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HOW TO GROW MUSCLE WITHOUT FAT
🕑 Added 2023-06-18 09:02:35 +0000 UTCI think I wouldn’t be mistaken if I assume that your goal is to build a little more muscles through gym workouts. A large number of people have been working out for years for this very purpose. Many of these gym fans begin to notice something else over time that does not give them joy. It’s true that weight training helps to increase muscle mass. More specifically, they can help. However, there is one thing other than muscles that can grow with time. Damn! You certainly know that I’m talking about subcutaneous fat. Our today’s article is about how to grow muscles rather than fat.
OH NO! I’M AS FAT AS A PIG!
The most dangerous thing about the fat gain is that the process is GRADUAL and very SLOW! You can notice that your muscle mass grows and you become bigger for months and years, without noticing that more and more of this “enlargement” is caused by fat deposits. Everyone knows that biological tissues such as muscles, for example, grow very slowly and gradually. In natural training, gaining 0.5-1 KG of muscle per month is a huge achievement, by the way. But few people pay attention to the fact that, along with muscle growth, subcutaneous fat is gained slowly and gradually. Moreover, there is less muscle and more fat in the overall proportion of “enlargement” over time. At some point, with a natural training, you suddenly notice that MUSCLES ARE NOT GROWING AT ALL... BUT FAT IS!!!!
But even assuming that you’re lucky enough to be able to build muscles by gym workouts, over time you get less and less pleasure from having them just because your muscles are hidden by a layer of fat. There are less and less compliments and admiring looks around. More and more disappointment and frustration. Yes. You may have gained muscle and become bigger, unlike many other people who could not. But along with the muscles, you gained too much fat. Gym goers often start noticing that they GAIN MORE FAT THAN MUSCLE in the course of their training. Moreover, in especially unpleasant cases, after you gain fat, you lose your muscles and get a disgusting situation when your muscles return to the initial level, while you remain at an advanced level in terms of fat. And there you are, oh, my God.. you’re both FAT AND THIN!
Why is this happening? Why does fat grow while our goal is to gain muscle mass? There are two basic explanations:
- OBJECTIVE REALITY ASSESSMENT MISTAKES
- SUBJECTIVE REGIMEN IMPLEMENTATION MISTAKES
OBJECTIVE REALITY ASSESSMENT MISTAKES What do mistakes in the assessment of objective reality mean? This means that you believe, for example, that a professional bodybuilder from the magazine cover does not use steroids. Or, for example, you believe that in order to lose weight, it is enough to start eating the “right foods”. Or, for example, that all jocks have problems with erection. All these are examples of the wrong assessment of the objective reality, which make you choose the wrong paths to achieve your goals. You mistakenly think something is possible while it’s not
SUBJECTIVE REGIMEN IMPLEMENTATION MISTAKES - everything about your personal diet, workouts and recovery in general. For example, if you train a muscle group too often or too rarely, this is an example of wrong implementation of the subjective regimen. Two groups of the above errors result in surplus or deficit of CALORIES, among other things. And this moment is important for us, because it affects how much muscle and fat you gain after your workouts.
CALORIE SURPLUS
I think it’s no secret that calories are a measure of energy our body receives from food. And there are a few options:
- CALORIE DEFICIT - the body lacks energy and it burns fat and burns muscles.
- CALORIE SUFFICIENCY is homeostasis (balance) when there is sufficient energy but you don’t grow.
