Macro-Based Diets Part 2: Building Muscle and Strength
Takeaway Points:
When it comes to building muscle and strength, the most important macro to track is protein. You have to be hitting your daily protein goals (in addition to a good strength focused workout program) in order to grow the muscle you want.
The most effective way to build muscle is to be in controlled weight gain/bulk phase where you consistently eat a little more calories than your maintenance number would be while focusing on protein consumption. With this strategy, a person does gain weight, but bulking can also be followed by a cut cycle where the focus is weight loss and muscle maintenance.
Goal Selection
When it comes to programming your macronutrients for gaining muscle, it’s important to first decide what kind of goal you’re going to pursue with regards to your weight.
If your goal is to build muscle/strength, you probably don’t want to be focusing on weight loss. Weight loss requires a caloric deficit (eating fewer calories than you burn on a daily basis), which will also inhibit muscle/strength growth, and has negative effects on your hormones and short term health. During such a phase, your goal is not really to build muscle, so much as you’re just trying to maintain what you have while losing fat. So, we’ll have a whole other article on this, and we don’t recommend trying to pursue a weight loss goal while trying to build muscle and strength.
This leaves maintenance/recomposition, or a weight gain/bulk goal.
Maintenance/recomp(osition) refers to the process by which you attempt to gain muscle and lose fat while remaining at roughly the same weight throughout. This is a very doable process (for beginners at least) and is really how most people attempt it. However, this isn’t usually ideal, and becomes harder and harder to do as you get higher in fitness level. It’s still possible at an elite level, but it’s just far easier to focus on bulking instead.
This is because recomposition is limited by how fast you build muscle. You can build muscle relatively quickly as a beginner, but this will slow down rapidly as you get more experience, and at that point recomposition becomes slower and slower. For this reason, and because you build muscle a bit faster when in a weight gain/bulk, it will probably make more sense for more advanced exercisers to pursue a weight gain/bulking goal in order to build more muscle.
Weight gain/bulking refers to the process of gaining weight in order to also gain muscle, accomplished by eating more than your maintenance calories on a daily basis (a caloric surplus). Bulking will also mean gaining additional unwanted fat, but it’s also the fastest way to build muscle. Ideally, this is later followed by a weight loss/cutting cycle in order to trim off the excess fat while retaining as much of the built muscle as possible.
With recomposition, you're sticking to maintenance calories but increasing your activity level and your protein consumption to ensure some degree of muscle building while losing fat. With bulking, you're overshooting your maintenance calories in order to gain weight and muscle simultaneously, then you’ll typically follow this with a cut (weight loss) goal later to offset the added weight gained.
Calories For Muscle Mass
When it comes to gaining weight in general and muscle in particular, this means that you’re looking to maximize protein synthesis via protein consumption (so you can build as much muscle as possible) while overshooting your daily needed calories in order to gain weight, and training as hard as you can in the gym to stimulate muscle growth.
While some people might advocate eating a crap ton of calories over and above your needs in order to gain weight quick, this usually isn’t ideal because your body simply can’t build as much muscle in the short term. This means that only a small surplus will maximize the benefit you get, and anything above that, will just mean extra fat.
It’s usually better to take a steadier approach, with a smaller surplus. This typically means aiming for a safe overconsumption of 100-250 cal/day or so, resulting in less than a pound of weight gain per week. It’s certainly possible to gain weight quicker, but it’s also more likely to lead to unwanted fat gain.
One note is that since caloric needs tend to increase rapidly while gaining weight, this may mean that any particular intake, quickly stops being sufficient, and you need to add calories aggressively from week to week to see continued progress. Since the target of 100-250cal/day is a relatively small one, this could mean that for example, you increase +100cal/day this week, then your expenditure increases by +100cal/day, and by the end of the week you’ve barely gained any weight. This is annoying and delays the time it takes to achieve your goals, but is a necessary part of the process if you want to gain muscle without too much added fat.
