TL;DR: Building muscle takes more than just showing up to the gym and eating protein. Kraken Fitness trainers in North Burnaby (near Brentwood) break down what actually matters: building a strength foundation first, eating real nutrients instead of just chicken and rice, and recovering enough to let your body do its job. Most people who feel stuck are under-recovering, not under-training.
Why Strength Has to Come Before Size
Here is the thing most people get backwards about muscle building: they want to look bigger before they get stronger. It does not work that way.
Think of it like building a house. Strength is the foundation. Size is the house. If you try to pack on muscle without a base of strength underneath it, you are building on sand. Kraken’s trainers see this all the time in Burnaby. Someone walks in wanting bigger arms or a bigger chest, and they are still benching the same weight they started with six months ago.
That is the bottleneck. If you are a guy still pressing 100 pounds on the bench, there is only so much muscle your body can build at that level of force production. Your muscles need a reason to grow. That reason is being pushed beyond what they can currently handle.
This is why Kraken’s coaches prioritize strength early on — especially for people who are newer to training. Not because the goal changes, but because the foundation has to be there first. Once you have that underlying strength, building volume on top of it becomes way more effective.
The gym also closes a skill gap that many people overlook. Exercises like pull-ups can take years of park training to achieve from scratch. With access to machines, lighter dumbbells, and assisted variations at a gym, Kraken’s trainers can accelerate that progression dramatically.
Strength first. Then size follows.
Volume and Progressive Overload (Without the Overthinking)
Hypertrophy — the scientific term for muscle growth — comes down to one main variable: volume. That means total work done. Sets, reps, and load, accumulated over time.
But here is the part people either miss or overcomplicate: volume needs intensity behind it. You cannot build muscle with light weight and endless reps alone. If that worked, marathon runners would be the most jacked people on earth. There has to be a meaningful load on the muscle. Enough to create real stress, enough to force an adaptation.
The good news is that the rep range for building muscle is surprisingly forgiving. Anything from about 5 to 30 reps can produce solid hypertrophy, as long as you are pushing the intensity over time. You do not need to obsess over hitting exactly 8 to 12 reps. The key is that you are progressively adding more weight, more reps, or more sets over weeks and months.
That is progressive overload in a nutshell. Not a complicated program. Just a simple truth: your body will stay the size it is right now unless you give it a reason to grow. The way you give it that reason is by asking it to do a little more, consistently, over a long time.
The people who stall are usually the ones who find a comfortable routine and repeat it forever. Same weights, same sets, same reps. The body adapts to that. Kraken’s coaches program for progressive overload specifically — adjusting load, volume, and intensity as clients get stronger — so that the stimulus keeps driving real change.
Nutrition Beyond Protein: What Most People Miss
Yes, protein is essential for building muscle. That is not debatable. If you are not eating enough protein, you are not going to build muscle. Period.
But protein gets all the attention while everything else gets ignored. And that is a problem.
If you Google which vitamins and minerals are required for muscle growth, the answer is basically all of them. Vitamin D, iron, B vitamins, magnesium, zinc — they all play roles in hormone production, recovery, energy metabolism, and tissue repair. If any of those are chronically low, your muscle-building efforts will stall or never really get off the ground.
This matters because the fitness industry has spent decades giving people nutrition advice through the lens of bodybuilders. Fish, chicken breast, and rice. That template works great if you are on steroids. Steroids override a lot of biological processes that would otherwise require proper nutrient support. But if you are natural — and you probably are — your body needs a much wider range of nutrients to actually build and maintain new muscle tissue.
Kraken’s nutrition coaching focuses on this distinction. Instead of just tracking macros, coaches work with clients on the full picture: sleep, digestion, micronutrients, food quality. The behavior-first approach means figuring out what is actually holding someone back nutritionally, not just handing them a protein target and sending them on their way.
Your hormones affect everything. Your nutrient status affects your hormones. If you are deficient in something, muscle growth is going to be slow, difficult, or impossible regardless of how hard you train.
The Dirty Bulk Trap
The idea of a “dirty bulk” sounds appealing on the surface. Eat everything in sight, cram in calories, get big fast. And it is true that building muscle requires a calorie surplus. Your body needs fuel to construct new tissue.
