This channel is focused on providing science-backed training and nutritional videos in order to help you become the best version of yourself. I'm certified by NASM and FMS (functional movement screening), and a Kinesiology graduate based in Vancouver, Canada. I focus on providing unbiased information to help you optimize your training and nutrition.

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The Fastest Way to Gain 20 lbs Of Muscle (Naturally) Jeremy Ethier Try 2 weeks free of your personalized fitness program here: 
https://bws.plus/14a

Gaining 20 pounds of muscle can completely transform your body whether you start out skinny, skinny-fat, or overweight. But very few people ever build that much muscle naturally, not because of age or muscle genetics, but because they make some early progress in muscle building, get stuck, and spend years doing more workouts, eating more protein, and buying more supplements without following the right plan for building muscle long enough for it to work.

The process comes down to three things that matter most for building muscle as fast as possible naturally: training, nutrition, and recovery. With proper training and nutrition, building 20 pounds of muscle takes at least a year, and gains slow down significantly after that. But your fastest progress happens when you start lifting properly.

Research on top pro drug-tested bodybuilders who have built well over 20 pounds of muscle naturally found that they averaged only about 12 sets per muscle per week, and some muscle groups were trained with as few as 6 sets weekly. That sounds low until you understand diminishing returns.

Effort matters just as much for muscle building. Training closer to failure appears to create a stronger growth stimulus than stopping well short of it. At the same time, trying to combine very high volume with failure-level effort on every set creates too much fatigue to sustain well. So the real goal is not to maximize everything at once, but to choose a training style that lets you push hard, recover, and stay consistent.

Two practical approaches come out of that to build muscle. One is a lower-volume, higher-intensity method with around 5 to 12 sets per muscle per week and most sets taken to failure. The other is a higher-volume, moderate-intensity method with around 12 to 20 sets per muscle per week while stopping 1 to 3 reps short of failure. Both can work, which means preference and sustainability matter. Once you get to roughly 10 or 11 sets for one muscle in a single workout, more may not add much. Splitting those sets across at least two days per week may speed up growth, which is why upper/lower, push/pull/legs, and full-body splits can all work well if they fit your schedule.

Exercise selection matters too, especially because the best exercise for one person can be the wrong one for someone else. Beginners do best focusing on a small number of general movement patterns like presses, pulls, squats, and hip hinges. Intermediates usually hit a point where standard compound lifts no longer grow every muscle equally, which is where more individualized choices and specialized exercises become important. Advanced lifters usually know which movements work best for their body and simply double down on them, rotating only when needed.

Nutrition starts with calories, because how much you should eat depends on both your body fat level and your training experience. If you are above roughly 20% body fat as a man or 30% as a woman, you may be in a good position to recomp by losing fat while gaining muscle. In that case, you probably do not need a surplus to make excellent progress, but the deficit should stay moderate, with a rough cap of around 0.5% of bodyweight lost per week. Once you are leaner and muscle gain becomes the main goal, moving closer to maintenance or a surplus makes more sense. Calorie targets should also scale with training age, with bigger monthly weight-gain targets for beginners and smaller ones for advanced lifters.

Protein matters, but less than most people think. A solid low-end target is around 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, or 0.7 grams per pound, but meaningful gains can still happen lower than that. One of the most overlooked nutrition factors for muscle building is what you eat before you train. Instead of obsessing over protein alone, it helps to have a meal with slow-digesting carbs and protein about 1.5 to 2 hours before training, then some faster-digesting carbs closer to the workout so you can actually perform hard enough to drive growth.

Creatine has a strong track record, is cost-effective, and can add a small but consistent boost to lean mass and gym performance, especially early on. But most of that lean mass increase is a one-time effect from increased water in the muscle, and some people, due to muscle genetics, may not respond much because their creatine stores are already naturally saturated. The bigger point is that supplements are optional.

Recovery matters just as much, and sleep sits at the center of it. Better sleep supports growth hormone and testosterone production, improves recovery, and affects what you can achieve in the gym. Practical fixes for sleep quality include eye masks, ear plugs, cooler room temperatures, and short naps.

