Muscle Gain Mistake

For those tho think it is easy to gain muscle on a calorie deficit I suggest you read this amazing article
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/muscle-gain-mistakes.html

Taken from it:

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> Not Eating Enough <

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Outside of poor training (which can be either too much or too little), not eating enough is the number one mistake I see most trainees making who can’t gain muscle. This is true even of individuals who swear up, down and sideways that they eat a ton but no matter what they can’t gain weight. It’s been said that ‘hardgainers’ tend to be overtrainers and undereaters and there is much truth to that.

Almost invariably, when you track these big eaters, they really aren’t eating that much. Research has routinely shown that overweight individuals tend to under-estimate food intake (e.g. they think they are eating much less than they actually are) but in my experience ‘hardgainers’ are doing the opposite: vastly overestimating how much they are actually eating in a given day, or over the span of a week.

Similarly, although such trainees may get in a lot of food acutely, invariably they often compensate for those high-caloric intakes by lowering calories on the following day (or even in the same day). So while they might remember that one big-assed lunch meal, they won’t remember how they ate almost nothing later in the day because they got full.

Some people simply lack the appetite to eat sufficient amounts to gain muscle (or any weight at all). While they may be able to force feed calories for a little bit, their appetite regulatory mechanisms kick in and they unconsciously reduce calories. Their bodies also tend to upregulate metabolic rate better than others, so they burn off more calories (a phenomenon called non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT).

But the simple fact is this: if such ‘big-eaters’ were actually eating as much as they think they are, they would be at least gaining some body fat, even if they were gaining zero muscle. If a trainee swears he’s eating a ton, but he’s not even gaining body fat, I know he’s still not eating enough (or even as much as he thinks he is).

Since I’m talking about body fat, I might as well address another very common cause of poor muscle gain and that’s trainees who fear putting on even an ounce of body fat. They’ll deliberately keep their calories low all the time and then wonder why they aren’t magically synthesizing muscle mass out of thin air. At this point, I’m not even including the folks who want to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

The simple physiological fact is that, to gain muscle, you have to provide not only the proper training stimulus, but also the building blocks for the new tissue. This means not only sufficient protein (see below) but also sufficient calories and energy. While it’s wonderful to hope that the energy to build new muscle will be pulled out of fat cells, the reality is that this rarely happens (there are some odd exceptions such as folks beginning a program, and those returning from a layoff).

And while there are extremes (such as my Ultimate Diet 2.0 or some of the intermittent fasting schemes) that allow people to put on muscle while remaining lean, they always invariably alternate periods of low and high calories. With the high calorie part of the diet (e.g. the weekend on the UD2) providing sufficient protein and energy to drive muscle mass gains.

Now, although this is a slightly different topic, I entreat trainees not to take the ‘Eat enough to gain’ to the opposite extreme. While GFH (look it up) can work for many people, eating so much food that a trainee gains a disproportionate amount of fat is just as much of a mistake as not eating enough in the first place.

Unless you’re a sumo wrestler or football lineman, eventually the fat has to come off; the more you put on while gaining muscle mass, the longer you have to diet. Which is not only a psychological chore but often results in performance or muscle mass losses (especially if you diet badly).

What I’m getting at is some optimum level, an intake sufficient to provide sufficient calories and protein for muscle growth without becoming a total fat-*kitten*. Which isn’t very helpful without some starting points which I’ll present now.

Muscle magazine claims notwithstanding, a natural trainee is usually doing damn well to gain 0.5 pounds of muscle per week (and a female might gain half of that). Yes, you’ll occasionally see a faster rate of gain but much more than that (especially for sustained periods) tends to be rare.

And while that may not sound like much, realize that a 0.5 lb per week muscle gain over the course of a year comes out to 26 pounds of lean body mass. And most won’t get that past their first year of training.

However, to get that rate of muscle mass gain will usually require some amount of fat gain, depending on how much over maintenance you’re eating, this might be an additional half pound of fat per week. So a reasonable weekly or monthly weight gain rate might be 1 pound per week or 4 pounds per month of which about half should be muscle and the other half fat.

Short dieting cycles can be inserted to take off the fat of course, a number of people on my forum have been using the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook to strip off fat between short bulking cycles so that they can get back to normal training.

I’d note that this shouldn’t take a huge number of calories over maintenance. Assuming a trainee is not burning off excessive calories through either a ton of cardio (or NEAT), you’re not looking at much more than 500 calories over maintenance to support about the maximum rate of muscle gain for a natural lifter. I’d suggest putting a majority of that on training days (and around training) with a lesser surplus on non-training days. That should help keep fat gains down somewhat.

Of course, this will have to be adjusted based on real world changes in body composition. If you’re not gaining any weight, you need to up calories. If you’re gaining a disproportionate amount of fat, you need to cut things back.