primary driver of hypertrophy. Muscle damage and metabolic stress are likely secondary or irrelevant.
- **Cellular Pathway: Tension to mTOR** [16:30] — Tension activates mechanosensors, which signal mTOR. mTOR then triggers muscle protein synthesis via mRNA and ribosomes.
- **Leucine's Role in mTOR Activation** [18:46] — The amino acid leucine also activates mTOR, but its effect is shorter than the stimulus from weight training. Both are needed for maximum stimulation.

## Transcript

in this video I'm going to explain how
to build muscle in five levels of
increasing complexity starting with the
most basic explanation and getting more
detailed as we go now in preparing this
video I consulted with a number of
different experts including a professor
in muscle metabolism an industry leader
in the field of biomechanics and an
active researcher in the field of
strength and conditioning I'm also a pro
natural bodybuilder myself and I've been
studying the science behind getting
jacked for over a decade while coaching
people from around the globe and just
for fun I'd like you to comment below
which level you got to before you
started zoning out or getting lost
[Music]
all right so building muscle is actually
pretty simple all you really need to do
is lift weights and eat protein protein
of course being the macronutrient found
in foods like fish chicken meat Dairy
beans lentils and protein powders and
when you weight train your muscles start
to think well if we're going to keep
lifting these heavy weights I'd better
start to get some bigger muscles to make
this easier this is called an Adaptive
response and it's kind of like when you
play guitar your fingertips start to get
harder and roales as an Adaptive
response to pressing against the strings
it hurts at first but then it gets
easier as you build the thicker skin
layer however lifting weights isn't
quite enough on its own to build muscle
in order to build something you need
building blocks and when it comes to
muscle the building blocks are called
amino acids which you get by eating
protein so when you lift weights you're
telling the muscle it needs to get
bigger and when you eat protein you're
giving the muscle the building blocks it
needs to actually
[Music]
grow so in reality it's probably not
quite good enough to just lift weights
and eat protein to get really solid
results for example if you're lifting
the exact same weight for the exact same
reps 2 years from now that you lifted
today that probably won't be good enough
to keep the muscle growing sure you'll
see some decent growth at the beginning
because you've never lifted any weight
before but soon enough that weight will
no longer be challenging enough to
present a sufficient stimulus for your
muscle to continue growing this is why
we need to expand the lift weights part
to lift weights with an emphasis on
Progressive overload now the technical
definition of progressive overload is
the gradual increase of stress on the
muscles during weight training but we
can simply think of it as just
increasing some training parameter over
time so from workout to workout you want
to add a little bit of weight or add an
extra rep using the same weight for
example let's say you're trying to grow
your biceps rather than doing three sets
of 10 reps with the same weight week
after week and month after month it'd be
much more effective to do three sets of
10 reps in week 1 three sets of 11 in
week two three sets of 12 and week three
and then in week four you can go back
back to 10 reps again but this time add
a little more weight now at a certain
point you may not be able to increase
the weight or reps each and every time
and that's okay there are still other
ways to apply Progressive overload such
as by adding an extra set with the same
reps and the same weight or even by
doing something as simple as controlling
the negative a little better or feeling
a stronger mind muscle connection where
you more consciously feel the muscle
squeezing and stretching as you lift or
swapping out for a new exercise and
starting that overloading process again
also on the nutrition side we can do
quite a bit better than just saying eat
protein so to be more specific the
latest research shows that Landing
between 1.6 to 2.2 g of protein per
kilogram of body weight per day so about
0.7 to 1 gram per pound is a good Target
for maximizing muscle gain for example
if you weigh 165 lbs or 75 kilos you'd
want to be eating somewhere in the range
of 120 to 165 g of protein per day for
General muscle building now there may be
some advantage in going a bit higher in
certain Advanced situations but this is
a sufficient range for most now if
you're very high in body fat the grams
per unit body weight approach won't work
as well so let's say you're 300 lb you
don't really need 300 g of protein per
day so in that case I simply prefer to
use 1 g of protein per centimeter in
height because it works independently of
body fat percentage so let's say you're
5'9 or about 175 cm tall 175 g of
protein would be plenty for you it's not
a perfect system but it'll get you in
the right Ballpark and while there is
some evidence to suggest that spacing
your protein across 3 to five meals
throughout the day might be more ideal
if that suggestion holds true it's
certainly much less important than
simply hitting a daily protein Target in
fact contrary to Common belief training