0:00 - How Long It Takes
1:25 - Training
7:36 - Best Exercises
11:03 - Diet Plan
15:55 - Supplements
17:18 - Sleep Try 2 weeks free of your personalized fitness program here: 
https://bws.plus/14a

Gaining 20 pounds of muscle can completely transform your body whether you start out skinny, skinny-fat, or overweight. But very few people ever build that much muscle naturally, not because of age or muscle genetics, but because they make some early progress in muscle building, get stuck, and spend years doing more workouts, eating more protein, and buying more supplements without following the right plan for building muscle long enough for it to work.

The process comes down to three things that matter most for building muscle as fast as possible naturally: training, nutrition, and recovery. With proper training and nutrition, building 20 pounds of muscle takes at least a year, and gains slow down significantly after that. But your fastest progress happens when you start lifting properly.

Research on top pro drug-tested bodybuilders who have built well over 20 pounds of muscle naturally found that they averaged only about 12 sets per muscle per week, and some muscle groups were trained with as few as 6 sets weekly. That sounds low until you understand diminishing returns.

Effort matters just as much for muscle building. Training closer to failure appears to create a stronger growth stimulus than stopping well short of it. At the same time, trying to combine very high volume with failure-level effort on every set creates too much fatigue to sustain well. So the real goal is not to maximize everything at once, but to choose a training style that lets you push hard, recover, and stay consistent.

Two practical approaches come out of that to build muscle. One is a lower-volume, higher-intensity method with around 5 to 12 sets per muscle per week and most sets taken to failure. The other is a higher-volume, moderate-intensity method with around 12 to 20 sets per muscle per week while stopping 1 to 3 reps short of failure. Both can work, which means preference and sustainability matter. Once you get to roughly 10 or 11 sets for one muscle in a single workout, more may not add much. Splitting those sets across at least two days per week may speed up growth, which is why upper/lower, push/pull/legs, and full-body splits can all work well if they fit your schedule.

Exercise selection matters too, especially because the best exercise for one person can be the wrong one for someone else. Beginners do best focusing on a small number of general movement patterns like presses, pulls, squats, and hip hinges. Intermediates usually hit a point where standard compound lifts no longer grow every muscle equally, which is where more individualized choices and specialized exercises become important. Advanced lifters usually know which movements work best for their body and simply double down on them, rotating only when needed.

Nutrition starts with calories, because how much you should eat depends on both your body fat level and your training experience. If you are above roughly 20% body fat as a man or 30% as a woman, you may be in a good position to recomp by losing fat while gaining muscle. In that case, you probably do not need a surplus to make excellent progress, but the deficit should stay moderate, with a rough cap of around 0.5% of bodyweight lost per week. Once you are leaner and muscle gain becomes the main goal, moving closer to maintenance or a surplus makes more sense. Calorie targets should also scale with training age, with bigger monthly weight-gain targets for beginners and smaller ones for advanced lifters.

Protein matters, but less than most people think. A solid low-end target is around 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, or 0.7 grams per pound, but meaningful gains can still happen lower than that. One of the most overlooked nutrition factors for muscle building is what you eat before you train. Instead of obsessing over protein alone, it helps to have a meal with slow-digesting carbs and protein about 1.5 to 2 hours before training, then some faster-digesting carbs closer to the workout so you can actually perform hard enough to drive growth.

Creatine has a strong track record, is cost-effective, and can add a small but consistent boost to lean mass and gym performance, especially early on. But most of that lean mass increase is a one-time effect from increased water in the muscle, and some people, due to muscle genetics, may not respond much because their creatine stores are already naturally saturated. The bigger point is that supplements are optional.

Recovery matters just as much, and sleep sits at the center of it. Better sleep supports growth hormone and testosterone production, improves recovery, and affects what you can achieve in the gym. Practical fixes for sleep quality include eye masks, ear plugs, cooler room temperatures, and short naps.

0:00 - How Long It Takes
1:25 - Training
7:36 - Best Exercises
11:03 - Diet Plan
15:55 - Supplements
17:18 - Sleep

World's Most Boring Diet (Actually Works) Jeremy Ethier The World's Most Boring Diet. Would you try this? The World's Most Boring Diet. Would you try this?