But there is a massive difference between fueling muscle growth and just eating junk with high protein content. When people lean into fast food and heavily processed high-protein snacks because they are convenient, they are technically hitting their calorie and protein numbers. But they are starving their body of the micronutrients, fiber, and food quality it needs to actually recover and build.
The practical problem is real, though. Eating enough high-quality food to support muscle growth takes serious volume. Healthy, whole-food meals that are high in protein and carbs take up a lot of plate space. It takes planning. It takes prep time. It takes sitting down and actually eating all of it, multiple times a day.
This is where a lot of people fall off. The dirty bulk is easy. The clean approach is harder logistically. But the results are dramatically different — not just in how you look, but in how you feel, perform, and recover.
Kraken’s coaches help clients navigate this by matching their nutrition method to their actual lifestyle. Some people track macros. Some use hand portions. Some start with a simple protein-first approach and build from there. The point is finding what you will actually do, not what looks perfect on paper.
Sleep and Recovery: Where Muscle Actually Gets Built
This is the section most muscle-building articles skip entirely. And it might be the most important one.
Muscle does not grow in the gym. Training creates the stimulus — you are essentially stressing your muscles, creating micro-damage in the tissue. The actual rebuilding and growth happens during recovery. Specifically, during sleep.
LeBron James reportedly sleeps 12 to 14 hours a day. On a plane, sleeping. In a car, sleeping. He trains for hours, eats, and sleeps. That is not laziness. That is someone who understands that recovery has to match the demand.
Most people do not train like LeBron. But the principle scales down perfectly. If you are going from zero workouts to two sessions a week, that is a real increase in physical stress on your body. You need to proportionally increase your recovery to match.
There is a phrase Kraken’s coaches use often: “There is no such thing as overtraining. There is only under-recovering.” If you feel stuck — training consistently, eating well, but not seeing muscle growth — recovery is almost always the missing piece. Not just rest days. Sleep quality, sleep duration, and actual downtime.
For serious muscle building, seven or even eight hours might not be enough. Nine-plus hours may be what your body needs to do its work. That is a hard sell in a culture that glorifies busy, but it is the reality.
If you are training and not sleeping enough, you are putting all the effort into the stimulus and skipping the adaptation. That is a house of cards.
More Muscle Does Not Automatically Mean More Health
This one trips people up because it goes against what the fitness industry implies. But just because someone is jacked does not mean they are healthy.
One of Kraken’s own coaches put on about 30 pounds of pure muscle after he started training seriously. No excess fat. Visibly fit. Then he went for a blood test and found out he had high blood pressure.
That sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense. Thirty extra pounds of tissue — even lean tissue — means more blood volume, more vascular demand, and more pressure on the cardiovascular system. Your body does not distinguish between “good weight” and “bad weight” when it comes to the mechanics of moving blood through your system.
This does not mean building muscle is bad. It means there is a range, and health is not a straight line where more muscle always equals better health. The body has to be supported to maintain that extra tissue. Nutrients, sleep, stress management, cardiovascular fitness — all of it matters alongside strength.
Kraken’s approach to muscle building accounts for this. The goal is functional, sustainable strength — not just size for the sake of it. Coaches monitor the whole picture, not just how much someone can lift or how they look.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many reps should I do to build muscle?
Anywhere from about 5 to 30 reps can build muscle effectively, as long as the intensity is high enough to challenge the muscle. The key variable is progressive overload over time, not hitting a magic rep number.
Do I need to take protein supplements to build muscle?
Not necessarily. Whole food sources of protein work just as well. Supplements can help if you struggle to eat enough protein from meals, but they are not required. What matters more is total daily protein intake plus your overall nutrient profile.
How much sleep do I need if I am trying to build muscle?
More than you probably think. Seven to eight hours is a baseline, but if you are training hard and trying to add muscle, nine or more hours may be what your body needs for full recovery. Sleep is when muscle actually gets built.
Why am I not building muscle even though I work out consistently?
The most common reasons are under-recovering (especially poor sleep), not eating enough total nutrients, and not progressively increasing the demand on your muscles. If your workouts stay the same, your body has no reason to change.
Is building muscle bad for your health?
Not inherently, but more muscle is not always better. Adding significant mass increases cardiovascular demand and can raise blood pressure even in fit individuals. The goal should be functional, sustainable strength balanced with overall health markers.
Start Building Muscle with Coaching That Actually Works
Kraken Fitness in Burnaby, BC is built for people who want real results with real guidance. Every client gets a coach, a customized program, and a system that identifies what is actually holding them back — not a generic plan and a “good luck.”
