Eat your way to bigger muscles!
Bigger muscles: muscle building
Aim to gain less than one kilogram a week. If your body uses plenty of energy and builds a lot of muscle mass, your weight can rise suddenly.
The strongest bears in the Finnish wilderness spend the autumn bulking up and go into hibernation before the snow arrives. They wake up groggy in spring, having burned off their excess fat. Why couldn’t we do the same as bears? Nature encourages us to eat in autumn before winter arrives, so why should we turn down food? Putting on plenty of mass for winter and burning off the extra kilos in spring is a familiar routine for bodybuilders. Muscles need energy to grow, but their growth also needs careful monitoring.
In summer, during beach season, you keep your weight steady. When autumn arrives, you start covering your beach-ready physique with clothes. The next time you show off the body you have built will be the following summer. Autumn and winter are a good time to add mass with the next beach season in mind. I suspect many people overeat throughout the autumn. Christmas is the perfect time for weight gain to peak. After Christmas, it is easy to start a diet. That kind of gorging practically demands weeks of dieting.
How long you need to diet depends on how much fat mass you have. If you need to lose 15-20 kilos, it will take around 5-8 weeks. After the diet, you can add a little body mass again in March, then fit in short spells of dieting in April-May. This time, you burn off as much fat as necessary. By summer, you need to be in great shape with firm muscles; otherwise, there is no point in muscle building and dieting.
A year-round process
Over the years, I have tried to solve the bulking dilemma. A body of knowledge about bulking principles is building up, along with the foundations of effective fat burning. Mass accumulates through months of overeating. Physiologically, there is no other way. Eating is the only way to store energy in your tissues. Effective training is recommended for muscle building, as it forces your body to store energy for muscle mass. If your bulking and training efforts are balanced, more than half of your weight gain should be fat-free mass (muscle tissue, body fluids and bone). Gaining fat at the same time is unavoidable.
You have to accept this without complaining. Talent, diligence and genetics determine how you gain body mass. The biggest single factor is the addition of fat mass alongside fat-free mass, which quickly increases body weight. If you gain a kilo or more a week, it indicates that more of the gain is fat mass, though not everywhere. The recommendation is to keep weight gain below a kilo a week. If your body uses a lot of energy and builds plenty of fat-free mass with it, weight gain can be faster. InBody or Tanita devices are worth using to check what is contributing to your weight gain. You can use them every week if you like. It is very difficult to judge how your body responds to overeating. If training enables your body to build more fat-free mass, weight gain can be unpredictable. But if it is clear that most of the mass you are gaining is fat, you need to eat less before too much fat mass accumulates.
10-20 kg from mid-August to Christmas
There are 20 weeks from mid-August to the New Year. You can gain 10-20 kg in that time. The Christmas feasts will reveal how much weight you have gained. In my view, this period is straightforward and stress-free. If you gain too much weight, you should consider how you portion out energy-dense foods. Overeating is by no means good. The more protein you have on your plate, the harder eating becomes during muscle building.
A spring ketogenic diet
This year’s experiences with ketogenic dieting solve the dieting problem. Muscle loss during a diet can be substantial. There is always a risk that dieting will cost you all the muscle mass you worked so hard to build. Experience with ketosis solves this problem. Muscle mass is well preserved in ketosis. The best results have been among bigger men. One man lost 30 kilos in seven weeks: 27 kilos of fat and three kilos of fat-free mass. His starting weight was 150 kilos. The results are the same for smaller men and women. Some women who tried ketosis gained muscle tissue during the diet. At the same time, everyone’s weight loss was associated with a loss of fat mass.
Another ketogenic diet, or protein diet, for 5-8 weeks
If you have gained 20 kilos over the autumn, allow 5-8 weeks for a ketogenic diet (depending on your sex, weight and age). In March, you could have another short bulking phase, followed by another protein diet. After a couple of weeks on a ketogenic diet, your weight can drop by more than five kilograms, with fat accounting for more than half of the loss.
