I eat lots of celery broccoli carrots onions roots kimchi ,pickled and fermented things and lots more. I just vary them up daily
I think you’ve got your answer.
Eat more and do 20-rep squats and/or front squats. You’ll hit your quads the most with those, and you’ll never gain much muscle unless you’re gaining weight.
160lbs at 5’10" isn’t that big. I think if you’d stayed at 180 and just worked on building some muscle, that may have worked out better. Just work on gaining weight. Like @Chris_Colucci said, where’s it going to come from?
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So theres no calorie set?
Dude you have literally asked the same questions on every single thread youve started since july and been given the same answers. Go away and actually do the work. Eat your wheaties.
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I think we’re being trolled. I think this is some loser jealous of a dude and has his pics, and is using these posts to make him look dumb
Can you not google “calorie calculator” or “TDEE calculator”? How did you find this forum and make these posts without navigating a search engine ever in your life?
Or, count the calories you’ve been eating every day for 3 days, take an average of those, and assume that’s your maintenance. You have 3 months of meals that kept you the exact same weight, which will provide a much better estimate of how many calories you need to start planning a surplus than a generic online calculator. But that’s like…a few minutes of work, so you might have to work up to it with the 3 seconds it’ll take to google a calorie calculator.
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16 x bodyweight to start that’s a slight surplus. If you weigh 160 that’s 2560 calories for a slight surplus and from what you listed you calories are much lower than that. 160 protein 57 grams of fat 355 carbs all from good sources. That’s a low surplus but you can slowly add to it. If you’re putting in the work you’ll gain weight. You can lower the fat and add carbs or proteins
1 gram fat =9 calories
1 gram protein= 4 cal
1gram carb =4cal
Some ppl like more carb, or fat or protein so that’s be up to you to adjust as you find what works for your body. I hope this helps you out and good luck.
Um wtf? Someones pessimistic
In fairness, you do very little to inspire optimism.
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did you try single leg squats?
and accurate
Only you would waste your time like that
Only you would waste your time trying to clown a kid because you’re a hater
I’m about your height. about 5’10. You can seem my avatar picture. Now, imagine subtracting 40-50 lbs from that.
That’s you. That’s the obvious reason you don’t think you look muscular. You’re not big enough to look muscular. Eat more, kid.
Side note: definition is just muscle size, while lacking bodyfat. there are no workouts for improving definition. The more you grow your muscles, the less fat you’ll have to cut to see that definition.
Not sure how experienced you are and couldn’t really figure out how you train, but since you’re already on a PPL split:
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drop a few workout sessions, 6 times a week at your current level probably means you’re doing a lot of junk stuff you don’t really need, you’re either wasting time or hindering your progress by slowing down recovery. Stick to 4 sessions a week, and learn to do each session with intention instead of being in the gym 365 days a year wasting time;
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take a quick look at the basic 5/3/1 progression, which is fairly simple: 3 weeks blocks, a light - medium - heavy week, you do two work sets of 3-5 reps on your main exercise and then push the heaviest set of the day for as many reps as possible. All the %s are based on a TM, not an actual 1RM (this is important);
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you don’t need to stick to 5/3/1 entirely but what’s important in the context of your question/issue with quads is that you understand how the most basic progression works.
If you have a decent solid base on squat technique, this is what I’d do (and what has worked good for me, since I too sticked to a PPL routine in the last few months, using 5/3/1 as the backbone for the main work) in your leg day, in this order:
Squat
Push the top set each week striving to hit 20 reps
Since, if I understood correctly, you’re already using 50% for your 5x5 work right now, take that 50% and use it as your 5/3/1 TM to calculate the weights. This should give you room to get used to push the squats towards 20 reps. If it feels too easy at first, keep at it and stick to the normal 5/3/1 increases (+10 lbs to your TM every 3 weeks), don’t try to increase more than that to speed up your progress (it won’t, it will just bury you), don’t reinvent the wheel, keep it simple. Pick 50% of your 1RM, plug it into 5/3/1 sets, increase that number 10 lbs every 3-weeks cycle, plug it into 5/3/1 sets and repeat;
Goblet squat
3-5 straight sets of 10 (I do 3 sets when I superset them with good mornings, done standalone I’d do 5 sets)
Heels elevated, these should allow you to go below parallel by a good margin but don’t sacrifice technique for a longer ROM.
What you really want to do here is NOT lock your knees at the end of each rep, keep them softer and stop just before lockout. Keep a controlled tempo, your set should look like a continuous fluid motion for ten reps. This keeps constant tension on your quads;
Leg press
5 sets of 10, pyramid up
Keep your feet parallel on the lowest part of the foot plate, with a narrow-ish stance (for me, it’s shoulder width or so), don’t lock your knees at the end of the reps like explained above. Push through your toes. Again, don’t try to use full ROM at all cost, set the bench in a ROM that you’re comfortable with, you don’t have to get all acrobatic trying to start the movement with knees in your mouth. Play around a bit until you find a starting position that really allows you to focus on feeling your quads doing the work, and stick to it, that’s the point of isolation/machine work;
Hack squat
5 straight sets of 10 (fixed weight)
Same as above, hack squats feel a bit weird to me, like unnatural, so just find a stance and a ROM that allows you to focus on your muscles working, it doesn’t really matter if you’re not getting to parallel or whatelse. Don’t lock out at the top, keep constant tension on your quads and crank out smooth rep after rep, you should feel like you’re on autopilot by now;
Leg press
Jump back on the leg press, take about 60-70% of heaviest set you did previously on it, and shoot to do about 25 reps. Same rules as above, don’t lock your knees, push through the toes, in this last set I like to focus on really exploding at each rep, so much that on many reps the foot plate moves away from my heels and it ends up with half a calf raise;
This is it.