My Wife's Butt Got Flat... So I Fixed It In 90 Days Jeremy Ethier Get 2 weeks free of your personalized fitness plan here:
https://bws.plus/12a

Can you build a bigger butt without squats/deadlifts? This was a 90-day glutes workout experiment with one constraint. Tahnee has trained for years, but five years ago, she hurt her back doing heavy squats and felt like she’s now got a flat butt. So we set rules and ran the challenge.

The 90-day glute workout experiment. Tahnee — No squats, no deadlifts, and no heavy loading on her spine. Me — Train however I want. The bet — If Tahnee outgrows me, I go vegan for 30 days

We built the plan around four glute movement patterns for well-rounded glutes growth:
1. Lower body press — Glute-dominant step-up/step-down 
2. Lower body hinge — Single-leg dumbbell deadlift/single-leg RDL 
3. Squeeze — Barbell hip thrust, staying glute-focused at the top and avoiding overextending the spine
4. Abduction — Hip abduction

These exercises could easily be done as a glute workout at home or a glute workout with dumbbells.

For comparison, I kept a fuller leg program with heavy compounds for my glute workout like squats, deadlifts, and bulgarian split squats. to see if it would give me a huge advantage over 90 days.

Butt baselines (Day 1)
- Glute circumference — Tahnee 92cm, me 92.5cm
- Performance — I tested vertical jump and broad jump to see if glute training carries over without practicing jumping

Week 1 was a reality check. I’d been lazy with glute training for the past 6 months, so ramping volume hit hard. Tahnee doubted the plan because she wasn’t getting the same soreness she used to feel after heavy squats/deadlifts. Key point: multiple studies show soreness isn’t a reliable indicator of muscle growth. Bret also chose movements he’s found cause less soreness and muscle damage than squats, deadlifts, or split squats, helping you recover faster and feel less beat up.

Do squats win in saving a flat butt because of hormones? Heavy squats can spike testosterone around 10%–20%, sometimes higher than leg press, but it only lasts about 15–45 minutes before returning to baseline.

Weeks 2–4 are where the real bottlenecks showed up. Tahnee was nervous about pushing harder because she didn’t want to hurt her back again, and old habits popped up (like skipping warm-up sets). Food became the other constraint: she struggled to eat enough because she was scared of gaining fat, and water weight can mess with your head even when you know it’ll pass.

Around this point, Bret’s 2023 squat vs hip thrust study matters: squats grew quads and inner thighs more, but for glute growth, squats and hip thrusts were equal. By Week 3, Tahnee hit 135lb on hip thrusts for 12 reps and said it felt easy — something she hadn’t done in about six years.

Tahnee also had two edges. First, based on Bret’s experience, women tend to recover faster from lower-body training and can handle more glute volume and frequency. Second, about 80% of her training was dedicated purely to glutes, while mine was spread across quads and upper body.

30-day check-in: my glutes were up 1cm, and we were tied. But Tahnee’s tracking showed she was averaging around 1,500 calories/day and having a hard time eating enough protein, which could stall progress. So I started cooking more, and we enjoyed meals together again.

One more point: does being vegan make it harder to build muscle? A study compared vegans and omnivores who both ate the same protein target (0.7g per pound of bodyweight per day). After 12 weeks of lifting, both groups built the same amount of muscle and strength.

Weeks 5–13, volume went up. Tahnee shifted to three leg days and one upper body day. She’d been doing around 20 glute sets/week and making good progress, and for maximum growth Bret sometimes takes clients up to 30–40 glute sets/week. Then the setback: tightness built in her left upper glute, then into her lower back, and we paused for a few days.

After about a week off, her glutes looked and felt flatter. A short break can reduce glycogen, and since glycogen pulls water into the muscle, muscles look less full — like letting air out of a balloon. Most research suggests it takes at least three weeks or more of no training to start losing actual muscle. We dialed training back from 3 sessions/week to 2 sessions/week and kept going.

Final results
- Tahnee hit two plates on hip thrusts for the first time ever
- My vertical jump improved by about 5cm; broad jump improved by 2cm

Big takeaway: there’s no must-do glute exercise. What matters is good form and choosing movements that fit your body. If you’ve been neglecting your glutes, the simplest start is adding 3 hard sets of hip thrusts to your leg days and paying attention to how it carries over to your other exercises and how your glutes look after a few months. Get 2 weeks free of your personalized fitness plan here:
https://bws.plus/12a

Can you build a bigger butt without squats/deadlifts? This was a 90-day glutes workout experiment with one constraint. Tahnee has trained for years, but five years ago, she hurt her back doing heavy squats and felt like she’s now got a flat butt. So we set rules and ran the challenge.