Try Kraken free for a week. Train with a coach, experience the full program, and see if it fits. If it does not, cancel by text. No pressure, no commitment.
Listen to the Full Episode
Ep 8 — The Muscle Building Blueprint is available on all major platforms:
About the Author
Josko Kraken is the founder of Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby near Brentwood, and Brandon is co-owner. Together they host the Kraken Power Podcast. With two decades of combined coaching experience, they built Kraken as a transformation gym for non-gym people — a private, coached environment where people who feel out of place in traditional gyms get the structure, accountability, and behavior-focused coaching they need to actually change.
Josko:
Welcome back to the Kraken Power Podcast. We’re your hosts Josko and Brandon. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about how to build muscle.
A lot of people think that this is a mystery, but it’s actually really simple if you look at the science. Let’s dive in. Welcome back to the Kraken Power Podcast.
So obviously, Brandon and I, we are massive and, you know, we have so much muscle, so much I don’t even know what to do with it. Yeah. So clearly we are the types of people that you want to be listening to about building muscle, but all jokes aside, there is a science behind building muscle.
And although we might not be the biggest guys that you’ve ever seen, you know, I’m buck 70 and Brandon’s like a buck 60. So, I mean, we’ve built some muscle in our days. We have, we have, but in certain places.
Yeah. And so I think, you know, there is a science behind it and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. And first thing that we’re going to be talking about is the proper rep ranges and also the volume that you need in order to build muscle.
And the first thing that I want to say is that the volume is so important. A lot of people really don’t understand how much volume it takes to build more muscle. Basically when you’re trying to increase your size, what you have to do is you have to keep lifting more weight for more reps and for more sets forever in order to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And if you, once you stop or you stay the same, then that’s the size that you’re going to stay at.
Brandon:
Yeah. And hypertrophy, which is the scientific method or scientific term for what we’re trying to achieve. The key variable there is volume, like you said, right.
But also volume with some sense of intensity. It can’t just be like crazy high volume with like no load or no intensity. Otherwise, uh, you know, the runners like marathon runners would be the most jack people on this earth, right?
There does have to be a considerable amount of load for you to achieve the stress that it’s going to cause to make that adaptation of building more muscle.
Josko:
Yeah, for sure. And you know, the, the thing is most people, they never actually break through that strength threshold in order for them to actually start building muscle mass. So like if you’re in the gym and you’re still doing like a hundred, if you’re a man and you’re doing like a hundred pound bench press, there’s only so much that you muscle that you can build on that frame of strength.
You know, you have to, it’s like trying to build a house without a foundation, right? The foundation is the strength. And then from there you can easily pack on muscle if you have that strength.
So that’s why at the beginning it’s so important to work on strength.
Brandon:
Yeah. And I think a good example in the fitness industry would be like, you know, guys who do calisthenics, right? They might not have any kind of like external load, like access to weights and barbells, dumbbells, et cetera.
Right. But they do crazy amounts of pushups. They do crazy amounts of pull-ups and you can get, you know, pretty good, pretty fit, pretty far in building muscle, but you’re never going to see a guy step on a bodybuilding show who just does only pushups, right?
He has to have some load that’s going to be greater than what his body can actually produce itself. Dude, are you sure about that though? Because it’s, dude, gymnasts are like insanely jacked.
Yeah, they’re jacked. Don’t get me wrong, but some of them look like bodybuilders. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They’re big, right? But we’re talking about like, they’re doing so much volume and actually they’re probably producing so much force too. Yeah.
Josko:
Yeah. I think, uh, I don’t know if that was like the greatest example to use guys that are doing calisthenics because they’re doing like calisthenics and gymnasts. Like there’s some of them are huge.
Brandon:
Yeah. But if you’re going specifically only building muscle, then, you know, you’re going to want to have some crazier or much bigger load.
Josko:
But the, you know, the problem is like with a calisthenics. So the thing with calisthenics though, is that there’s a massive amount of skills that you need to acquire in order for you to be able to be like even adequate at it. You know, like let’s, let’s say like for a lot of people, they even struggle with pushups.
They even like to even do a pull up for a lot of people. Like it might take them years to build up to that. And so there’s things that you can do in the gym that can help accelerate that to the point where you’re doing a pull up, where if you were just like, if you were just at a park using a bar, it might take you a really, really long time to get there.
