Ok so you’ve been lifting weights for a while, and while you are getting stronger, you are wondering how to really bump up that muscle mass level.
Or maybe you are like me and have certain areas of your body you are really want to make bigger, like your legs or glutes.
How do you physically grow your muscles bigger?
Well, today we are diving into a nutrition for muscle gain series! I am going to teach you exactly what you need to do to start getting those pounds of muscle added to your body. And it isn’t as hard as you may think.
I know I’ve shared this before, but when I first started weightlifting on e of my main goals was to gain muscle mass in my legs, hips and glutes. I’ve always had very thin hips and legs and that was a goal I had at first.
Now, before you judge me too harshly for having an aesthetic goal as my primary goal for weightlifting, as opposed to just getting stronger for example, sometimes our goals start as one thing and then they transform as you start to see how something is changing your perspective.
So for me, at first I pretty much only had aesthetic goals for weightlifting. But as I did it, and as I got stronger and stronger, it has been morphing into the goal of getting strong for myself, not just to look good.
It’s so gratifying when I do a set of 200 lbs deadlifts for example, you feel like "I can't believe I just DID that!" You just feel like you can accomplish anything.
And don’t think that’s too far away for you either.
Depending on your age and fitness level when you start, you can make incredible advances in strength in just a few years.
Ok so when I started I wanted to gain muscle mass in my lower body. And I started to look into how bodybuilders accomplish this. They can put POUNDS of new muscle on themselves between competition seasons, and I wanted to figure out how to do that myself, without steroids obviously.
I also wanted to put on some significant muscle so that I could eat more. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism is, and that is a big draw for me as well.
So how do bodybuilders do this? The main way that they do this is by doing a season of bulking. I call this a season of muscle gain.
What is a season of muscle gain, or a bulk? Let’s define that real quick. This is a defined period of time where your main fitness goal is to eat in such a way as to promote the maximum amount of muscle growth, with the least amount of fat gained, while lifting heavy weights.
You may or may not have heard of what’s called a “dirty bulk” which is where you eat whatever you want and then lose the fat later, but we aren’t about that, right? This sets us up for long seasons of fat loss, and we want to keep our fat loss seasons at short as we can, can I get an amen to that?
The trick here is to eat slightly over your maintenance calorie level while lifting heavy (we are always lifting heavy) to stimulate muscle growth. There’s a lot of science to this, and I told y’all this isn’t a podcast about all the science with exercise and nutrition, and it won’t be, but I want to just give you a basic, basic overview like I did with the fat loss series.
So there’s a two things, or processes, I want you to know about growing bigger muscles. If you want to be scientific, is this process is called muscle protein synthesis. Literally, synthesizing or making muscle proteins, which are components of your muscle fibers, which make up your muscles.
I got a lot of this information from this article. It is VERY long and science-y but feel free to check it out! I probably should have pulled out my old nutrition textbooks from grad school but who has time to go to the attic when you can just pull it up on the internet.
So the author of this article used an analogy I like.
Think of your muscles as a wall made out of bricks. Each brick is an amino acid (which are the building clocks of protein). This process of muscle protein synthesis is simply the process of adding bricks to the wall to make it physically bigger.
So you are adding bricks constantly, but on the other side of the wall is a process that is taking bricks away. This process is called muscle protein breakdown or muscle proteolysis if you want to be fancy.
These two forces are always at work, so they can’t stop totally, but there are things you can do to change their speed.
So if you can find a way to make the building side go faster than the breakdown side, then your wall (and your muscles) are going to get bigger.
The main ways to make the building side go faster are, you guessed it, lifting weights (providing that stimulus, that NEED for your body to grow it’s muscles) and eating enough protein, and NOT being in an energy deficit.
Weightlifting tells your body “I need bigger muscles to do this load next time!”. And eating enough protein tells it that it has what it needs to make that happen.
Being in an energy deficit, or calorie deficit slows the rate of muscle protein synthesis. It slows down how fast the wall can be built.
So if we want to grow as much muscle as we can in a short amount of time, we need to be eating enough.
So was that too science-y? I hope not. I wanted you to understand the science a little bit behind what I’m going to suggest to you if you want maximum muscle gain, which is a season of muscle gain.
So next week we are going to get into the nitty gritty of HOW to do this. How much protein do we need to eat? How many calories? How should we train?
So your action item for this week, if you are thinking about doing a period of muscle gain, is to work on tracking your calories.
Just practice it.
I want you to do this in a season of muscle gain because you are going to be eating in a slight surplus of calories, and I feel it is MUCH better to be exact about this and err on the side of less fat gained (because there will be some) and so we need to be a little more knowledgeable about our calorie intake with this.
So you can download a calorie-tracking app like my fitness pal, that’s the one I use and I like it, and work on that. Start small, maybe make a goal to track every other day at first to ease your transition.
So stay tuned for next week! We did the “why” this week and next week we are going over the “how” with muscle gain.
Happy lifting!
-Rachel
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