This was my first newsletter post, made over a month ago, but I decided to let it go live as many past subscribers missed out! But so not to miss out be sure to subscribe by clicking HERE. Without further ado, here it is, part 1 of how to gain muscle without the added fat.
How fast can you gain muscle?
Setting realistic goals
We all want everything at once; fat loss and muscle gain, however sadly, more often than not, the two simply cannot occur at the same time. Why? Well to build muscle we need to eat more calories than we use, to give the energy to build tissue, whereas the opposite is true for losing fat, we need to consume less energy than our bodies use, so we burn fat tissue.
So now we know we cannot gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, we need to understand how fast we can gain muscle, because if we aren’t adding lean tissue, we’re adding the stuff we don’t want, fat.
You may have heard ‘you gotta eat big to get big’ and this is simply not true for everyone, and it is what led me to gaining pounds of fat. You want to avoid this, because everyones nutritional needs and ability to gain muscle differs. However, there are some general recommendations for the amount of weight to gain each month, that if you meet will ensure you are adding lean tissue to your body.
At the start of our resistance training career our bodies are very adaptive, and grow quickly, this is what is referred to as ‘newbie gains’, which last about a year. After this gaining muscle becomes much harder, we need to do more to cause our bodies to develop. Therefore, the longer you have been hitting the weights, the less lean tissue you can add each month. Many fitness professionals have come up with general recommendations for lean weight gain, and below are the ones I like to use (women can half these figures):
As you can see the amount of lean tissue added for every year of proper training decreases dramatically. And by proper training I mean planned, progressive resistance training, not just going along and doing what you please.
So there we have it, some realistic goals to plan our lean mass gaining journey. Next up will be the training required to best optimise our gains.
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Further Reading:
stephenhallrevive.wordpress.com 