"The key is food and quantity. It is caloric excess. If you don’t have it, you can’t grow.
Essentially caloric excess is what allows your body to grow and get bigger than it currently is now. How are you going to add another room on your house with only enough wood or concrete to make small maintenance repair on your existing structure?
All any good training program can do is get you better at the activity (this is true in any sport). If you eat more than you need you will gain weight. If you are a couch potato, that weight might be all fat. A good training program will ensure that a large portion is muscle. Either way, if caloric excess is present - one will not be the same weight and body composition by the very definition of caloric excess. Lift bigger, eat bigger, get bigger. Very easy."
Basic Takeaways:
Caloric excess is required
Your body and weight will change if excess is present (proportion of muscle/fat will depend on training effectiveness)
If over the period the body did not change - caloric excess was not present
If you add muscle, your base requirement will change and you will need to eat more to maintain excess
Do not spend 95% of your effort balancing the 5% minutia, eat a reasonable diet and spend 95% of your effort making sure you are getting enough.
From MY personal experience, a little bit of fat gain is needed. If you try to gain muscle while maintaining fat, you’re spinning your wheels.
Someone posted a while back because he was concerned about gaining an inch of muscle on his arms but also an inch of fat on his waist.
I couldn’t believe it. Sounds like a GREAT ratio to me. I would happily accept 2 inches on my waist for every inch of muscle on my arms. Probably more. Hell it might work out that way.
Dieting a couple inches off is easy. Adding a couple inches worth of muscle? Takes ten times more effort, consistency, and time.
Now i understand this, but why do so many people want to gain muscle and stay ripped? I tried that for a LONG damn time before i realized that you just have to lose your aspirations of “ripped” for awhile if you want any serious progress…Food = Good. Lifting is a great excuse to slam a 10oz steak and sweet potato and big ass glass of milk. Chicken and broccoli just doesn’t seem to give enough for me to grow.
It seems SO common sense to do, but everone is afraid of getting fat…lol…I say just try to keep BF%. You can still gain 10 lb with 15% being fat and still be at that 15% bf range.
My thing is if i dont look good naked…I should probably change a little bit, otherwise keep on eating! Be a glutton for meat and dairy, eat a salad or two…have a banana…be THAT guy and gains come.
So simple, so basic, so good. It amazes me how many people (and here I’m talking about away from weightlifting circles) just don’t get the metabolic activity level of muscle recovery. The only other thing that I would add would be nutritional timing around your workout. I try to eat about 1000 calories within an hour and a half of my workout and 1000 calories within an hour and a half after my workout.
Even I have to keep reminding myself to eat when I’m not hungry.
Imagine me at about 250 lbs at 6’-2" still needing to be reminded to eat. Then imagine the 140lb kid asking about how many sets he needs to get his bi’s bigger, you just KNOW he’s not doing what it takes.
I tell my clients almost every week that “You will be ASTOUNDED at the sheer volume of food you need to eat to get bigger.”
I need about 6,000 calories to really pack it on. That’s pretty much eating again just as soon as I can no longer taste what it was I last ate.
One thing I did was copy and paste a sample diet I found on MuscleswithAttitude.com and e-mail it around and ask if anyone is eating that much food per day. Even from some of the guys, (and all the females) I get a “No, I could never eat that much food in a day.”
Then I reveal that the sample diet was taken from a 115lb figure competitor and that that diet was her low-calorie regimen for her upcoming show!
That usually send the message home of how much you need to eat while trying to get “huge”.