is a much more powerful contributor to
muscle growth in diet and by quite a
long shot so while it is true that a
caloric Surplus will drive muscle growth
more effectively and dietary
manipulations like protein timing can
have some impact I'm going to focus the
remaining levels on maximizing the
muscle response through resistance
[Music]
training so focusing on Progressive
overload is smart but it still leaves a
lot to be desired in the gym for example
it doesn't tell us how hard we should
push it or how many sets we should do or
how many reps we should do or how heavy
we should be lifting so next I want to
take a quick look at what the research
says about the so-called acute training
variables factors like effort volume
intensity exercise selection and
frequency now I think effort is the most
fundamental variable for growth because
no matter how much you optimize all the
other stuff if you aren't pushing it
hard enough the muscle simply won't grow
at least not optimally now there's
currently a raging debate within the
scientific Community about exactly how
hard we should push each set a
relatively small group of experts
insists that all sets should be taken
all the way to muscular failure defined
as an inability to complete another rep
despite maximum effort but I'd say that
the mainstream scientific consensus is
that it isn't necessary to take sets all
the way to failure but you do need to be
pretty close you shouldn't be leaving
more than two or three reps in the tank
for most of your sets now of course
there are a few exceptions relieving
five or more reps in the tank does make
sense for recovery especially when
training primarily for strength but as a
general rule most of your sets should be
pretty close to failure so you do need
to push it hard maybe Harder Than You
Think up next volume technically refers
to the amount of work you do and this
was historically calculated as the
number of sets times the number of reps
times the amount of load but as of 2015
most practitioners began to think of
volume simply as the number of hard sets
you do now over the last few years it's
become a popular meme to think of volume
as the quote primary driver of
hypertrophy and if I ever said this I no
longer think it's the case rather than
more volume leading to more growth what
we instead see is a sort of inverted U
Trend where more volume leads to more
growth only up to a point past which
further increases don't do anything
extra and then at a certain point adding
more volume seems to be
counterproductive so there's this volume
Sweet Spot which seems to be a bit
different for everyone and I find a lot
of people are already doing more volume
than they really need and would probably
benefit more by reducing their volume
and focusing more on effort and
execution but the main point is that you
should experiment and figure out what
dose of volume gives you the best
balance of gains and Recovery still
based on what we know from the current
science something around 10 to 20 sets
per body part per week seems to be a
good range for most people and most
muscles so for example if you're running
an upper lower split that has you in the
gym four days a week your chest volume
might look something like this with six
hard sets for your chest on Monday and
six hard sets for your chest on Thursday
totaling 12 hard sets for the week okay
next we need to cover intensity which
despite its popular conflation with
effort technically refers to how heavy
the weight is you can either lift heavy
weights for low reps or light weights
for High Reps but what's the best for
muscle growth well it turns out that as
long as you're taking sets sufficiently
close to failure you can maximize
hypertrophy using High Reps or low reps
or a combination of both research has
shown that reps as low as three and Reps
as high as 30 all cause similar muscle
growth however there does seem to be a
limit to how light you can go new data
shows that when you lift weights lighter
than 20% of your one rep max you do see
significantly less growth but the
average rep count subjects got with that
load was 67 reps not a very practical
way to train regardless so the
traditional 6 to 12 rep zone is kind of
a myth in the sense that research shows
you can go well outside that range and
still grow fine as long as you're
training close to muscular failure still
I think there is some value in that 6 to
12 range because once you start dipping
down below six reps you can risk
unnecessary strain on your joints and it
can be practically more difficult to
accumulate enough volume and the more
often you go above 12 reps the more you
risk just burning yourself out as higher
rep sets are harder to recover from so
for practical purposes I suggest
splitting it up like this with the
majority of your sets coming in that 6
to 12 or maybe 15 Zone while having
smaller chunks dedicated to lower Reps
for continued strength progression and
higher Reps for stimulative variety now
I think exercise selection and execution
is just as much an art as it is a
science sure I do tend to favor
multi-joint compound movements like
squats presses and rows in my own
training because they give you more
hypertrophic bang for your buck by
activating large amounts of muscle Mass
while promoting more efficient total
body strength gain and while I
definitely think mastering these basic
compound movements is important single
