On my counterpart Finnish website, I offer exciting long-term training plans to customers who want to hit the next level on their training journey. The most popular long-term plan has been Super Gains : 6 Months plan, which I published back in 2015.
The name says it all. The plan’s ultimate goal is to develop the most muscle-mass that is naturally possible, by non-professional trainees.
Despite, receiving huge amounts of positive feedback and seeing good results in others, I never trained in this program for many years. I indulge in many other sports, and I did not want to put them aside to give this plan the time and effort it needs.
Finally, in Autumn 2019 I felt like I should try this plan out. I was curious to see what kind of results I would get with this plan. Honestly, I had big expectations based on customer feedback I had received over the years.
You can check out the plan here if you want to give it a try: Super Gains 6-Month plan.
Before
7 August 2019, I hit the scale and took all the important measurements.
- Weight: 81 kg
- Shoulders: 116 cm
- Biceps: 37 cm
- Chest: 99 cm
- Waist: 86 cm
- Hip: 103 cm
- Thighs: 61 cm
- Calves: 38 cm
Small Tip: When you start a goal-oriented workout plan, I strongly recommend taking good pictures and measurements. When you start to get the results, you don’t notice them by looking in the mirror, because you are looking in the mirror every day continually. Comparing pictures and measurements side-by-side give you a far better picture of how you are doing.
The Workout
The workout plan for the most part ran timely on schedule. At the time of the third bodybuilding phase I fell sick for one week, and during the six months time period I had two long weekend trips. So the six-month plan lasted actually for six months and two weeks in total.
Luckily, I avoided any major injuries. After first four weeks, I got some minor nerve pain in my forearms due to the sudden increase in training load from 2-3 workouts a week to 5 workouts a week. Luckily, there is a short two weeks recuperation period in the plan at weeks six and seven, so my arms recovered and I had no problems with them since then.
From a broader perspective, I liked the variability of the plan. My muscles were surprised again and again, and my mind stayed fresh and motivated. I made some minor alterations to the program according to my personal preferences- I moved training loads a bit away from the legs towards my biceps and shoulders. These alterations can be adopted as a modified version of the original plan too.
The Diet
I have to admit, I failed to eat enough in the second half of the plan. Due to this reason I know that I missed some potential muscle growth.
As a general rule-of-thumb in this plan, you should eat an extra +500 to +1000 kcalper day above your usual consumption. This is how I did it for the first three months. I added extra pasta or rice (carbohydrates) and cottage cheese (proteins) to my meals. In addition to that I drank one or two protein shakes every day.
After three months I realised that even though my muscles were growing, I was also getting some amount of fat in my diet. So, in the next three months I aimed to consume and spend an even number of calories. This slowed down the muscle growth by a small amount, but on the other hand I did not gain too much fat.
In addition to protein shakes and recovery drinks I used Creatine during the plan. At first week I did Creatine loading and took 15 – 20 grams a day, divided into three to four 5 gram servings throughout the day. After the initial loading phase, I took one 5 gram serving daily.
The After Results
I was quite pleased with the results. I think I had some regret about cutting calories in the latter part of plan. If you want even better results in terms of muscle growth, keep the calorie surplus going for the whole six months.
Here is a breakdown of the measurements during the plan.
The result of cutting down on the calorie intake can be clearly seen in the table above. Some numbers stopped increasing after 12 weeks (weight, waist, hip, and thighs).
In the table, you can see that most gains were developed in the upper body. Specially my shoulder circumference saw a big growth. The circumference of your shoulders is an important measurement. With a single measurement of the circumference of your shoulders with a measuring tape, you get three important metrics- your shoulders, your back, and your chest as well.
The slow growth of my calves remains a mystery to me. They grew only in the first bodybuilding phase, then they stopped growing altogether. Maybe my genetics don’t allow more growth, or they need massive amounts of training to grow more in volume.
So, these were my results with this plan. If you are curious about what kind of results you would get, you can get this plan here:
