Plan Your Diet To Gain Muscle Mass Fast!

“Learn To Harness The Muscle Building Power Of A Well Designed Muscle Gain Diet”

Diet To Gain Muscle MassStructure your diet to gain muscle mass properly, and you will likely find the key to increasing the amount of lean muscle that you put on. As boring as this seems, it’s the truth.

Ask anybody who has ever attempted to gain muscle mass and succeeded, what they believe to be the most important factor in their muscle gain success. Chances are, the number one answer will be something like “focusing their diet to gain muscle mass” or “eating enough protein”.

When it comes to building muscle, there is simply no substitute for a well planned out muscle gain diet. Notice here that the opening sentence of this article did not begin touting supplements, steroids, and advanced just-discovered eastern block training methods.

The cold hard truth is that no matter how intelligently you train and no matter how many supplements you take, you will not gain appreciable amounts of lean muscle without properly structuring your diet to gain muscle mass….Period!

Unlock The Power Of Food – Laser Focus Your Diet To Gain Muscle Mass

In order to gain lean muscle mass, it’s very important to be able to calculate your current Basal Metabolic Rate and Total Daily Expended Energy. If you are serious about setting the structure of your diet to gain muscle mass specifically, then this is the first step.

In order to perform the BMR calculation, you’ll need to have your body fat tested by skin fold caliper method. To calculate your BMR simply plug your % body fat and lean body mass into the following equation:

BMR = 370+(21.6 x LBM (kg)).

In order to calculate your TDEE, you will need to multiply your BMR x your estimated activity level multiplier.

Activity Multipliers

Sedentary BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly Active BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. Active BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very Active BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extra Active BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or 2X day training, i.e
marathon, contest etc.)

 

Conventional wisdom says that in order to gain weight, muscle or otherwise, you will need to consume more calories than you burn. This is a scientific fact.

Trying to figure out exactly how many more calories to consume is where it begins to get fuzzy. There is a very fine line when it comes to structuring your diet to gain muscle mass. If you cross it you will not only gain muscle mass, but an appreciable amount of body fat as well.

I would recommend adjusting your caloric intake gradually. A good place to start would be to add an extra 500 calories per day to your diet. Try this for a week. Then, get on a scale and measure the results.

It’s also important to have your body fat measured periodically to ensure that your weight gains are due primarily to muscle gain. If at the end of the one week period, you have not gained any weight, adjust your caloric intake by an additional 500 calories per day. Continue in this fashion until you begin to see the results you are after.

Focus Your Diet To Gain Muscle Mass With Meal Frequency And Timing

Ok, so you know how many calories you need to be consuming. You’re clear on how to adjust your calories as needed and measure your results. But something is amiss.

“How exactly do I manage to eat 3500 calories a day?!!!” You yell out to no one in particular.

This is one of the most misunderstood areas when it comes to putting together a diet to gain muscle mass.

In order to reap the muscle building benefits of your new diet, you will need to be eating a meal every 2-3 hours throughout the day.

In order to get a handle on this, just make note of the time you wake up in the morning. Divide your entire day into 2 – hour increments. Now take the number of increments in your day and divide it into your caloric goal.

Presto, now you not only know exactly how many calories you need to consume in a day, but you know how many meals you need to eat each day and how many calories are in each of those meals.

The Perfect Meal – How To Create The Ideal Muscle Building Meal

In order to create a nutritional profile that effectively incorporates your target caloric intake for the day, you will need to pay attention to the nutrient profile.

Each meal will need to be composed of various amounts of individual nutrient classes.

The nutrient classes that you should be most concerned with are water, protein, carbohydrate and fat. It is important to note that each of these nutrients work together in your body to create an environment conducive to muscle growth.

If you decide that certain nutrients are more important than others, or even worse, decide to exclude certain nutrients from your diet, your body will have a difficult time producing the muscle mass that you desire.

In order to engineer your ideal diet to gain muscle mass, take a quick look at your per meal calorie requirements, (calculated previously).

  • 1 Gram of Protein Or Carbohydrate Contains 4 Calories
  • 1 Gram of Fat Contains 9 Calories

Armed with this new found information you can quickly begin to see that fat is the most calorie dense nutrient. Fat does not just make people fat because it is bad for them, a small amount of fat can contain a staggering amount of calories.

Following this logic, it is important to realize that in order to consume more calories, fat is an essential addition to any diet to gain muscle mass.

Certain types of fatty acids (omega 3′s and omega 6′s) when consumed properly, can not only increase your calories, but they have been scientifically proven to:

  • Lower Unwanted Body Fat Levels
  • Increase Muscle Building Hormone Levels
  • Increase Brain Function and Alertness
  • Provide An Additional Energy Source For The Body

As you can see, these are some pretty great side effects!

I recommend consuming between 40 and 60 grams of “healthy” fat per day. Spread over 6 meals, this would break down to approximately 7 to 10 grams of fat per meal.

This should be enough to ensure that you will be able to get the benefits that dietary fats have to offer, without consuming the excess of calories often associated with fat consumption.

Eat as much as you can. You can never get too much! Is often the advice given when it comes to protein.

Protein is primarily responsible for cell growth and repair, muscle growth, and as a last resort, an energy source for the body. To drive home the significance of protein, when you lift weights, you are tearing your muscle cells apart.

When your body begins to regenerate and repair all of those damaged muscle cells, it will need ample amounts of protein. If you do not consume enough protein, then your body will not regenerate and repair itself.

If this critical step in the muscle building process is limited by inadequate protein consumption, then you simply will not gain muscle mass!

Although, it is important for people wanting to gain muscle mass to consume enough protein, it is simply not necessary to consume absurd amounts.

The American College of Sports Medicine suggests that it may be prudent for strength training athletes to consume between 0.72 – 0.77 grams of protein per lb of body weight.

This stands in stark contrast to the 2 – 3 grams of protein per lb of body weight recommended by many bodybuilders. If your goals are to build muscle, it is important to consume a approximately 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight.

Now, if you’re doing the calculations, you are going to consume between 40-70 grams of “healthy” fat. This would account for between 360 and 630 of your daily calories.

Next we factor in the protein, at a minimum of 1 to 1.5 grams per lb of bodyweight. This would account for nearly 1200 calories for a 200lb man.

This brings us to a total of roughly 1830 calories. Supposing our target caloric intake for the day was 3600, we would need to consume approximately 443 grams of carbohydrate to round out our diet.

Your complete per meal break-down would look something like this:

Calories

Protein

Carbohydrate

Fat

604

50 grams

74 grams

12 grams

 

Hopefully this article has shed some light on how to focus your diet to gain muscle mass. Apply these diet tips and begin packing on lean muscle mass in no time at all!

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