Muscle Building Book

The simple answer to your question, yes, Arnold’s "New Encyclopedia of Modern Body Building" is a must have for body builders. Even though it’s getting older everyday, it’s still an amazing one stop shop for body building technique, nutrition, and exercises.

That said, it depends on what you want to do with your 19yr old, 130lb body? If you want to be a body builder, then start training like a body builder. If you just want to gain muscle, then evaluate what you’re doing and make the appropriate changes to get where you want to be.

First off, I’m going to focus more on the nutrition side than the exercises, no matter what exercises you do, you WILL NOT GAIN MUSCLE if you don’t feed yourself properly.The intake is the hard part, burning the calories and building the muscle is the easy part. I’m not going to write out an exercise program for you, but I’ll give you an example of how critical and complicated your nutrition program SHOULD BE to support your exercise. Exercise programs that will help you gain a lot of mass are a dime a dozen on the internet, but good dietary advice for body building or muscle gaining are hard to come by. Eat a lot and move a lot of weight (lift heavy weights-heavy weights make heavy muscles), and you’ll get your gains you desire.

To business:

If you’re trying to gain muscle, you should be eating 1 to 1.5g of protein per pound of body weight per day, i.e. you should be eating 130 to 190g of protein per day. Call it 200g for simplicity.

Also evaluate how many calories per day you’re consuming. My off the cuff calculations for you show that you need to consume about 1600cal per day just to maintain your current weight WITHOUT ANY EXERCISE. With an appropriate exercise program in place, you would likely need approximately 2400cal per day to maintain your weight. BUT, to gain weight, say 1lb of lean mass per week, then you have to exceed that point by 500cal per day (primarily from protein). So, you need to be taking in almost 3000cal per day. I’ll target 2700 for you-read below…

200g protein per day = 800cal per day, which meats your intake point for 1.5g per pound body mass. Protein should comprise at least 30% of your diet, so with 200g protein, your total intake should be 2700cal per day. The remaining 1900cal should be broken up between fats and carbs. Fats should make up less than 20% of your diet, so I’d recommend limiting your fat intake to about 60g of fats per day. Carbs will make up the remaining 50% of your intake, meaning you should be taking in 350g of carbs per day.

Trick is, while 615g of carbs, fats, and proteins (about a pound and a half) doesn’t sound like much to eat in a day, consider a whole food basis. Meats contain about 20-30% protein, so 200g protein means 650-1000g of meat. Lean meats are around 10-20% fat, so 1000g meat will contain 100g of fat, so you’ll have to get some of your protein from lean sources. High carb sources like whole wheat breads or mashed potatoes or pastas can be 85-90% carbs on a dry basis (but pastas and potatoes are often 60% water). So to hit 350g of carbs per day, that’s around 400g of food, at a minimum, or up to 1000g.

So to accomplish your intake goal to meet your muscle gaining goals, you’ll have to take in around 1500-2000g of food per day, or about 4lbs.

So, if you aren’t gaining muscle through your workouts, then you’re not eating enough. Increase your intake (with healthy foods, not with candybars and big macs) and you’ll get the gains you want.

I think you should follow your friend advice but in the correct way. You should research on the net on the various way and if you want to buy a book, also check which one is the best for your value