Brandon:
Right. So you’re saying that there’s a little bit of a skill gap that you can easily overcome in the gym. Cause maybe you can use a machine or maybe you can use dumbbells that are like lighter than what you would be able to produce body weight.
Josko:
Exactly. Yeah. So that’s why it’s really important for you to, you know, just come to the gym and just work on your strength at the gym.
Brandon:
Yeah. But everyone wants to get like super specific of what their volume is going to be in the gym. But hypertrophy is almost like dummy proof.
Like you do anything above like five, eight reps, like all the way up to like 30 almost, you’re going to get really good hypertrophy as long as you push the intensity over time.
Josko:
The main point that we want to make is that you have to have some underlying strength in order for you to be able to build that massive amount of volume that’s required for you to build muscle on your body. So the next thing is, of course, progressive overload. I don’t know how much time you want to spend on this because this one’s just been so overdone, but progressive overload is just basically making sure that over time that you go, you use heavier weights, you have more reps that you use more volume in order for you to build more strength and also more muscle mass.
Brandon:
Yeah. In a very simple snapshot, the way it looks like is you’re trying to create a condition, which is, you know, you adding more muscle. And the way you do that is having a stimulus, which is, you know, loading time on your tissues under time, under tension with volume and intensity.
And then after they do the recovery period, that’s when you’re going to build more muscle.
Josko:
And so the next thing is nutrition and not just protein. I think so. Protein.
Yes. A 100 percent essential for you to build muscle mass. That’s fact.
If you’re not going to have enough protein, you’re not going to build enough muscle. But the thing is, though, a lot of people neglect the whole nutrient side of things that affect your entire body. So if you were to like just simply Google search which vitamins, minerals are required for you to build muscle mass, it’s like all of them, you know?
So if you’re not getting an adequate amount of vitamin D, if you’re not getting an adequate amount of iron or B vitamins, like you’re not going to be able to build muscle, especially not quickly. It might take you forever or it might not even work at all. And the reason why is because all of these nutrients affect your hormones.
They affect every single function in your body. So, yeah, you have to have enough nutrients to be able to build muscle, which is a lot of time, unfortunately, neglected.
Brandon:
Yeah. And people will fall kind of victim to like, you know, dirty bulking rate where you just try to ingest like a very high amount of calories and a very high amount of like protein, regardless of what is in it. Right.
And people will lean into like, you know, fast food or very heavily processed, like high protein items that you’ll see on the shelves because they’re convenient. And some people don’t want to do like meal prep and just eat the actual amount of volume. Because if you’re eating like healthy, high protein items with like high amounts of carbs that you need, that’s a lot of volume that you’re going to have to eat in a day.
It actually takes a lot of planning to like make all that and then also time to eat it and be able to do it again over and over and over again.
Josko:
Yeah.
Brandon:
So that would be the big difference between, you know, you going into like a dirty bulk and versus you actually, you know, feeding the your body, the nutrients and fuel that it needs to go through this recovery process and adaptation to build that muscle.
Josko:
So it’s really unfortunate because the way that the fitness industry looks at building muscle is through the lens of like all of these bodybuilders who are massive, yes, but they’ve gotten there through steroid use. And so now, you know, there’s all these impressionable people thinking like, oh, all I need to do is fish and chicken breast and rice, which is like completely nutrient depleted. Like there’s nothing in there.
It’s just like protein, carb, which works really well if you’re on steroids. But it doesn’t work that well if you’re a natural, if you’re trying to do this all naturally.
Brandon:
Yeah. If you think about it, like adding more muscle mass to your frame, isn’t really a good thing for your body in a sense that it’s like it’s a lot for your body to take on and maintain over time, right? Your body’s only going to do that if it actually makes sense for the conditions that you’re putting it in, right?
So if you’re just like a regular office worker, right, who doesn’t really do much outside of it, your body’s not going to feel inclined to put on more muscle mass. But if you’re maybe like a mover who moves like couches every day, right, and you’re lifting all these things, your body’s going to be like, hey, we should probably bolster our joints and our tissues so we can go to work the next day, right? So just adding more muscle mass is actually going to take more calories, more energy the next day.
It’s not going to want to do that if the things under the hood aren’t working very well.
