Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How Many Calories Should You Eat to Gain Muscle Without Getting Fat?

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

There’s no way around it. If you want to gain muscle efficiently, you’re going to need to eat more calories than you burn each day. While eating slightly more calories than you burn every day is conducive to muscle growth, eating a lot more isn’t more so. That is, you’ll gain just as much muscle eating ~110% of your total daily energy expenditure as you would eating 120 or 130%. The only thing that will change, really, is how much fat you’ll gain. In this episode, we’re going to cover how to know how many calories you need to eat to gain weight, without just getting fat. I also created a simple and accurate calorie (and macronutrient) calculator to make these calculations easier: → https://legionathletics.com/how-many-calories-should-i-eat/ Let’s get to it. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series where I answer one common question quickly and simply because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less. And that's what I do in these episodes. All right. So this time around, we are talking muscle gain, maximum muscle gain and minimal fat gain. How many calories do we need to eat to accomplish that? And before I just get to the point and give the numbers, let's start with a quick primer on why calories matter in this context. Because most people think that calories really only matter if you want to lose weight. Then that's when you should pay attention to your calories. They're

wrong. Your total caloric intake is very important when you are trying to gain as much muscle as possible and as little fat as possible. And especially if you're in, if you're an intermediate or advanced weightlifter, because in the beginning, you can pretty much do anything in the gym and in the kitchen, and you're going to see changes in your body. If you just get in there and you throw some weight around, you get a little bit of progression, a little bit of progressive overload, or not, honestly, if you just get in some volume, just show up and do something. And then if you eat at least a little bit of protein and you don't go completely haywire with your calories, you're going to see some nice

changes in the mirror. You're going to have some fun. But once that honeymoon phase is over, it gets much trickier to continue gaining muscle and particularly to gain muscle and not just fat. And the reason for that is actually pretty simple. The physiology is kind of complex, but it can be boiled down to a very simple explanation that is this. When you are in a caloric deficit, so when you're in an energy deficit, when you're eating fewer calories than you're burning, your body prioritizes what it does with its energy. It pays closer attention to what it spends energy on, and it wants to spend energy on the most important vital processes to staying alive. Because when we're dieting, even when we're

doing it right, realize it's mild starvation. That's what our body sees it as. So it begins to play a little game of triage, so to speak, with the energy and muscle building becomes very low priority. For women, menstruation also is low priority. And that's why many women lose their periods when restricting their calories. And so what happens is, lose their periods when restricting their calories. And so what happens is, and this has been demonstrated in a number of studies, is that when calories are restricted, when you're in a caloric deficit, protein synthesis rates are just lower, which means that your body is simply not able to build muscle tissue as effectively. You could think of it as that, you know, your body's muscle building machinery, so to speak, just doesn't work very well when calories are restricted. And so therefore,

if you want your body's muscle building machinery to work as well as possible, which is what you need, if you want to gain muscle and strength effectively as a natural intermediate or advanced weightlifter, then you have to make sure that you are not in a caloric deficit. And that of course means that you have to make sure that every day you are eating at least as many calories as you're burning. And while it would be ideal to eat exactly to the calorie, the amount of energy that we're burning every day, because then we could mitigate the downsides of being in a deficit without having to deal with the downsides of being in a surplus, eating more calories than they're burning, which is fat gain, that's just not feasible because

our total daily energy expenditure is a moving target, regardless of how fancy and how granular we want to be with trying to calculate it. Ultimately, we can only estimate it. So we have to respond to that with measured overeating, basically. Now I should quickly mention that everything I just said remains true regardless of what you're doing with your protein intake, because some people will say that if you just eat the right amount of protein every day, and this is usually a large amount, one and a half grams per pound of body weight per day and up, or if you eat the right types of protein or the right combinations of protein, or if you eat protein at the right times before and

after your workouts or eating protein every few hours, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you can positively influence something called nitrogen balance, which is essentially the difference between the amount of nitrogen that you are eating and the amount of nitrogen that you are expelling from the body. And of course, protein is our primary source of nitrogen in our diets. Some people will say that if you do fancy things with your protein, you can then positively impact your body's nitrogen balance in such a way that you don't now have to be in a caloric surplus to maximize muscle growth. You can just eat at maintenance, which again is strange advice because none of us really know what our maintenance calories are to the calorie. Even those of us who have really dialed our diets

