Contents
Your muscles grow when your body is in a state of anabolism-building new cells, both muscle and fat. Many people can not decide to gain muscle mass because of the fear of gaining extra fat. However, the amount of excess fat will directly depend on your diet during this period, the intensity of training and genetic predisposition. Let’s look at how to gain muscle mass with a minimum set of fat.
Nutrition for gaining muscle mass
As long as you have extra fat in your body, you should not start gaining muscle mass. The fact is that the muscle/fat ratio affects the body’s storage of surplus calories. The more fat you have, the more fat you will build. It is optimal to start massaging when your body is 22-24% fat (for women) and 10-12% fat (for men).
If for weight loss you need to create a calorie deficit due to nutrition, then for gaining muscle mass you need to create a moderate surplus – 10-20%. People who are not inclined to gain fat can focus on 20%, those who are inclined-10%. It is important to give your body time to adapt and create a surplus after two weeks of eating at the level of maintaining calories.
The amount of protein in this case should be in the range of 1.7-1.8 g per kilogram of weight, the amount of fat-0.9-1.1 g per kilogram of weight, and the remaining calories should fall on carbohydrates.
Be attentive to your diet. Choose high-quality products – meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, grains, beans, vegetables, herbs, fruits. From bread, sweets and sausage, your body will not build muscle, but fat-easily.
Workouts for gaining muscle mass
To gain muscle, you need to train hard. Heavy-this means performing multi-joint exercises, such as squats, deadlifts and presses with a barbell and dumbbells, as well as choosing the right weight. Forget about multi-rep and round-robin workouts. To gain weight, you will have to work in the range of 6-12 reps per approach.
The main condition for training is that you must progress. For example, you can start with a small number of repetitions-6-8 in the approach and increase it with each week by 1-2 repetitions. And you can choose the golden mean – 10 repetitions and increase the working weight as the strength increases.
Remember, after a workout, your muscles fully recover in 48 hours, so it’s important to give them a new incentive to grow. By working out your muscle group twice a week, you will not only ensure effective growth, but you will also be able to avoid fat accumulation. However, if you feel a lot of muscle soreness after a workout, give yourself a little more rest time.
Recovery
Insufficient recovery leads to poor results. Muscle growth does not occur during training, but during rest. Therefore, during this period, try to get enough sleep, fully relax and control the level of psychological stress.
The optimal amount of sleep is 7-9 hours, and a full rest implies not only a passive pastime, but also an active one. It is very important to maintain a high level of non-training activity, especially during the set of muscles you reduce the number of cardio exercises.
Why your muscles don’t grow
1. Your body is low in calories. This point explains about 90% of cases when someone complains about the lack of muscle growth and weight gain. After all, gaining weight is creating a surplus in your daily calorie balance (in other words, you need to get more energy than you spend).
2. You have the wrong foods in your diet. If you are trying not just to create fat reserves, but to gain high-quality mass, you should pay attention to the products that you eat. Read about the benefits and harms of food products in our special section.
3. You consume too little water. Our muscles are made up of as much as 70% water, so it’s no surprise that insufficient fluid intake delays the weight gain process.
4. Your training does not give results. If the body does not receive a serious load, then there will be no muscle growth, since muscle growth is primarily a reaction of the body to an increase in the level of physical stress. If you start to load your body above the level to which you are accustomed, your body will have to adapt to new conditions.
5. Your technique is no good. If you do the exercise incorrectly, you take the load off the working muscles. Hone the technique of exercises, make each movement at a controlled pace (the negative phase is 2 times longer than the positive one), do not allow yourself to make sudden movements, jerks or use inertia.
6. You are using the wrong exercises. 70% of the exercises in your workout should be basic and multi-joint, performed with a barbell and dumbbells. The remaining 30% can be isolated exercises for working out individual muscles and performed on simulators.
7. You don’t train your legs. Exercises like squats strain the entire body, even contributing to the release of growth hormone. If you want to be strong and big, do not be lazy to train your legs. Similarly, women avoid training the chest and shoulder girdle, although these muscle groups need exercise.
8. You don’t rest enough. After all, during training, the muscles do not grow, but, on the contrary, they are destroyed, micro-breaks are created, which will later overgrow, make your muscles stronger. But in order for this to happen, it is necessary to create the appropriate conditions.
9.You don’t eat after a workout. After your workout, your muscles are ready to load up on a large portion of the nutrients consumed during the workout. If they are not energized at this time, they will have to look for third-party sources of energy (destroy other muscles, for example).
Never forget to eat after a workout.
10. You lack motivation. There are several easy ways to track your progress and monitor whether you are really moving forward:
- training diary;
- setting small goals every month;
- regular photos “before” and “after”;.
And finally, the process of gaining muscle mass should not get out of control. Weigh yourself regularly, make sure not to gain more than 300 g of weight per week. We hope our tips will help you build strong and beautiful muscles.