joint isolation exercises certainly have
their place especially when it comes to
targeting smaller muscles like the
biceps rear delts side delts and abs
which can be overpowered if you focus on
compound lifts exclusively luckily when
it comes to muscle growth there are no
mandatory exercises and so after
mastering the basics it's once again
important to experiment with different
movements and movement variations to
figure out what works best for you and
and your body's mechanics now when it
comes to frequency it seems like most
people have flipped from thinking that
you should only train each body part
once a week on a split that looks
something like this otherwise you're
going to overtrain and melt your muscle
away to these days most people thinking
that if you train on a bro split like
this you're never going to make any
gains at all because science in reality
the latest research actually shows that
frequency in and of itself likely plays
a relatively minor role in muscle growth
and the latest studies show similar
results between hitting a body part once
a week and three plus times per week how
however I still generally recommend
hitting a muscle at least twice a week
and I do prefer splits like upper lower
and full body over the traditional body
part split because they typically allow
for more volume per week and higher
quality volumes per workout still as
long as you've got all the other
variables in place are recovering
properly and being consistent over time
this is an area of programming that
probably deserves less of the spotlight
than it tends to get and then there are
other training variables like rest
periods lifting Tempo and advanced
intensity techniques that make up a
relatively smaller piece of the puzzle
and rather than go into detail on these
I'll just link a few videos on them down
[Music]
below okay so with Progressive overload
and the main acute training variables in
mind at this point I'd like to get a bit
more granular and take a closer look at
what's actually driving muscle growth
physiologically so in 2010 Dr Brad
shenfeld published a landmark paper with
over 500 citations that introduced the
three Factor model of muscle hypertrophy
this model proposed that there are three
main things driving muscle growth grow
mechanical tension muscle damage and
metabolic stress now the very short
version is that mechanical tension is
the type of force that tries to stretch
a muscle fiber one way to visualize this
is like a tug of war as each side pulls
tension is generated in the Rope so you
can think of it like not only are the
people pulling on the rope but the Rope
is also pulling back on the people
similar in the muscle where tension is
passively created when the muscle is
stretched and tension is actively
created during contraction when actin
molecules are pulled by meas and heads
and as of now tension remains absolutely
Undisputed as the primary driver of
hypertrophy within the scientific
community at large next muscle damage is
basically exactly what it sounds like
physical damage to the muscle like micro
tears and other cellular disruptions and
you can observe this under a microscope
where you see that the normal pattern in
muscle can be seriously disrupted after
training now some believe that this type
of damage is at least partly responsible
for the delayed onset muscle soreness
that you can feel in the days following
training although the soreness
phenomenon is no doubt caused by a
number of factors and still isn't fully
understood Still For Years many people
have just assumed that getting sore
should be the goal of training since
soreness comes from muscle damage and
muscle damage causes muscle growth but
the latest science shows that that first
claim is questionable and the second
claim is most likely not true of course
the most common sense way to think about
this is that running a marathon would
cause tons of muscle damage but wouldn't
do anything good for muscle growth in
fact a review paper from wacken
colleagues pointed out that if anything
damage in this context would seem to
decrease muscle growth and even in a
weight training context damage doesn't
seem to be doing much good the study
from domson colleagues argued that
damage doesn't even correlate with
hypertrophy over the long run as shown
in the figure here early on in a
training program you see a huge amount
of damage this could be why you get so
sore when starting a new routine and
while there is an Associated early spike
in muscle protein synthesis the vast
majority of that synthesis is directed
toward repairing damaged muscle tissue
rather than building new muscle tissue
from scratch and it's only after that
damage decreases that muscle protein syn
is is directed toward new muscle
hypertrophy and while folks Playing
devil's advocate could argue well
studies show that Ecentric training
causes more muscle damage and studies
also show that Ecentric training causes
more muscle growth I would simply
respond that correlation doesn't imply
causation and it seems more likely to me
that the extra growth that you see from
Ecentric overloading could simply be
coming from the fact that you can simply
overload the muscle more heavily during
an Ecentric contraction causing more
tension in the muscle now I should say
that if we're being really honest we
don't actually understand muscle damage
all that well even the methods of Simply