Remember that your weight can fluctuate by a couple of kilos during a diet
When dieting, remember that the glycogen stores in your muscles and liver become partially depleted, and the weight of your gut contents decreases. You also lose fluid along with salt. The weight lost in these ways returns quite quickly once you start eating again. You need to account for this 2-3 kilo fluctuation (the amount depends on your sex and size).
You may spend the whole summer dieting
If you are in good shape by summer and have built muscle mass throughout the year, avoiding excess carbohydrates makes it easy to keep fat mass under control. You can follow a ketogenic diet all summer if you can use up 100 g of carbohydrates a day. This is not impossible, but you will have to give up pastries, sweets, soft drinks, cider and other treats, as well as alcohol, white bread, rice, pasta and potatoes. You can start eating carbohydrates again in autumn.
Bulking principles
Tips for successful muscle building:
1. Eat more than usual, but eat regularly. Plan your increases. Work out how much extra food you need each day. Make consistency a priority. Remember that if you want to gain 500 grams in a week, you should eat around 500 extra kilocalories every day. The same principle applies if you want to gain one kilogram a week: you need to eat 1000 extra kilocalories.
2. Choose foods that support muscle building. Remember that large amounts of protein in your food keep hunger at bay. Eating plenty takes work. Choose your carbohydrate sources carefully. Try to eat foods with a low GI. You can add high-GI carbohydrates to your diet if, despite all your efforts, you are not gaining enough weight.
3. Monitor your energy expenditure, using a wrist-worn fitness monitor. If these devices are unavailable, estimate your energy expenditure by keeping a food diary and looking up energy values online. Remember to include everyday activities such as work, workouts and leisure time in your calculations.
4. Avoid stress, as it increases energy expenditure and raises cortisol levels. Elevated cortisol levels accelerate the breakdown of muscle mass.
5. Give your training your full attention. Your workouts must be effective, and you need to train your muscles as much as possible in as little time as possible. Overtraining is out of the question. Recent studies have found that training in cycles with light weights gives muscle growth the greatest boost. Train with proper form and repeat the exercises.
6. Avoid other strenuous activities alongside your lifting exercises, to allow room for muscle growth.
7. Get plenty of sleep, the more the better, but no more than ten hours a day.
8. Weigh yourself regularly. Record your weight each time. There should be no major fluctuations in weight, and the final result must match the goal you set at the start.
9. You can easily monitor the ratio of fat to fat-free mass using bioelectrical impedance devices, such as an Omron wrist monitor. The device’s readings are not valid for lifting exercises and should be disregarded in that context. The device works well for tracking changes, provided you always measure in the same way. Here, too, daily fluctuations can derail your progress, but you must meet your monthly target, whether you are gaining or losing weight. If you do not have these measuring devices, you can check your body composition using InBody or Tanita devices.
10. Track changes in your muscle mass and fat mass. If you are not gaining 0.5-1 kg a week or 2-3 kg in one month, reduce your physical activity and/or eat more. If most of the weight you gain is fat mass, eat less or fine-tune your training.
11. Use muscle-toning supplements when strength training. Remember to take a recovery drink with you to the gym. Drink it during and after your workout.
12. Muscle-building diets are temporary diets. They can lead to elevated liver test results, as well as higher cholesterol, blood triglycerides, blood sugar and blood pressure. These generally return to normal when you start focusing on fat burning. If you have any hereditary conditions, it is worth getting tested before you start training to avoid problems.
13. The final tip is that, during the overeating phase, you will certainly get the nutrients you need (vitamins, minerals and trace elements, essential fatty acids, amino acids and water), but you cannot focus too heavily on food quality while overeating. You can only limit animal fats, such as dairy fat and saturated fat.
Enjoy your meal!
Author: Kertu Koronen (translation)
Source:Turg.Fitness.ee
Come and train! ArtGym
