1. Follow the see-food diet. If it looks good, eat it — not only will your arteries hate you, so will all the jealous guys with their Tupperware filled with chicken and rice!
  2. Don’t waste valuable stomach space on liquids. Unless they’re the sugary, caffeinated kinds, liquids are just taking up space in your gut that could be better used by McDoubles and ice cream. You think water is a performance enhancer? Try some animal fries, bro!
  3. The same goes for fruits and vegetables. In fact, if it’s not deep-fried animal fat, it’s probably not optimal for gains.
  4. Shoot for a 5-pound gain per week, minimum. All that scientific babble about how your body can only grow muscle so fast is just marketing bullshit. If you’re not gaining at least 5 pounds a week, go back to step 1 and try harder.
  5. Still stuck? Take drugs! Did you know that if you can’t force-feed yourself enough naturally, that you can get appetite-enhancing peptides? It’s like your stomach is on steroids! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

By now you know the drill: obviously, this isn’t the optimal route to grow (unless you’re trying to be a sumo wrestler and/or cut your life expectancy in half). If you follow the five rules above, you’re going to become a true fatass pretty darn quickly. Yeah, you’ll probably build some muscle, too — but not any more than if you had taken a smarter, more conservative approach. And a conservative approach is far better from a performance standpoint, even if you don’t care about your Wilks score: getting bigger changes your leverages considerably, and if you add weight too quickly, don’t be surprised when your deadlift tanks because you can’t get in the proper starting position any more.

There’s always two sides to the story, though, and next week we’ll give the reverse dieters a hard time. You really think you’re going to become a freak by adding 50 calories to your 3-egg-white breakfast? And later this month, I’ll share my actual approach to gaining weight: one that’s aggressive but also carefully planned and purposeful, part of my “intensity with intent” approach to the offseason.