measuring muscle damage have been
contested by prominent researchers so
the bottom line is that any theory that
uses muscle damage to explain muscle
growth is speculative at best and
unfeasible at worst but what about
metabolic stress well metabolic stress
refers to the accumulation of
metabolites like lactate and hydrogen
ions and the muscle hypoxia that often
follows weight training and it's often
associated with the massive skin tearing
pumps that you get from high rep
workouts so if muscle damage and it's
ensuing soreness is unlikely to be
driving muscle growth surely the pump
and its Associated metabolic stress must
be doing something I mean even Arnold
seemed to recognize this the greatest
feeling you can get in a gym or the most
satisfying feeling you can get in the
gym is the pump your muscles get a
really tight feeling like your skin is
going to explode any minute you know
it's really tight it's like somebody
blowing air into into your muscle it
just blows up and it feels different it
feels fantastic and well while the pump
does feel good and certainly can make
training more enjoy and perhaps even
provide some feedback that you're
actually hitting the muscle that you're
trying to Target it most likely isn't
driving hypertrophy because there are
just too many examples of where the
relationship between metabolic stress
and muscle growth breaks down shorter
rest periods cause more metabolic stress
but significantly less muscle growth
than longer rest periods note that
there's a footnote in the description
Box about this partial range of motion
causes more metabolic stress but often
less muscle growth in full range of
motion training all the way to failure
causes more metabolic stress but at best
results in equal muscle growth to
stopping a few reps shy of failure and
Blood Flow Restriction Training causes
tons of metabolic stress but doesn't
enhance hypertrophy on its own and
doesn't even work in conjunction with
training unless the training methods are
highly suboptimal and even in this case
it still seems to point back to tension
when I spoke with one of the authors of
this popular Blood Flow Restriction
study he pointed out that any benefit
seems to be tension related would you
argue that the impact of bfr essentially
leads back to just creating more tension
in the muscle like do you think it still
goes back to tension yeah it's like it's
just bfr is it's like cheating 20 reps
extra in a sense it's the it's the same
effect you just it just happens earlier
so consensus is converging on tension
and perhaps tension alone as being the
primary driver of muscle growth and so
it should be the primary goal of our
training to maximize tension above
anything else so how do we do that well
the practical application is actually
quite simple you need to apply
Progressive tension increases to the
MUSC itself this means we need to lift
with good consistent technique while
using the acute training variables and
Progressive overload to push the level
of intramuscular tension up over time
also paying attention to things like the
Mind muscle connection at least on
certain exercises and Ecentric control
should also help as those aspects of
lifting have been shown to increase
intramuscular
[Music]
tension okay so we know that mechanical
tension is the main thing driving muscle
growth but what happens next how do we
get from a mechanical stimulus like
tension to a biochemical signal that
commands the muscle to grow well Dr
tromlin explained this to me in terms of
blocks of dominoes he said that when one
thing gets activated it passes on the
signal to the next thing and the next
thing and so on but if you're smart you
don't just build one chain of dominoes
you build out all these side chains so
that they fall in a bunch of different
directions and it's the same thing with
muscle growth there isn't just one
pathway with one outcome but rather many
different interconnected Pathways with
many different Downstream effects
effects so with that in mind let's start
at the top all right so we lift a weight
heavy enough that it creates active
mechanical tension within the muscle
this is called the stimulus the stimulus
is sensed by mechan sensors which sort
of feel that the muscle is being pulled
into tension and pass that signal on now
based on the latest research it isn't
perfectly clear exactly which molecules
are doing this sensing but the top
candidates include camir which are
collections of proteins that sit in the
muscle fiber membrane and are
responsible for holding muscle fibers
together and transferring force between
muscle fibers during contraction there's
also Titan which as a fun fact is
actually the largest protein we've ever
discovered in humans and because it runs
parallel to the muscle fiber itself
could theoretically be responsible for
sensing mechanical changes like
stretching but probably only at long
muscle lengths and then there's filamin
which bind to the famous actin proteins
that slide during contraction making
them a really good candidate for sensing
tension and for the record I read
through the latest paper on all this
sensing stuff from 2018 and I'll just
say this area of research is not well
understood yet to quote the author's
directly conclusively identifying major
hypertrophy stimuli and their sensors is
one of the big remaining questions in
exercise physiology still we can paint