Josko:
Yeah, exactly. And so like if you don’t have the right nutrient, like if you don’t have enough nutrients in you, then it’s just not going to happen simply. Also just kind of like going into the next thing here is one of our coaches, he actually a ton of muscle ever since he started working with us.
Like I think he put on like 30 pounds or something like that. He’s not overweight by any means. It was literally just like pure muscle.
And he went for a blood test and they’re like, oh, you have high blood pressure. And he’s like, what? I’m so healthy.
How could I have high blood pressure? It’s like, dude, you put on like 30 pounds of muscle. It has to, of course, there’s going to be more pressure in you, you know?
And so it’s just something that a lot of people don’t overlook. Just because you’re jacked, just because you have a lot of muscle mass doesn’t mean that you’re healthy. So that’s just one thing that we have to mention here.
You know, it’s not always the healthiest just to add more muscle. But one more thing as well is the rest and recovery. This is probably the most overlooked thing when it comes to building muscle.
But like guys, like I think LeBron James, I’m not a big basketball guy, but I’m pretty sure he said in interviews that like all he does is just train, eat, sleep. He’s the king of sleep. Yeah.
So apparently, so he’ll be on a plane, sleeping on the plane, gets off the plane, goes in the limo, he’s sleeping on the limo, wakes up, eats, and then like goes trains and like sleeps on the basketball court. He’s like always constantly sleeping throughout the day. He probably gets like 12 to 14 hours of sleep every single day.
And it’s because of the amount of training that he’s doing. If you’re training for four or five hours every single day, then you’re gonna have to recover hard. And the thing is, a lot of people, they get their advice from all of these YouTubers and steroid users on bodybuilding.com and they never talk about that. They just talk about training and sometimes eating. But if you don’t sleep right, you’re not gonna be able to build muscle. It’s going back to what you said earlier.
If you don’t have that foundation and you’re just building a house of cards.
Brandon:
Well, just plainly simply put, if we go back to the process of what it actually takes to put on muscle, it’s like you’re creating a stimulus that’s gonna put stress. Some people say it’s like micro tears on the tissues. And then you’re gonna come back through the recovery phase once you’re fueled and you’re adequately fed.
That’s the process of what you’re actually putting on muscle. So if you’re not actually focusing on recovering and sleep being one of the biggest levers that you can pull, you’re leaving a lot kind of on the table.
Josko:
So if you’re trying to build muscle, like a lot of muscle mass, it’s not about getting seven hours of sleep, not even about getting eight. It could potentially be even getting more than nine hours of sleep every single day in order for you to build muscle. So if you’re feeling stuck and you’re like, I just can’t build muscle, I’m working out so much.
It’s probably your recovery. It probably is. You need that recovery in order to build muscle.
I think there’s a quote out there that’s like, the muscle is built while you sleep or something. I think you mentioned it recently on one of the podcasts.
Brandon:
One kind of phrase I really like is there’s no such thing as overtraining. It’s more so just under recovery. And I think that’s totally true.
In the case of LeBron James, we would say the same thing. He trains so much that he needs to recover so much. And so I think that if you are, even for you, if you’re just starting off and you’re already introducing two workouts in the week. That’s still a substantial amount of what you’re adding.
So you’re going to have to add a substantial amount of focus on your recovery as well.
Josko:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that’s the thing. Even if you’re adding in two sessions a week of working out like 45 minutes twice a week, you probably are going to have to sleep more even for that.
Brandon:
Proportionately, to someone who’s not been doing anything to go to that, you’re going to have to actually ramp it up in the same fashion.
Josko:
It has to be.
Brandon:
And people think they need to jump into being like, I just need to be like LeBron James now. It’s like he didn’t get to there like in one week. He didn’t just like start like, okay, next week, I’m gonna start sleeping 14 hours and playing for 12 hours of basketball.
Yeah, yeah. 10 hours of basketball. Yeah.
So yeah, I hope that podcast was a little bit different than what you would normally hear from a muscle building podcast. Like we kind of joked about earlier. We’re not like bodybuilding guys, but we’ve been around with enough clients who want to build muscle and help people.
And even, you know, competed in bodybuilding, right? But we just want to give a different kind of perspective of just being like, hey, yeah, just get high calories and high protein. And there’s a lot more to building muscle and especially ones that are going to be functional and usable to you in your daily life.
So hope you enjoyed that episode and we’ll see you in the next one.