Rec and Sports

Bodybuilding: Muscle Gain and Body Fat

For most of the bodybuilding population, the eventual goal is nothing less than a strong, muscular physique with impressive, razor-sharp definition.

Everyone wants a great body, but for those people who strive for nothing less than an ideal body, they don’t just want to be huge: They want to be shredded. In pursuit of this goal, many plunge into their programs headfirst, eager to get started and gain muscle. Bulking up might be the motivation, but everyone is worried about gaining excess body fat at the same time.

If you want to add a significant amount of muscle to your frame over as short a period of time as you can, you will always end up gaining some extra body fat along with it.

This is simply the nature of the entire process and if you really want to travel a significant way in the “bulking” direction, you have to be willing to accept this.

In order to increase the amount of muscle gain, you have to consume a large amount of calories in order to support the protein synthesis your body is going through. There is simply no way that every single calorie will go to muscle gain. Some if it will always end up as body fat.

If you want to make dramatic changes to your appearance over the shortest period of time, it is always best to focus on gaining size for a set period of time, followed by focusing on losing body fat for a set period of time.

Based on what we’ve covered so far, the goal of a bulking phase is simple: build as much muscle size as possible while minimizing body fat gains. Your goal during a bulking phase is never to LOSE body fat; it’s only to gain as little as possible.

There are three primary ways to accomplish this:

1) Use a precise caloric surplus. A caloric surplus is required to fuel muscle growth, but haphazardly cramming more food down your throat beyond what is necessary to build muscle tissue will simply cause you to gain more fat.

The general rule of thumb for muscle gain is to take 15-20% more calories than you need to keep your weight. If you are already within this range, there’s no need for you to add more.

2) Watch what you eat. You should be concentrating your diet on lean, high quality proteins, high fiber carbohydrates, and unsaturated, healthy fats.

Rather than aimlessly chowing down on every food item in sight, make sure that you’re sticking to lean protein sources, keeping blood sugar levels stable through proper carbohydrate choices, and avoiding high amounts of saturated fats.

3) Don’t forget the cardio. You don’t have to go wild, but a good, solid 2 to 3 sessions of cardio workouts during the week will help keep your body on track, and cut back on the body fat.

Stick to exercises of 10-20 minutes of high intensity, as they have less likelihood of muscle loss compared to the longer forms.

Once you’ve achieved the amount of muscle size that you want, a goal which is completely up to you as an individual, it’s time to move into a fat loss cycle. In this way, you can focus on stripping off the excess body fat gained during the bulking cycle, while still maintaining muscle size.

The trick is to minimize it rather than try to totally avoid it, and you can do this with a reasonable diet and sensible exercise.

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