 Question is from doctors vermin When you reach a point you stop gaining weight. How do you get over that point? Is it better to back off of your calorie intake or increase it even more? Okay, so kind of related to the first one, but I'll the first question we did But I'll tell you what if you stop gaining weight The first place I would look would be a workout. That would be the first place now diet plays a huge role here It certainly does but the first thing I would look at is Is my workout as effective as it can be because at the end of the day, I remember when I first broke this down Gaining a pound of muscle a week, which is a ton Okay, if you gain a pound of muscle a week you're either genetically gifted or on anabolic steroids or a complete beginner And you just start lifting weights. You can't expect to gain four pounds of muscle not gonna last now But let's just say you did Let's say you were gaining a pound of lean muscle Every single week. Okay, let's say this was you That would require an extra I think it was something like 15 grams of protein a day or something silly like that like it's nothing And that's if you gained a tremendous amount of muscle four pounds every single month Your body doesn't need all these extra calories to gain lean body mass. It needs a signal To build that muscle first And I I remember you know going through this process myself or I would be doing a workout for a long long long long time Then I changed my workout my diet wouldn't change I would change my workout that would be more effective and boom, you know two pounds of lean body mass would come onto my body so that's the first thing that I would say is is look at your workout and Look there first if you're not getting stronger. You're not building muscle Because here's what happens if the workouts not effective and you just keep bumping your calories You know what's gonna end up happening? She's gonna gain body fat and you see this a lot Guys tend to fall for this where they're doing the bulk and they come in they're like, oh man You know, I was on this crazy bulk for like three months and I gained 25 pounds, you know, and then you do your body fat test like actually you gain three pounds of lean body mass The rest was body fat and then we try and shed that body fat You end up losing the fat and all the muscle that you gain and you're back So we're both misleading because yeah, a lot of times you are gaining that weight You're feeling good. You might be getting stronger. You think that like the majority of its muscle But it's like half the time it's like mostly fat at a certain point that you're just gaining sometimes it's a bit of a mind fuck too to be like constantly trying to gain weight gain weight gain weight and something I used to do with The competitors that I coached and myself When I would get in a situation like this I actually would throw in a single day fast on a day off And uh, it sounds like it would be counter counter. Yeah, it totally sounds counterintuitive to do this, right? Uh, but when you're constantly trying to chase the calories and you're stuffing and you feel like you're always overfeeding And you're just not getting enough feel like you're not getting enough Again, I feel like sometimes we're just we're flirting with that line of like, oh the body just doesn't want anymore So one of my favorite things and I don't know if half of that is maybe a psychological thing that we're dealing with too It just and this just works it works really well for all the competitive athletes that I had it worked well for me when I was competing Um, and that is what I would do is I would pick saturday or sunday or whatever day you normally have off from the gym Then I would run a 24 hour fast and I would just fast for 24 hours And then the next day when I started feeding and training again I felt like my appetite would spike back up again. So It does seem very counterintuitive to do that But this is a strategy that's worked really well for myself and and people that I've coached and maybe something that you explore Now as far as workouts are concerned, I'll tell you this right here Um, and this isn't always 100 true, but it's a pretty consistently true, um statement Try to get stronger Strength oftentimes not always but oftentimes if you get stronger and stronger and stronger consistently It's accompanied by more muscle Especially if you're beginner or intermediate now when you get super advanced oftentimes the strength things you get Come from better technique better positioning Uh, you know better cns signal but if you're beginner intermediate and you're Trying to gain weight you're not getting stronger change your workout out to try to get stronger focus on that and you'll I used to notice this it was like a If I gained like 15 to 20 pounds on a lift Um, then I would notice in accompanying, you know one pound of lean body mass or something like that I actually have it written down when I was a kid I noticed this like when I go up 20 pounds on a lift I gain like a pound Of muscle try to get stronger if you're gaining weight and your strength isn't going up But you're gaining weight on the scale I hate to say this but you're you know, it's it's likely not always but it's likely you're getting body fat Now you can gain muscle without getting stronger But that's uh, you know, that's much more tricky. Um, and you'll see that more often in advanced lifters So try to get stronger if you get stronger Oftentimes you'll you'll gain muscle. Well, they never said lean weight. So that's true, you know, they could be wanting to get big