Calorie Target for Muscle Gain?

I'm glad I found this thread. This is exactly the information I was looking for. I want to lose about 10 pounds of fat and gain about 10 pounds of muscle. I've got the losing part down, it's the strength training I'm not familiar with. I'll be checking out all of the sources advised here.
Just last night a friend of mine told me that I was doing it "wrong". Not a, "You're going to hurt yourself" wrong, but just that I needed to add more weight and less reps. So this thread popped up at a good time for me.

A question, on average, is what I'm trying to achieve doable by the end of April. It's my sons birthday and we always like to take him to the beach for the weekend so that was my target goal.

I don't want to discourage you, but I also don't want you to be disillusioned into thinking this is going to happen. I'm not saying it's impossible. I think it's very probable that you can achieve half of that stated goal. Your body relies on a calorie deficit to lose fat and requires a calorie excess to build muscle. Another factor that plays into your equation is that the human anatomy adds muscle mass at greatly slower rate than it burns bodyfat.


I think by the end of April you can certainly have the ten pounds of body fat that you wish to lose off. You can probably lose those ten pounds and then some. You can also certainly improve your muscle TONE in that time frame. The definition of muscle tone is "tension in resting muscle" meaning that your muscles even when not doing anything will be poised for action and ready to respond. They'll look damn good too ;-). I think you will be hard pressed to gain that much muscle MASS in that time frame while keeping your body in the caloric deficit required to lose that much body fat that quickly.