Name: Why Some Guys Build Muscle 3x Faster (How You Can Too)
Uploaded: 2025-09-16T09:02:51.000Z
Duration: 15 min 57 s
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The second conditional

What if I told you this guy eats less than 1,500 calories a day, yet his muscle growth speed is unheard of.

Adverbs of degree

At 15, before even touching a weight, his arms were bigger than most grown men.

Narrow shoulders, skinny frame, I look like a stick you'd find in your backyard.

So I dug into science to find a way to beat my crappy genetics, and I finally transformed from this to this.

Well, there's three main ways that genetics affect your muscles.

How fast they grow, which ones grow the fastest, and your natural limit.

Let's start with speed, where I've got two perfect examples.

My friend Max and Ryan, a record-breaking lifter.

We even filmed a bench press video together not too long ago.

After probably seven or eight months of lifting, I was able to get to 225 pounds on my bench press.

So the progression felt quite fast for me, and it was definitely faster than my peers.

For me, I don't know, I'm kind of sad that people don't believe it's possible naturally.

So people kind of jump to the conclusion that you can only achieve this by taking this, and that I wanted to be an example that this is possible.

And then, you've got the extreme outliers.

Take Julian, a teenager who's built such a crazy physique in just a few years that Jeff Nippard even did a video questioning whether he was natural.

It's certainly possible that people respond better than others to a certain stimulus, and that can be even due to the way they train.

Maybe they've found a very effective method of training that he's managed to capitalize on.

I do tend to give the benefit of the doubt.

But obviously there is the possibility that he is lying, and if he is, I think that's really unfortunate.

Regardless of whether Julian is or isn't natural, the truth is very clear.

Some people are genetically wired to grow muscle faster than the rest of us.

Imagine you took 287 people and you had all of them do the exact same full-body workout twice a week for 6 months.

Back in 2016, a group of scientists did just that, but they used MRIs, DEXA scans, and ultrasound to measure muscle growth as accurately as possible.

But they quickly noticed three types of people.

These people grew 2-3 times faster than the average, growing their muscles up to 30% bigger.

Then there was the average responder, where most people fell under, growing their muscles about 5-10% bigger.

And finally, the low-responders, who barely built any muscle, with some even losing muscle.

And remember, this was with the exact same training routine.

Imagine you and your gym bro never miss a training session together, and after 6 months, your body gets jacked, whereas you've lost muscle.

But what exactly in our genetics is causing this?

Maybe it's possible to do something about it.

Well, one genetic candidate is myostatin, which stops your muscle from growing.

Well, in our ancestral days, we never knew when our next meal was going to come.

And since carrying tons of muscle around burns a lot of calories, God looked out for us by hooking us up with myostatin, preventing you from getting too big.

Well, there is a Belgian breed of cattle that's born without myostatin, and they get abnormally massive as a result.

And we see the same in dogs and even mice when you remove myostatin.

But in humans, the first case of a human mutation in the myostatin gene was first documented in a 2004 study, where a German newborn was pretty much jacked right out of the womb.

By the time he was just 4 years old, he was able to hold 7 pound dumbbells straight out to his eyes.

My friend Paul Durand, a natural bodybuilder, is thought to have this deficiency.

This is what he looked like before even touching a single weight.

So I first noticed I was gifted around age 5 to 6, because I was in the bush just playing around.

I always liked to flex my muscles just because I could feel everything.

And then I was in the bush just kind of going like this.

And similar to like this, just think of a 5 year old with a bicep.

Starting in elementary school is when I would get accusations for being on steroids by like all my friends.

And then by grade like 5, that's when I was like, okay, are you on steroids?

So someone says like, eat this much protein.

I haven't even gotten my protein goals over the past like, say 13 years of training.

I can get away with not eating as much as I need or as other people would think you would need.

However, this mutation is actually extremely rare.

In every 1 million people, maybe 4 might have it.

So it doesn't explain the differences we see in most lifters.

Now you might be wondering, is there a way to stop myostatin from working?

Scientists have very recently tested a myostatin inhibitor on monkeys.

And the results?  Unfortunately, it's going to take years before this muscle drug is proven safe or even made available to humans.

But there are three other ways you can work around your genetics.

But first, how can you tell if your genetics are good or bad in the first place?

Well, some people think that if you're born with a wide frame, that you have a body type that builds muscle faster.

A recent study investigated this exact question.

And they found that wider framed people do tend to start off with more muscle.

But when researchers looked at how quickly they built more muscle compared to narrow frame lifters, the advantage was actually pretty small, barely detectable.

What a wide frame does do though, is it creates the illusion of broader shoulders.

And if you're like me, and you were born with a narrow frame, don't worry, I'll show you later how I worked around that.

But a better way to actually assess your genetics is to look at how quickly you gain muscle and strength in your first year of training.

After just one year of training, this is what Max looked like.

It would take most guys, including myself, at least a few years to achieve that look, let alone lift the amount of weight they were.

If you're a low or average responder like me, are you stuck there forever?

You can absolutely speed up your progress and get way more out of your genetics than you think.

The first strategy to do that is training volume.

So how many sets are you doing in the gym?

The first time I went to what I would truly describe as a high volume approach was the off-season of after 2011.

My upper body finally caught up to my legs.

That's Dr. Eric Helms, a pro natural bodybuilder and one of the most respected researchers in the field.

He told me that every time he's pushed his training volume higher, he's seen the fastest gains of his entire career, even after 20 years of lifting.

But does more is better apply to everyone?

Or are there people who actually do better with less?

Well, Eric recently co-authored a one-of-a-kind study that may have finally answered this.

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