How to gain muscle mass?
Your muscles grow when your body is in a state of anabolism - building new cells, both muscle and fat. Many people cannot make up their mind to gain muscle mass because of the fear of gaining excess 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 take a look at how to gain muscle mass with minimal fat gain.
Nutrition for gaining muscle mass
As long as you have excess fat in your body, you shouldn't start gaining muscle mass. This is because the muscle / fat ratio affects the body's storage of surplus calories. The more fat you have, the more fat you build. It is optimal to start mass gain 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 through nutrition, then to gain muscle mass you need to create a moderate surplus - 10-20%. People who are not prone to gaining fat can be guided by 20%, inclined - 10%. It is important to give your body time to adapt and create a surplus after two weeks of eating at a maintenance calorie level.
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 rest of the calories should be carbohydrates.
Be attentive to your diet. Choose quality foods - meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, grains, beans, vegetables, herbs, fruits. Your body will not build muscle from bread, sweets and sausages, but fat - easily.
Muscle building workouts
It takes hard training to gain muscle. Heavy means doing multi-joint exercises like squats, deadlifts, and barbell and dumbbell presses, and getting the right weight. Forget about multi-rep and circuit training. To gain mass, you will need to work in the 6-12 rep range per set.
The main condition for training is that you must progress. For example, you can start with a low number of reps - 6-8 per set and increase it by 1-2 repetitions every week. Or you can choose the golden mean - 10 repetitions and as the strength increases, increase the working weight.
Remember, after a workout, your muscles fully recover in 48 hours, so it is important to give them new stimulus to grow. By working out a muscle group twice a week, you will not only ensure effective growth, but also avoid fat accumulation. However, if you feel severe muscle soreness after exercise, 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, get enough rest and control the level of psychological stress.
The optimal amount of sleep is 7-9 hours, and proper rest implies not only passive pastime, but also active one. It is very important to maintain a high level of non-workout activity, especially as you reduce the number of cardio workouts while building muscles.
Why your muscles aren't growing
1. Your body is low on calories. This paragraph explains about 90% of the cases when someone complains about lack of muscle growth and weight gain. After all, weight gain is creating a surplus in the 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 striving not only to create fat reserves, but to gain quality mass, you should be careful about the foods you eat. Read our special section about the benefits and dangers of food.
3. You are drinking too little water. Our muscles are made up of as much as 70% water, so it should come as no surprise that not drinking enough water will delay the mass gain.
4. Your training does not work. If the body does not receive a serious load, then there will be no muscle growth, since muscle growth is primarily the body's response to an increase in the level of physical stress. If you begin to load the body beyond the level to which you are accustomed, your body will have to adapt to new conditions.
5. Your technique is useless. If you do the exercise incorrectly, then take the load off the working muscles. Hone your exercise technique, do each movement at a controlled pace (the negative phase is 2 times longer than the positive one), do not allow yourself to sudden movements, jerks or the use of 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 muscle-building exercises and performed on machines.
7. You don't exercise your legs. Exercises like squats stress the entire body, even promote the release of growth hormone. If you want to be strong and big, do not be lazy to train your legs. Likewise, women avoid exercising their chest and shoulder girdle, although these muscle groups need stress.
8. You don't get enough rest. Indeed, during training, muscles do not grow, but, on the contrary, are destroyed, micro tears are created, which will subsequently overgrow and make your muscles stronger. But for this to happen, it is necessary to create the appropriate conditions.
9. After training, you do not eat. Your muscles after training are ready to be loaded with a large portion of the nutrients used up during training. 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 exercise.
10. You lack motivation. There are several easy ways to track your progress and see if you're really moving forward:
training diary;
- setting small goals every month;
- regular before and after photos;
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 these tips will help you build strong, beautiful muscles.
Author: Zhanna Sh. (Specially for Calorizator.ru)
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