How Many Cals to Make a Lb. of Muscle?

Nutrition
21

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Well, when growth is occurring rapidly, it is possible to measure feed efficiency, which is the amount of additional energy in the feed found to be needed per amount of added caloric energy added to the animal, as determined after slaughter.

That has been done many times.

From such data, it’s reasonable to estimate a figure that is quite unlikely to be too high and probably is not too badly low either. Namely, about 1000 cal/lb of lean muscle tissue added.

It does have relevance to a steroid cycle in a particular situation where extremely rapid gains should occur, as with a really properly done first cycle in the earlier weeks, or in some steroid cycle regain situations.

In other words, if you eat only 500 cal/day over what you would usually maintain at at the same training, ain’t no way you are going to add 1 lb LBM per day, which otherwise could be quite possible for a cycle done under those conditions.

Not that I couldn’t also give the figure from experience, but for those wanting to know why that ought to be, it turns out there is a reason why it ought to be, as well.

The OP’s question was an entirely reasonable one. He had a wrong figure that he had obtained from somewhere and it made absolutely no sense to him, so he asked.

I really might as well have not posted my previous reply on it though: clearly I might as well have been talking to myself.[/quote]

Hey, I thought it was interesting…however, what variables are being taken into account? Is this relating to cattle that are generally kept in a pen with minimal activity? Does the formula change if the cattle are driven from grazing to slaughter location or otherwise free ranging? And in regards to translate this to humans, can you make a similar reasonably accurate assessment given that even minor variations in routine can alter the calorie burning rate?

In other words, is there any statistically viable method of really answering this question in regards to people in general? Or even if you could make an even vaguely meaningful estimation to calorie consumption in relation to building a pound of muscle, is there any possible way to actually apply this to a given individual? It seems that unless you controlled just about every aspect of an individuals life and precisely calculated their calorie burning rate at all times of day, no practical statement could be made to answer the original question.

22

I said only that it was an estimated value that I think is unlikely to be greatly far off (with it being particularly unlikely to be a large overestimation.)

The biochemical processes of building new tissue are essentially (or actually) the same processes. Now the issues of whether growth occurs and how much are of course variable as you say, but that doesn’t mean the incremental feed efficiency is different.

Basically when this is studied, the animals are kept in the same conditions but with diets differing in energy (simply from amount: composition is the same) and comparison is between animals not terribly far – I don’t recall what is typical – from the midline of the curve. That is to say you don’t look at animals that are already at near maximal growth, for the feed amounts studied, with ones getting yet more feed than that, but look at the range where change in feed gives significant difference in growth, neither near the starvation nor gluttony ends of the curve.

It’s been 10 years or more since I made the effort to look into this so I’m not expert on it. But I found that values were not vastly different among different animals studied.

It is not surprising to me that the biochemical cost of building muscle falls within a reasonably narrow range, with variation perhaps coming more from differing efficiency among species in absorbing macronutrients than in the actual biochemical process.

Anyway, in the past I also had a lot of cases of either first cycles done right or regain cases, and in practice it proved correct that a 1000 cal/day surplus was sufficient to achieve muscle gains such as that, while amounts such as 500 cal/day seemed to limit to about 1/2 lb per day where bodyfat was not lost at the same time. (Sometimes that did happen and then that throws everything out the window, as that is another source of energy.)

That also winds up being rough, but rough is the best that can be done and is good enough in practice.

Since as has been pointed out, it is not as if one needs to calculate how many lbs one is going to gain in a given timeframe and then figure diet from that.

Anyway, it seems to me the best method of estimation available, short of studies on man that probably aren’t going to be done.

Generally in mature humans, the problem is that growth is usually not very fast. So the actual biochemical energy cost of building the muscle is only a very small fraction of total calories consumed.

So for example while a given experienced weight lifter might need to have, over time, a total 50,000 calorie surplus (500 calories a day, let’s say, over 100 days) to gain 5 lb of muscle. Actually that would be a much better result than most average over time.

And he might be confident, from experience, that had he had much less of an increase in calories than this, his muscle gains would have stagnated.

But that wouldn’t mean that the biochemical cost of the actual muscle building was 10,000 cal/lb. It means only that that many calories was required to create the milieu where the body responded by growing.

23

Hmmm! I’ll be damned, I wouldn’t have expected it to be such a reliable & consistent number. I’m actually interested in some self-experimentation, now. I just finished one month of a very strict Velocity diet, I might repeat that again in a couple of months…maybe for the third try later this year I’ll try an absolutely identical program with the exception of adding as close to 1000 calories per day as I can reasonably calculate and see what happens.

Thanks for the info!

24

Oh, I failed to be clear. Probably that was largely from being so wordy.

That figure is I believe reasonably close to the biochemical cost of building the muscle, after losses from incomplete absorption of macronutrients.

For someone in a situation of absolutely growing like a weed – the steroid cycles of the types mentioned and not in general, as most are slower in growth – there you can see it. Availability of nutrients and energy actually can be limiting in terms of the process.

For most weight trainers, this isn’t the case. The reason the person is not growing faster is not a shortage of protein or shortage of energy: it’s that the process isn’t otherwise going to be happening that rapidly anyway.

However a surplus typically creates a better overall environment – whether hormone levels or I don’t know what – where growth occurs better, for other reasons.

This doesn’t require 1000 cal/day extra to max out, nor if the best rate that, regardless of diet, woudl be achieved in that time frame is say 1 lb per 5 weeks (which would be fine gains over the year for an experienced trainer and better than is true for most) that doesn’t mean that just 1000 extra calories per 5 weeks would create that favorable environment. It might well take a few hundred calories a day extra over what would merely maintain bodyweight, over that period.

25

He’s asking how much it takes to MAKE a lb. of muscle, not how many calories are in it.

26

No no, you were clear, and I don’t expect any specific results, I was just interested in the whole concept in terms of a personal experience/experiment. That is, as I’m learning about my body’s response to specific (as tightly controlled as I’ve ever done) caloric intake (and macronutrient proportions) with a very specific training routine, it would be interesting to see the results if I changed one specific factor, in this case, calories (I still haven’t figured out what my macronutrient proportions should be)…of course there are always elements of one’s physiology that one cannot control – who knows I could get a little cold or something mid experiment that might throw everything off balance – but it would be as scientific as a solo experiment with minimal monitoring equipment can be. So I was more inspired to a quasi-controlled experiment by the information you provided than expressing an expectation of a specific response. Don’t stop being wordy, because you rarely write a useless sentence…if anything I responded to your first paragraph rather than addressing everything you stated.