in, we just know how many calories to eat on average every day to keep our body weight in the range that we need it to be in. And that's usually between one to one and a half pounds. So again, my point is don't fall down that nitrogen balance rabbit hole and think that you can just get fancy with your protein intake or other aspects of your diet or training to influence nitrogen balance in a way that will allow you to not have to worry about how many calories you're eating. Instead, what you want to do is you want to take your total daily energy expenditure, which we'll get to in a minute in terms of how to calculate that. And then you want to eat about 10 to 15% more calories than that every day. So in my case, I know that my total daily energy expenditure,

when you average it out, given my workout, my workout schedule and my basal metabolic rate and other little things that impact how many, how many calories you burn every day, like the thermic effect of food and so forth. I know that my total daily energy expenditure is about 2,700 calories. So if I wanted to go into a lean bulking phase, so if I wanted to bump up my muscle gain with minimal fat gain, then I would increase that number to about 3,000 calories per day. That's where I would start. And what that would accomplish then is it would ensure that I'm never in a caloric deficit, which would then ensure that my body's muscle building machinery can work as well as possible, which then allows me to gain muscle and strength effectively. Now, because I would be eating more calories than I'm burning, that of

course would mean that I would gain some fat as well. That's just part of the game. You can't get around it. Now you can minimize it by not being in too large of a surplus. So if I were to eat 30% more calories on average that I'm burning every day, that would be a mistake. So if I were to take my 2,700 number and I were to bump that up to, let's say 36, 3,500 calories per day, but what happened is I wouldn't gain muscle any faster, but I would gain fat faster. So when you get it right, you can expect, and I don't know of any good definitive research on this, but I've worked with a lot of people. And based on my experience, I would say that you can expect to gain muscle and fat at about the same rate. So if you get it right, you should be

looking to gain anywhere from a half a pound to a pound a week. And about half of whatever you gain should be muscle and half should be fat. Now, if you tend to gain more muscle and fat, then good for you. Fuck you. Good for you. It just means you have good genetics, basically. I mean, there could be other factors, but that's probably the most likely factor. Or if you're new to weightlifting, you also can gain muscle a lot faster than fat. But if you're an intermediate or advanced weightlifter, you probably just have good genetics. And on the flip side, if you tend to gain more muscle than fat, don't be discouraged. It means that you might just be a bit of a low responder to weightlifting and that's totally fine. You can still get to where you want to be. It just might take a bit more time than you thought going into it.

Now, as far as the quality of these calories and as far as where these calories come from, of course, the calories in Skittles and the calories in chicken breast are not the same, and especially not in the context of muscle building. The chicken breast is more conducive to muscle building than the Skittles are. But you should know that carbs are not your enemy, even when you want to lose fat, but they are really not your enemy when you want to gain muscle. The best muscle building diet for most people. So the place to start and see how you respond to it is a high protein and high carb diet. And that means that your fats should be moderate.

So for example, when I am lean bulking, my fats are usually around, I would say 0.4 grams per pound of body weight per day. And I'm eating about one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. And the rest of my calories are coming from carbs and carbs are your friend, especially when you're lean bulking, because one, they make for great training. You have high energy levels. You have a lot of glycogen in your muscles, which again, translates into better performance in the gym, which then of course translates into better gains. And research also shows that high carb diets are better for recovery purposes. They're better for muscle recovery. They're better

for reducing muscle damage that occurs in workouts. And that's important because too much muscle damage means a lot of muscle soreness, which then means that we can't train muscles as frequently as we would like to. And when, again, when we're looking to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, we want to be putting in work. If we can be in the gym four to six days per week for about 45 minutes to 60 minutes per session, that's what we want to do. You want to train hard when you're in a calorie surplus because that's when your body's primed to adapt to that training. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising

gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, so now that we have the groundwork behind us, let's just get to the answer to the question, how many calories should you be eating to gain muscle and not fat as quickly as possible? And what that comes down to is first estimating what your basal metabolic rate is, and then estimating from there how much additional energy you're burning through

physical activity and the energy that it costs to digest and absorb the food that you eat, which is also called the thermic effect of food. You've probably heard of that. And there are many ways to do that, but I recommend a very simple and practical one. Now, it starts with doing a little math to estimate your basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy that it costs to just stay alive. So if you're just lay there and not move all day, how much energy does that cost? And there are various ways to do that. But the equation that I like most is the catch McCardle equation because it accounts for your body composition. And I could just give that to you here, but easier is a calculator that

