“In order to gain muscle you must have a good amount of body fat to convert to muscle mass!”. “To gain as much muscle mass as possible, you have to stuff your face and eat anything in sight!”. “Want to get jacked? Don’t run, don’t move, just go on an all you can eat diet and lift hard!”.
If you’ll be asking traditional gym bros or old school bodybuilders on how to gain muscle, these are some common answers you’ll get. If you want to become an obese person thriving on type 2 diabetes, then I highly advise you to follow this advice. If on the other hand you want to have a muscular, lean, athletic physique, you better ignore the conventional wisdom and follow the information shared in this article.
While it is true that the body needs more calories than it currently uses to build new muscle mass, there certainly is a limit on how many calories the body can convert into pure muscle mass in a certain period of time. Any additional calories that the body cannot use to create new muscle tissue, will be stored as either glycogen or fat. I often see guys with athletic backgrounds and already decent physiques from playing sports, absolutely ruining their already in shape body by listening to shitty old school bodybuilding advice and ruining their athletic bodies by packing on way too many pounds of body fat in the pursuit of getting more muscular. Instead of ending up looking like they’ve been putting in the hard work, they look like they’ve been chained to the coach, binge watched some reality TV show and stuffed their faces with more nacho chips and easter eggs than you can fit into your cookie closet.
While it’s normal to gain some fat on a muscle gaining phase, the amount of muscle gained should far outweigh the amount of fat gained on a successful bulk. At the end of a successful bulking phase, you should look like you’ve put in hard work at the gym, have bigger and stronger muscles and yes, you might have risen a couple of percentages in body fat, but due to packing on a solid amount of muscle, you should still look reasonably lean and athletic. And please don’t believe the myth that you can convert body fat into muscle mass. Body fat and muscle mass are two different kinds of tissues and one doesn’t convert into the other. Body fat is either gained or lost, but it never gets converted into muscle. This is physiologically impossible.
Besides looking worse and destroying your health when you’re overweight, you’re making your own life harder when it comes to getting lean as well. The less fat you gain on a bulking phase, the easier it will be to lean down when you’re going on a fat loss phase to reveal more muscle definition. Once your muscle gaining phase has come to an end for that cycle and you’ve decided that you want to get lean, you’ll have a way easier time dieting down compared to someone who has let themselves go during a bulk. The process will be shorter and psychologically easier because you’re not going from one extreme to the other.
Instead of ending up like Jabba the Hut after a bulking phase, you should end up looking like someone who lifts, but just has a couple of pounds to lose before being really lean.
Get lean first
Most people want to get to their end goal of becoming big, lean and muscular as fast as possible. This is human nature, since we love instant gratification and don’t want to wait before we see results. Bulking up properly requires you to eat in a calorie surplus. If done right, about 80-90% of those additional calories will go to the creation of new muscle tissue and inevitable, the remaining calories will end up in gaining some fluff. Due to the favorable muscle to fat ratio gained on a properly done lean bulk, you won’t notice the small amounts of fat that you’ve gained and you’ll simply look more jacked.
If however you were already at a higher body fat of 20% or more to begin with, I would suggest that you cut down first to around 10%. The reason for this is that we won’t want you to end up looking softer than you need to be. The number one factor that will have the most profound effect on improving your overall aesthetics, no matter how muscular you are, is being at a healthy body fat percentage. Not only will your body become more aesthetic when you’re lean, your facial aesthetics will massively improve as well. You don’t have to become absolutely shredded to achieve this either. Being too lean is actually counterproductive as well. A good goal to aim for when cutting down first is around 10 percent body fat. What I would recommend is to eat a sufficient amount of protein of 0.8g per pound of body weight, eat in a moderate calorie deficit and follow a good resistance training program that is centered around the big compound lifts and focuses on progressive overload.
The beauty of being completely new to lifting weights is that even when you cut down to get leaner, your body is highly responsive to new adaptations. Even when you’re in a moderate calorie deficit as a beginning lifter you will gain new muscle mass. Your body will go through what is called a recomp phase where your muscle mass increases and your fat mass decreases, allowing you to end up looking more muscular and leaner.