Alternately, you could push it faster (+250-500cal/day or even more) and see more consistent weight gain, but this will mean accepting you’re also going to see some added fat mass. However, this may be an acceptable risk for you, if you plan to cut weight later to offset any fat gained.
You can refer to our first article to get a sense of how to calculate your expenditure/maintenance calories, and use this as a guide to determine how much of a surplus you need to eat to build muscle, and accordingly how many total calories to consume per day. Like in the first article, you’d need to increase or decrease your calorie targets on a weekly basis, if you’re gaining too slowly or too quickly.
Macros for Muscle Mass
Once you’ve set your calorie target, the first thing is to make sure you’re getting in enough protein. Around 0.8g/lb of bodyweight per day is all most everyone needs for general fitness, but you may want to aim a bit higher (as high as 1g/lb or even as high as 1.2g/lb) if you want to be on the safe side and absolutely maximize muscle growth. You need to be making sure you’re always hitting that target, since you’re a mean machine who needs all the protein you can get.
When it comes to your remaining calories per day after protein is accounted for, again it’s not too important. You typically don’t want to cut out fat entirely for health reasons, and you don’t want to cut out carbs entirely because they’re your body’s preferred energy source for high intensity activity, like all the lifting you’re going to be doing to build muscle.
Another warning I like to give guys looking to build muscle is not to worry too much about food quality. Sure, when you’re looking to build muscle, you don’t want to sacrifice your health in the process by eating zero veggies or doing nothing but drinking protein shakes. But at the same time, you don’t need to be eating super healthy.
A lot of people tend to believe that food quality has a huge impact on body composition during a bulk, but it probably doesn’t. That means that provided that you have space for it in your macros, it’s fine to eat a few burgers or whatever if it’ll make it easier to get your calories in. Trying to bulk on kale, for example, is a pointless treadmill - there’s just so few calories in it relative to its degree of fullness that you could eat it forever and never gain weight.
On the other hand, cheaper “junk” food typically contains a high number of calories relative to how filling it is, and this can be a boon when you’re trying to gain weight. I’m not giving you permission to go overboard, way overshoot your targets, and eat a ton of crap, but being willing to eat a little less strictly might go a long way towards helping you pound down some extra calories while looking to gain weight.
I do like to recommend having healthy snacks on hand at all times to make it easy to get your calories in, as well as, of course, logging your calories closely so that you can ensure that you’re actually hitting your calorie targets and not just guessing. Mixed nuts (ideally without added salt) make for a super easy and high calorie snack that you can keep on hand throughout the day to help hit your calorie targets.
Tying It All Together
So to break down for your numbers:
Get a rough estimate of your expenditure/maintenance calories, either from an online calculator or an app like MacroFactor. Again, this is just a rough estimate, and tinkering may be needed (adjusting the calories up 100 once per week if you’re not seeing the average weight gain you’re expecting) if you’re not on point to begin with.
Add 100-250 calories to your total - or even more if you’re ok with gaining a bit of extra fun in exchange for more consistent weight gain - this is the amount of calories intended to get you gaining weight. You can increase this a bit if you want to go faster or decrease if you want to go slower, but this is a good starting point.
Take your bodyweight and multiply by your preferred protein intake between 0.8-1.2g/lb (depending on how conservative you want to be on protein). This is your g of protein per day. Multiply this number by 4 - this is the number of calories of protein per day. Subtract this number from your overall calories per day to get your number of remaining calories.
Your remaining calories can be split up however you want between fats and carbs. Again, it’s not a good idea when gaining muscle to completely cut one or the other.
Conclusion
That's really about it! It's best not to overthink your macros and focus instead on actually adhering to them over worrying about the tiny little percentages here and there. One of the most common mistakes a lot of people make when looking to gain muscle is either not tracking (and therefore not having any clue how many calories they're eating, and not gaining weight) or simply not having a good exercise program. From here, all you have to do is train hard, stick to the program, and increase your calorie needs if you’re not seeing weight gain consistently on a weekly basis.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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