There are a few relevant things to note:
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I like to use the 5/3/1 scheme because it’s a dumb proof, built in form of progressive overload, AND it follows a wave pattern instead of a linear progression.
20 rep squats are great, I just don’t think beginners should do them “the original way” (picking a 10RM and trying to crawl towards 20 total reps), it’s not just brutal, it’s also not sustainable on the long term and requires a much higher degree of technique mastery. A beginner shouldn’t need “shock therapy”, so to say, to make progress.
With 5/3/1 progression, you’re still working towards heavier and heavier sets, but over the course of three weeks at a time, leaving more room for recovery and progression.
An example would be, random numbers, that your first cycle has you doing 160 - 170 - 180 lbs x20 in the first three weeks, then you increase your TM by 10 pounds, recalculate the %s and the next 3 weeks you do 165 - 175 - 185 x20, and so on.
I personally started doing 20 rep squats conservatively with 167lbs in the first light week, and ended up doing 212lbs this wednesday in the heavy week, over the course of 13 weeks. Three weeks from now, I’ll be doing 220lbs x20. Nothing special at all, but every single week I’ve finished the set knowing I still had 2-3 reps left in the tank and knowing I still have a good margin for progress.
In the big scheme, you’re still working towards heavier and heavier top sets, but instead of attempting a new “personal record” every single week (something that would wear you down quickly), you have time to pile a ton of submaximal volume and ingrain better technique, while hitting a personal best every third week.
In a few cycles, the first “heavy week” weight you pushed to 20 reps will become your first “light week” top set, and this will build confidence. You’ll get stronger, your core will become much stronger too and, most of all, it will build A LOT of mental toughness. -
With the 5/3/1 scheme taking care of your progressive overload and strength gains, you can focus on doing assistance work “the right way”. I see a ton of kids your age doing a ton of assistance/isolation work, often with very heavy weights too, and they’re always the same.
Month after month, year after year, they have made exactly zero gainz in all possible aspects of physical development, while somewhat feeling accomplished by the fact that they have visible abs at 135 pounds of bodyweight.
Your assistance/isolation work is there to take your focus away from technique, stabilization and everything else, so that you can pour all that focus into using the muscles the way you need to use them towards your goal - that is, to get the specific muscle(s) do the job.
It’s not a dick measuring contest about who curls the heaviest dumbbell by doing the human trebuchet with the torso, or who leg presses more weight for a 1 inch ROM.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention to how you do these exercises, because simple tweaks like the ones written above all work towards making it easier for you to get the right muscle(s) doing the work, maximizing their involvement in the exercise, allowing you to feel the tension and the fatigue that builds in that specific area - and if you feel fatigue, burning and pump somewhere else, somewhere you shouldn’t feel them, you know you’re doing something wrong and you can correct it. -
Other than that, assistance work is meant to let you hit the target muscle(s) from different angles, so take advantage of it, because you need it.
For the squat, use whatever setup works better for you, no two people are the same and the squat is highly individual. Do it the way you’re stronger and safer, it will work your legs anyway, especially once you start hitting those 20 reps consistently for a couple weeks.
For assistance, learn how you can shift the focus towards different areas of the quads, those exercises are meant for you to do exactly that, you can do it safely because they don’t require much technique, if at all.
Basically, read and learn how muscles work.
For legs, pushing your knees out forces your vastus medialis to work a lot (the teardrop muscle you wanted), goblet squats are a great tool for this. Keeping a narrower stance with parallel feet shifts a lot the focus on the outer portion of your quads (lateralis). A wide stance brings more inner tighs and glutes into the equation.
You can pretty much adapt many assistance exercises to focus more on this or that portion of the muscles you’re working; -
Don’t chase weight on assistance exercises. If you keep the weight and reps the same in your assistance stuff, your volume AND intensity will progressively increase anyway over the course of 3 weeks thanks to the 5/3/1 progression in the squats. Strive to do the assistance stuff properly while the squats get harder and harder - properly means, see above, “the right way”, with muscles doing the work, focusing on tension and hitting different angles.
From time to time you’ll be able to go up a notch with your assistance weights and stick to the new weight consistently. It might just be a dumbbell 5 pounds heavier in goblet squats, or 20 pounds more in your leg press top set, it doesn’t need to be a world breaking PR. When it happens, don’t rush it - don’t try to increase weight on all the other exercises, don’t try to increase weight on that exercise the week after. Stick to it for a while, a few weeks, and keep everything else (except the squats progression) the same. If after a few weeks you feel you’re dialed in with the new weight, see if you can increase just a bit in another exercise; -
Make sure you’re resting a few days after this workout before you hit again anything lower body related (duh);
…holy shit this was long.
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x2 with this