The goal of our gym journey is to look great throughout the whole process. Becoming reasonably lean is the first step towards that goal and if you do things right. Staying fairly lean throughout the whole process will make it so much easier to lose the excess fluff when you want to diet down. Imagine just having to shed a couple of pounds versus a ton of weight in order to get the body of a Greek God. You’re just setting yourself in a better looking and more favorable position when you stay lean throughout the process.
The optimal calorie surplus for lean muscle gains
Once you’re fairly lean and have reached a healthy body fat percentage, the time has come to maximize your gains. People once used to believe that in order to gain muscle, you had to get fat by adopting a ‘see food diet’. In other words, you had to eat everything in sight. As a result, more and more people persuing to have the body of a Greek God, ended up with a physique similar to that of Homer Simpson.
In order to gain muscle optimally, it’s true that you should be in a calorie surplus. However, more calories does not equal more muscle mass because your body is limited by its rate of how fast it can create new muscle tissue naturally. For someone who is fairly lean, about 1% to 3% of a person’s bodyweight can be gained as lean muscle. The newer you are to lifting weights, the closer to the 3% your lean muscle gains can be. The longer you’ve been lifting, the closer you’ll lean to gaining only 1% and even less if you’ve been lifting for years and have already gained a lot of the muscle mass you can naturally carry on your frame.
To ensure that the majority of the weight you’ll gain will come from lean muscle mass, we will eat in a weekly calorie surplus of about 1400 to 2100 calories. Divided by 7 days this will equal out to a calorie surplus of about 200-300 calories. By eating in a conservative calorie surplus you are giving your body the necessary energy to create new muscle mass, yet you aren’t stimulating unnecessary fat storage by overfeeding the body.
An amazing strategy I regularly use to ensure that the extra calories will directly benefit the muscle repair and building process is to eat all of my extra calories on my workout days and eat at maintenance on my rest days. For example, if I’m lifting 3 days per week and I want to be in a conservative surplus of 1400 kcal per week, I will divide 1400 by 3 which is 470. On the days I work out, for example Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I will eat 470 calories over maintenance. This way the additional calories will instantly serve their purpose and you will feel replenished the next day because your body had more fuel to recover faster. If for example you workout 4 days per week and want to be in a weekly calorie surplus of 2100, you can divide 2100 by 4, which is 525 and you can eat 525 extra calories on your workout days.
Whether you wish to be in a surplus every day or want to divide your surplus over your workout days comes down to personal preference, although I do lean towards the surplus on workout days as the additional calories will be put to use instantly.
Going over 300 additional calories per day won’t necessarily benefit you much more if your goal is to remain aesthetic. You will gain strength and muscle size at a decent pace and will make steady gains without putting on too much fat. There will come a moment in time where weight gain will halt and you will reach a plateau. This is because of a process called metabolic adaptation. This occurs because your body has reached a new, higher bodyweight and needs more energy to maintain it’s current weight at its current activity level. If you are still fairly lean and want to continue making gains, I would bump up the calories by another additional 200. This way you’ve put your body in a new conservative surplus and you will start making gains again. If you want to take things really slow to ensure lean muscle tissue, take it easy and bump it up by only 100.
You can repeat this process until you’ve reached a point where your body fat percentage is just on the point of being acceptable. For most guys this will be around 15%. After that point you will notice more and more loss of muscle definition and going further and further with the calorie surplus will only lead to a doughier and softer look. Continuing to pack on more and more body fat will also lead to a harder time cutting down again. That’s why I recommend to start your bulk around 10% body fat, make gains until you reach a maximum of 15-17% body fat and then cut down again to around 10%.
Conclusion
You don’t have to become a walking advertisement for type 2 diabetes when attempting to maximize your muscle growth. While your body needs additional energy to grow new muscle tissue, it certainly doesn’t require an insane amount of extra calories since the body is limited by its natural rate to build muscle in a certain timeframe. Extra calories will only be stored as fat.
By adopting a small daily calorie surplus of around 200-300 additional calories per day, leading up to around 1400 – 2100 additional calories per week, you will be able to maintain a relatively lean physique while packing on size. You’ll maximize muscle growth, stay aesthetic throughout the whole process and you’ll have a way easier time cutting down when you want to get really lean. A great strategy is to ensure that additional calories will be put to proper use is to divide your weekly surplus in the number of days you work out and eat in a surplus only on your workout days. Monitor your progress and if you seem to have reached a plateau, slowly bump up the calories by 100-200.
Kevin Mahjoubi