Anyone here using Stronglifts to gain weight?

leithy89

Hello, I'm 24 and from Australia, trying to gain some good muscle weight by doing stronglifts and have found that my strength has increased heaps since starting.
I'm tall skinny thing and hating it, anyone else here trying to gain muscle by using stronglifts?

Amazing1985RSD

It's not necessarily the workout that puts muscle mass on you. It's the food the fuel your body with. Lots of it.

jstout365

Yep, Amazing has it right. You need to eat at a surplus to gain muscle. Many people do a very slow gain of .25 to .5 lbs a week to help limit fat gain, because any time you eat to help build muscle mass, you will also gain some fat. Most women on here are eating to lose while strength training. A few of us are eating at maintenance. I don't know of anyone off the top of my head who is eating to gain at this point.

cats847

Hello! I can relate to your situation. I was slightly underweight before starting to strength train. I have gained about 3 lbs per month so far. I still look very lean, all my clothes fit, and I have visibly defined muscle mass that I definitely did not have before.

I was not eating at a surplus intentionally, however -- it kind of just happened naturally. Before I started lifting, my eating habits were not too great. I often skipped meals out of just sheer laziness...but after I started training, I made sure to eat enough food because a). I would feel super tired if I didn't, and b) I didn't want my hard work at the gym to go to waste by failing to support growing muscle tissue with proper nutrients!!

Now, I think it's easy to go overboard with this. Therefore, I didn't try extra hard to eat LOTS of food -- I just made sure to stop skipping meals, and have some sort of high quality protein at each meal -- eggs, lean meats, fish, milk, nuts, beans, and so on.

I definitely agree with what others have mentioned so far -- nutrition plays a crucial role in gaining muscle mass. If you don't put enough raw material into your body from which it could construct new tissue, then it won't happen.

neandermagnon

I'm doing stronglifts to gain strength and lean mass. Just want to second the advice that gaining weight is about what you eat. I'm not tracking what I eat, but I'm ensuring I get plenty of protein, healthy fat, carbs, fruit, veg, etc, plus I'm making sure I don't go hungry, and also eating chocolate. Kind of like Rippetoe's advice to young men wanting to gain weight "gallon of milk a day" well that's almost certainly an overkill for women trying to gain weight.... but "bar of chocolate a day" seems to be working for me :laugh:

you need to eat more than you burn off to gain weight, it can be tricky to do that and also eat foods high in protein and micronutrients (yep easy if you stuff your face with junk 24/7 but you'll end up under on protein if you do that) - but I will freely admit to eating fast food, in fact my local McDonalds have this doubles offer where you get 2 patties instead of one inside various burgers, that's a really good way to bump up calories and protein without going OTT. I usually leave out the fries and drink with fast food because I don't like them enough to justified that much empty carbs/calories/fat from frying (which destroys most of the nutrition in fat, e.g. EFAs, fat soluble vitamins) - it is more tricky that it looks to eat at a surplus when you're paying attention to nutrition at the same time. But it can be done and be delicious in the process.

jstout365

neandermagnon - I completely forgot that you were working on gaining! And it is so true that all it takes is a few hundred calories over a day to get the results you are looking for.

bumblebums

You know how they say that dieting makes you look good in clothes and exercise makes you look good naked? Reverse dieting (bulking) is sort of similar. Eating at a surplus is an absolute prerequisite to gaining weight. While eating at a surplus, you will gain both fat and muscle mass, but how much of each you gain will depend on how--and whether--you train.

neandermagnon

that is so true. I have gained fat but it really seems to me that I gained most of the fat during the 2 weeks that I wasn't training or being careful about nutrition (due to my work and life schedule being very messed up and me being really busy and disorganised). The rest of the time I didn't seem to be gaining any fat. I'm carrying on now training properly and focusing on nutrition, and will probably do a slow cut for a short time (nothing to extreme, I don't want to lose strength, I just want to keep my body fat % in the middle of the healthy range, i.e. 22-23ish%).

leithy89

oh definately nutrition is a huge factor! trying really hard to eat surplus calories, i do a lot of walking with work so it makes it even harder.
thanks for all the tips and advice, trying to gain muscle and strength more than anything and always had a good appetitte.