I built and you can find it at the link down below. So if you click on that link, you'll be taken to an article that I wrote about this whole subject of how many calories to eat, not just to gain muscle and as little fat as possible, but also how to lose as much fat and as little muscle as possible. And on that article is a calculator. And if you were listening to this outside of YouTube, just head over to legionathletics.com and search for calories, and you'll find the article. It's called how many calories you should eat with a calculator or something like that. And then once you have your BMR, which for the sake of reference, in case you're wondering, I am 6'2", I weigh 195 pounds, and I'm about eight or 9% body fat. And my BMR is about 2,100 calories per day. So once you have your BMR, then the easiest way to turn that into a fairly accurate estimate of

how many calories you're burning overall every day is to simply multiply it by a number according to how active you are. Now the catch McCArdle comes with multipliers, but I've worked with a lot of people and I've found that they tend to be high. They tend to over estimate how many calories people are burning, which then of course causes problems because people go by those multipliers and then don't see results. Whether it's don't really see weight loss or they see too much fat gain when they're trying to lean bulk and they think something is wrong then with the entire model of energy balance and everything I've just told you when that wasn't the problem, it's just the multiplier is too high. So I have taken those

multipliers and turned the volume down a little bit based on my experience. So here's what I recommend for turning your BMR into a fairly accurate estimate of your TDE. If you are sedentary, so if you don't really exercise, you don't really have any vigorous physical activity in your life, then multiply your BMR by about 1.1. If you are lightly active, so if you engage in light exercise, light sports, one to three days a week, then multiply it by 1.2. If you are moderately active, so if you do moderately intense sports or exercise three to five days per week, then I recommend you multiply it by 1.35. And if you are very active, so if you engage in hard exercise or intense sports or other physical activity of some kind, six to seven days per week, then I recommend you multiply it by 1.45. And lastly, if you are

super active, so if you do, I would say, you know, two plus hours of intense exercise or sports six to seven days per week, then you can go as high as, I mean, I've seen as high as 1.8, even two, but the low end of that's probably 1.6. So let's just say 1.6 to 1.8, if you are very, very active, should give you a fairly accurate estimate of how many calories you're burning. And then once you have your TDE, or at least a fairly accurate estimate of how many calories you're burning. And then once you have your TDE, or at least a fairly accurate estimate of it, you need to increase it by 10 to 15%. And that is the number of calories that you should be eating every day to gain muscle as quickly as possible and to minimize fat gain. Now, of course, that is a starting point. You may need to eat more. You may even need to eat less. You really

have to see how your body responds and adjust accordingly. And a good rule of thumb here is when it's all said and done, this comes out to about 16 to 18 calories per pound of body weight per day. That's where it is for most people. So when you do all the math, if you're in that range, you've done it right. If you're way above it or way below it, go back over your numbers because there's probably something wrong there. And also just for the sake of reference, when you start getting into the 14 to 15 calories per pound of body weight per day range, you're looking now more at maintenance calories or more or less the energy that you're burning. And then when you go down to the 10 to 12 calories per pound of body weight per day range, you're looking more at cutting calories. You're looking

at an energy deficit. So that's it. That's how to calculate how many calories you should be eating to lean bulk. And in terms of results, guys should be looking to gain about half a pound, two pounds per week. And women should be looking to gain about half those numbers. So a quarter of a pound to one pound per week. And the reason why there's a big range there is because people that are new to weightlifting can gain muscle a lot faster than people who are experienced. So if you're a newbie, you should be looking to gain the higher, at least somewhere in the higher end of that range. And if you have at least a year to a year and a half of proper weightlifting under your belt, then you should be looking to gain something closer to the smaller end of that range. And lastly, if you want to know how to turn those calories into macros, which is very

important and you do want to know it, just click the link in the description down below and you'll be taken to an article that I wrote that breaks it all down and it gives you a fancy calculator. And again, for those of you listening off of YouTube, simply go to legionathletics.com, search for calories and check out the article. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and

learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode,

and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in, so instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically by flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. Now, this book has sold over 200,000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands of men and women get the bodies they really want, eating the types of food they really love, which is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star

average. So if you want to know how to build your best body ever without having to follow a boring, bland, overly restrictive bodybuilding diet, and if you want 125 of my personal favorite recipes for building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy, then you want to pick up The Shredded Chef today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you are not currently listening to audiobooks. I love them myself because they let me make the time

that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitly.com slash free T S C. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to the shredded chef for free.