the rest of the picture with a broad
brush for now from the mechanos sensors
a signal gets sent to a beast mode
molecule called mtor which is a major
regulator of cellular growth in general
not just in muscle tissue it's also
implicated in many cancers because of
its responsibility in making tissues
bigger from there mtor goes to the
nucleus and tells the DNA Machinery to
produce a messenger RNA strand which you
can think of as a set of blueprints for
building new muscle those blueprints are
sent to a ribosome which is like a
muscle protein building Factory that
manufactures a string of amino acids
based on the blueprint from the MRNA in
a process known as translation and this
step is what we're actually talking
about when we say muscle protein
synthesis now through this translation
process many different proteins will be
synthesized some of which will be the
big contractile proteins that make us
more jacked others will be more
ribosomal proteins or mtor proteins
themselves so anabolic growth potential
remains high in the future now if this
rate of synthesis exceeds the rate of
breakdown protein balance is said to be
positive and in that case new
contractile proteins are incorporated
into muscle fibers resulting in what's
called myofibrillar hypertrophy leading
to increased muscle size overall but all
of that is really just one string of
dominoes there's also this other path
that's triggered by amino acids in the
protein we eat in this case amino acids
are transported inside the cell and the
amino acid Lucine also activates mtor
now for the record we seem to need about
3 G of Lucine to stimulate mtor which
can be found in about 20 to 20 G of high
quality protein although some research
has shown greater anabolic responses
with higher protein doses so it may be
possible to crank mtor activity higher
with more Lucine but regardless it's
important to realize that the
stimulative impact of Lucine is much
shorter than the stimulative impact of
weight training and so for maximum mtor
stimulation you need both training and
Lucine with Lucine essentially
complementing the stimulative effects of
weightlifting then the other eight
essential amino acids there's nine in
total when you include Lucine make their
way to the the ribosome where they're
used as the fundamental building blocks
for creating new muscle now another
pathway that I'll briefly mention is
that of testosterone now even though
modifying testosterone within the
natural range plays a relatively minor
role in muscle growth when you inject
highdose testosterone the hormone
crosses the muscle cell membrane and
either binds to an androgen receptor
directly or is converted to DHT which
then binds to the Androgen receptor and
then that complex enters the nucleus and
tells the DNA to start cranking out more
blueprints turning up that muscle
protein synthetic process even more now
if I were actually discussing muscle
growth with an expert there are a lot of
other things I'd want to discuss I'd
want to at least mention sarcoplasmic
hypertrophy so far we've been focusing
on myofibrillar hypertrophy so the
growth of actual contractile tissue but
there's some new solid evidence
supporting so-called sarcoplasmic
hypertrophy which is the growth of all
the other stuff inside the muscle fiber
like glycogen organel and other
non-contractile proteins then I might
speculate that higher rep and higher
volume training might bias the muscle
towards sarcoplasmic growth but then the
expert depending on how open they are to
guesswork might shut that down for
lacking evidence I'd also definitely
want to talk about myonuclear addition
the idea that all this muscle protein
synthetic stuff still seems to be
limited by the number of nuclei or
command centers that you have in your
muscle cells to begin with and so when
satellite cells that surround the muscle
cell Like Satellites donate their nuclei
that could theoretically allow the
muscle cell to crank out more new muscle
protein and build more muscle but then
the expert might push back that that
theory is actually pretty speculative
and we can't even rightly assume that
nuclei are in fact limiting factors for
hypertrophy until we get more science in
our hands and then a curious bystander
might ask why does any of this matter
anyway what's the point of this level of
research maybe the expert would respond
by saying something like knowledge
having value for its own sake or maybe
they'd point out a few of its many
medical applications such as an
understanding sarcopenia or muscular
distrophy or maybe they'd say that
they're trying to figure all this stuff
out just in case there's a new pathway
that can actually feedback into training
recommendations or maybe we'll be able
to use this research to develop an
exercise pill someday that creates the
same cellular effect is weight training
without having to spend nearly as much
time in the gym a sort of steroid
without side effects that could start
development 50 years down the road but
since I'm getting well over my own head
at this point I think I'm going to leave
it there for this one if you guys made
it this far please let me know by
commenting I'm ready for level six and
I'll see if I can make that happen in
another video as new research comes in
as always don't forget to leave me a
thumbs up if you enjoyed the video
subscribe if you haven't already and
I'll see you guys all here in the next
one