Brutally Honest Advice About Building Muscle (As a Natural)

In this video, Mario Tomic shares with you his honest account of building muscle as a natural lifter.

I want to give you the reality of the situation and what it really took to achieve these results. I’m currently sitting around 178 pounds, which is 78 kg. I am five feet ten, which is 178 centimeters.

I’ve been doing this for more than ten years, and that means consistent years of training. I paid attention to my diet, recovery, and I’ve learned a lot along the way.

Of course, there have been ups and downs, lots of mistakes, failures, as well as successes and wins. And I want to make sure you don’t have to spend years of your own life learning some of these lessons, so you can learn from my experience to get better results. So let’s dive into it.

Expectations

First, let’s talk expectations. How long will it take you to see results? And I started this fitness journey somewhat naively. When it comes to building muscle, I was looking at different transformations, people getting great results in about six to eight months.

I was looking at different charts that were saying you can put on about 10 to 20 pounds of muscle in the first year of training and then about half that in the second year. And I remember thinking if I just did average, I would be in a great position.

If I could just put on just 10 pounds of muscle in the first year, that would be great. The reality was I did about half that in the first year. I put on about four or five pounds of muscle. I was focused on fat loss, trying to get over the excess body fat that I had. And I was pretty happy with my results, but I was nowhere close to that 10 pounds of muscle.

And that’s the same in the second year. I gained about again, four or five pounds of muscle. In the third year, very similar and not due to a lack of effort. I was showing up consistently, paying attention to my nutrition, paying attention to my training, to my recovery, and executing the best program that I had at the time.

Of course, in hindsight I could have done a ton better, and I do it these days with clients and it’s faster, but we’re still talking about a long period of time. If I had the mentality of the average gym-goer these days, showing up in the gym, half-ass effort, checking my phone, sleeping on the machines, really not doing a good job with nutrition recovery, I probably would not have seen any results with my genetics.

Prolonged Effort

And this is something people need to hear. It’s not just that you need to put in effort, it’s also effort over a longer period of time. And it’s only about year four or five where I could look at myself in the mirror and start seeing how those gains accumulated to a physique that I could say, “Well, I look like I lift,” and that’s a long period of time.

The Feedback Loop

With muscle growth, people have a problem because we humans suck with things that have a long feedback loop. You don’t see the immediate result of your action. It takes time and it’s kind of similar to the stock market. You try to time the market, you’re probably going to end up being broke because nobody really knows when things are going to go up and down.

But if you have solid fundamentals and if you’re investing over time and you’re paying attention, you’re going to do a great job. And the same thing is with muscle growth. If you’re trying to time it, you don’t know when the gains are going to come. I remember going through phases of five months of gaining. You gain about a pound a month and you gain those five pounds. And you’re wondering, where did this weight even go? You can’t pinpoint it. You don’t know what actually happened.

And then you continue and continue and continue. Only when you do a fat loss phase after many months, then you see, oh wow, that’s actually what happened. And you saw your strength increase, and you actually see some progress.

So it takes a long time for that feedback loop to kick in. And this is why it’s so critical to have the right information and to have the right system. If you’re dedicating a lot of time and energy into this, you better be sure that your work is going in the right direction and that you’re staying objective.

If you’re emotional, like when stocks go down or Bitcoin goes down and they panic sell and they don’t understand that they need to follow through on the fundamentals, you’re going to be in trouble. The same thing happens with muscle growth. When people just go crazy with their programs because they’re not seeing immediate results a month after, two months after, they’re making decisions that eventually end up crippling their results.

Don’t Stay Too Lean

The second experience I must share with you and something that killed my gains more than anything else in my fitness journey was trying to stay too lean. I made two major mistakes here.

Mistake Number 1

Mistake number one happened in 2016 when I decided to go down to six to 7% body fat, thinking that it would put me in a good range where I can gain more muscle if I stay in that seven to 12%, and I’m always going to be lean, but be able to put on more size. And boy was I wrong.

When I go down to six or seven% body fat I felt horrible. My testosterone levels were from a 90 year old man. My libido was non-existent. I was fatigued all the time. I felt cold all the time. I couldn’t sleep well. My hunger signals and my metabolism was totally off. I would eat a full meal and not feel full at all.

I think in general, if you’re not a competitor, there’s really no need to go that low. For most natural lifters, this is going to be a disaster. You’re going to need a lot of time to recover from that and time that you could have spent gaining.

Mistake Number 2

And the second big mistake that I made was later when I actually wanted to gain, I was paranoid about gaining body fat. So I wanted to stay around 10% body fat and then just gain a little bit and then cut again, again and cut again. So all my gaining phases were really short and I was not letting my body get into that long-term gaining momentum.

And this was a huge problem, because I barely saw any progress whatsoever. And I think a lot of people are stuck in this perma-cutting mode, actually thinking that they can make some progress like that but it’s extremely slow. And at some point you’re not going to see any results. And this is the thing, you need those long phases.

A natural lifter doesn’t want to be shredded all year round. That is not sustainable for most people. And the majority of people you do see on social media that are staying around seven, 8% body fat.

I’m not going to name names but they’re probably not natural. And there’s a huge problem with these fake naturals causing mismanaged expectations, thinking that you can actually be that shredded all year round, it’s just not possible.

If you’re natural, your goal is to spend the least amount of time in a calorie deficit as you can. That’s really the key, is to allow yourself to accumulate a decent amount of lean mass. And then the higher body fat percentage just start looking much better.

And that’s something that I would highly recommend if you’re currently stuck in that perma-cutting mode as I was, where you’re constantly going back into a deficit, trying to clean up and whatnot. It’s going to be much easier to get leaner in the future and you’re also going to look much better at a higher body fat percentage.

Walking and Muscle Gains

Now, the third thing that I learned about building muscle over the last 10 years is just how fragile this process can get. And here’s what I mean by this. So if I’m training intensely in the gym, four, five, six times a week I’m hitting each body part two, three, four times per week. I really don’t have much room for adding other intense activity.

So if I add some high-intensity cardio or some classes or some martial arts, I won’t be able to recover from all of that and my gains will start to suffer. And this is one of the reasons why I’m a really big fan of walking because it pairs so well with lifting weights. And the same thing happens with your lifestyle. If you suddenly start going out a whole bunch partying, going to bed at odd hours, drinking, nutrition is a little bit off, not getting as much sleep. You will start seeing fewer gains at a certain point.

And I’m not going to sit here and tell you just to quit life and focus on bodybuilding, but that’s the reality of the situation, that’s the truth.

And I know, in my 10 years as I was going through some stressful periods, I did my absolute best but I was only maintaining. And that’s how it is. I pushed really hard, I tried to progress. I was very optimistic, I didn’t want to get that Nocebo effect, but no matter how hard I pushed, I just wasn’t able to recover from my training and I have to do less and less and it just wasn’t working out and that’s okay.

But then the next time, when I was going through a phase there was lower stress in life, then I actually made some progress. And it was easier to maintain those gains later when I again went through a stressful period of time. So there’s some cyclical nature to gaining muscle over time, and it does become fragile when you get quite strong.

So when you need that recovery from those sessions? If you’re just starting out in the first few years, you don’t really have to worry about this. But when you get close to your genetic potential, this is just how it is.

And sometimes you will have to prioritize whether it’s the gains, whether it’s something else. And that’s only fair, that’s how life works. There’s always trade-offs to make. Here you only have to get really good at managing yourself and your individual recovery levels will be different. So some people can recover from a lot more. Some people can recover from a lot less. You gotta know yourself in order to maximize your gains.

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