How Do I Gain Muscle? Gaining Muscle over Body Fat

How can I gain muscle? It’s probably the first question that every gymgoer asks when they first enter the gym.

Over the last seven years I’ve taken myself from 80kg in bodyweight to 108kg in bodyweight with my most recent body fat scores coming in at 13.5%.

Throughout this time I’ve had various weight fluctuation, I went through one heavy bulk at about 17 years old and I became “fat” for a short period. It was mostly belly fat and I was constantly bloated from all the food that I was eating but I definitely learned what to do and what not to do during that time.

First off, despite any bullshit that you might see on the internet, it takes time. You have to be willing to deal with the apparent lack of progress from week to week to achieve an end goal. I saw apparent because it’s only at the end when you look back that you see how far you’ve come.

Counting Calories

I think tracking calories has become a bit of a buzzword in the fitness community. It’s like if you’re not monitoring every morsel of food that goes into your mouth, you’re wrong. I think for overall health, the focus should always be on eating high quality food first and foremost. A calorie is not always a calorie, it depends on the type of food you eat. Your body will process good quality foods a lot better than low-quality, low-calorie processed snacks or foods.

However, it’s good to have an idea of how much calories you are burning and add to this.

I created a simple Calorie Calculator to help see what your maintenance calories should be. From the, adding 300-400 extra calories is a good place to start, the more you add the more you venture into fat gain territory which is what happened to me when I gained a lot of body fat. Now it worked because I was able to reset my body composition when I got to a certain weight by eating my maintenance calorie level and choosing cleaner foods which helped me “convert” that fat into muscle, but it’s not the ideal for everyone.

After 1 or 2 weeks of counting calories and eating clean foods you should have a fair idea of what your eating habits should look like and you can continue this from there.

Training Intensity

I have another blog post written on the importance of training intensity which you can check out, so I won’t go into too much detail. However, all of your session should be short in duration (<1 hour) and then from this you should train as close to failure as possible for each exercise during these sessions.

For complete muscle growth, I have found that the 6-12 rep range with partial reps to failure at the end is key. If you find that this is too intense and you don’t have enough recovery between sessions, that’s good, just reduce the frequency of your sessions. I train pretty much every day but you could train every second day and just go for a walk on the days between gym sessions.

The point is that you should train as intensely as possible during the sessions but don’t sacrifice the workout intensity if it’s difficult, just reduce the number of sessions in a week. This might sound counterproductive but it’s what works best.

Intermittent Fasting

I also have another blog post on intermittent fasting for muscle growth but I have found that this is a big proponent of my lean muscle gain in the last year. I fast from about 11.30am to 8pm and workout in the morning. Throughout the year I’ve eaten later into the evening but I’m cutting down on some weight currently so I shortened that window. It has been fantastic for me in this regard and I was initially surprised to see how much muscle I was putting on when I started doing it.

If you want to know more you can check out that blog post but I’d definitely recommend it.

Overall

By adopting these three methods into your routine, you can guarantee to see results. It’s important not to check the scales every day as your weight can fluctuate a lot due to water weight, time of day, etc and it can be misleading but every week it can be good to see. Over the coming months you should definitely see progress and a consistent increase in lean muscle.

The important thing is that it takes time and won’t happen overnight, nothing good comes easy but the results will happen.

As always, any questions feel free to contact me.

Jack.