The 90-day glute workout experiment. Tahnee — No squats, no deadlifts, and no heavy loading on her spine. Me — Train however I want. The bet — If Tahnee outgrows me, I go vegan for 30 days

We built the plan around four glute movement patterns for well-rounded glutes growth:
1. Lower body press — Glute-dominant step-up/step-down 
2. Lower body hinge — Single-leg dumbbell deadlift/single-leg RDL 
3. Squeeze — Barbell hip thrust, staying glute-focused at the top and avoiding overextending the spine
4. Abduction — Hip abduction

These exercises could easily be done as a glute workout at home or a glute workout with dumbbells.

For comparison, I kept a fuller leg program with heavy compounds for my glute workout like squats, deadlifts, and bulgarian split squats. to see if it would give me a huge advantage over 90 days.

Butt baselines (Day 1)
- Glute circumference — Tahnee 92cm, me 92.5cm
- Performance — I tested vertical jump and broad jump to see if glute training carries over without practicing jumping

Week 1 was a reality check. I’d been lazy with glute training for the past 6 months, so ramping volume hit hard. Tahnee doubted the plan because she wasn’t getting the same soreness she used to feel after heavy squats/deadlifts. Key point: multiple studies show soreness isn’t a reliable indicator of muscle growth. Bret also chose movements he’s found cause less soreness and muscle damage than squats, deadlifts, or split squats, helping you recover faster and feel less beat up.

Do squats win in saving a flat butt because of hormones? Heavy squats can spike testosterone around 10%–20%, sometimes higher than leg press, but it only lasts about 15–45 minutes before returning to baseline.

Weeks 2–4 are where the real bottlenecks showed up. Tahnee was nervous about pushing harder because she didn’t want to hurt her back again, and old habits popped up (like skipping warm-up sets). Food became the other constraint: she struggled to eat enough because she was scared of gaining fat, and water weight can mess with your head even when you know it’ll pass.

Around this point, Bret’s 2023 squat vs hip thrust study matters: squats grew quads and inner thighs more, but for glute growth, squats and hip thrusts were equal. By Week 3, Tahnee hit 135lb on hip thrusts for 12 reps and said it felt easy — something she hadn’t done in about six years.

Tahnee also had two edges. First, based on Bret’s experience, women tend to recover faster from lower-body training and can handle more glute volume and frequency. Second, about 80% of her training was dedicated purely to glutes, while mine was spread across quads and upper body.

30-day check-in: my glutes were up 1cm, and we were tied. But Tahnee’s tracking showed she was averaging around 1,500 calories/day and having a hard time eating enough protein, which could stall progress. So I started cooking more, and we enjoyed meals together again.

One more point: does being vegan make it harder to build muscle? A study compared vegans and omnivores who both ate the same protein target (0.7g per pound of bodyweight per day). After 12 weeks of lifting, both groups built the same amount of muscle and strength.

Weeks 5–13, volume went up. Tahnee shifted to three leg days and one upper body day. She’d been doing around 20 glute sets/week and making good progress, and for maximum growth Bret sometimes takes clients up to 30–40 glute sets/week. Then the setback: tightness built in her left upper glute, then into her lower back, and we paused for a few days.

After about a week off, her glutes looked and felt flatter. A short break can reduce glycogen, and since glycogen pulls water into the muscle, muscles look less full — like letting air out of a balloon. Most research suggests it takes at least three weeks or more of no training to start losing actual muscle. We dialed training back from 3 sessions/week to 2 sessions/week and kept going.

Final results
- Tahnee hit two plates on hip thrusts for the first time ever
- My vertical jump improved by about 5cm; broad jump improved by 2cm

Big takeaway: there’s no must-do glute exercise. What matters is good form and choosing movements that fit your body. If you’ve been neglecting your glutes, the simplest start is adding 3 hard sets of hip thrusts to your leg days and paying attention to how it carries over to your other exercises and how your glutes look after a few months.

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