- CALORIE SURPLUS - surplus energy used for building muscle and fat
The system is very simple, although there are many “gurus” who promise muscle mass gains during low-carbohydrate diet and other questionable manipulations. However, no one canceled physics. You need to spend something in order to get something. Our body needs extra calories to synthesize new muscles and to achieve load progress. And this is a very important moment often ignored by gym goers. One more time. EXTRA CALORIES ARE NECESSARY FOR:
- SYNTHESIS OF NEW MUSCLES
- LOAD PROGRESSION
And when it’s all very clear with the synthesis of new muscles: new structures require energy both for their existence and for their creation, people tend to forget about progression. Well, they shouldn’t! Load progression is the basic principle of natural training, since it allows you to regularly maintain the level of stress needed to produce anabolic hormones. If the load (weight of the barbell, number of reps or sets) does not increase regularly, there will be no stress or muscle growth (we don’t take steroids into account here). But think for yourself, if the load increases, it means that the WORK GROWS too. So you need more and more ENERGY in order to achieve further progress. That’s why our muscles always need extra calories to grow. And that’s why I have very great doubts about dry “natural” bodybuilders who decrease the amount of consumed calories.
The main problem with the calorie surplus is that it can ACCUMULATE IN SUBCUTANEOUS FAT!
Let’s assume 2 000 kcal is sufficient for you (basic metabolism + activity consumption). If you eat this amount of food, you will not grow fat, but you will not be able to gain extra muscle. For the simple reason that you won’t have the energy to build and maintain them. What happens if we create a 1,500 kcal per day CALORIE DEFICIT? Obviously, the body and muscles will not have enough energy to maintain the usual amount of muscle and fat. Our body will begin to get rid of everything it can’t maintain: primarily muscles and fat. The main problem at this stage is that the body loves to burn muscles in the first place, because they are: a) not needed, b) very nutritious. In this respect, muscles are even better than fat, which the body perceives as emergency long-term reserves. Finally, we got ourselves together and created a 2,500-kcal per day CALORIE SURPLUS. We have received excess energy and now we can build new structures such as muscles. But what’s not nice is that calorie surplus accumulates fat.
CONCLUSION: WE NEED CALORIE SURPLUS FOR MUSCLE GROWTH! There’s no escaping it, no matter what they may tell you. But in order to minimize the growth of fat tissue, we need to TURN CALORIE SURPLUS INTO MUSCLE, RATHER THAN FAT! That’s what your main task as a bodybuilder is. And in practice, CALORIE SURPLUS can go three ways:
- INTO MUSCLE (this is perfect for us)
- INTO FAT (if you eat too much and don’t train right, this is your reality)
- A COMBINATION OF BOTH (this is the acceptable situation that practitioners seek).
COMBINATION OF BOTH is a situation where we gain both fat and muscle, understanding that these are the rules of the game. But we try to gain as little fat as possible and as many muscles as possible.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO DIRECT ALL THE SURPLUS DIRECTLY INTO THE MUSCLES?
This question is obvious. Because it would be so great if we could channel all excess calories strictly into the muscles, bypassing fat deposits. It would be the fairy tale that all bodybuilders dream of. We could gain exceptionally dry, fat-free muscle mass. How real is that? Is it possible to build muscles without gaining extra fat? The answer to this question depends on FOUR things:
- DO YOU HAVE UNIQUE GENETICS?
- ARE YOU USING STEROIDS?
- ARE YOU NEW TO THE GYM AND/OR A TEENAGER?
- ARE YOU RESTORING WHAT YOU ALREADY HAD?
Four questions. If you answered YES to at least one of them, let me congratulate you. You can grow muscles without gaining extra fat. If you answered NO to each of these questions, then welcome to the harsh reality... ...you'll have to lay off small amounts of fat to build muscles. No way round it. In your situation, we can only change the proportions. We can try to maximize muscle growth and minimize fat growth.
MAXIMUM MUSCLE GROWTH + MINIMUM FAT GROWTH
So, in order to gain muscles, we need a CALORIE SURPLUS. That is, you need to eat more food (energy) than we spend every day. How can we make most of these calories go into muscle growth rather than fat growth?
WE NEED TO OPTIMIZE DISTRIBUTION OF CALORIES in terms of nutrient composition (proteins-fats-carbs), meal time and volume.
What do these distributions depend upon? Numerous factors, the main ones being:
- GENETICS (number of muscle fibers, their thickness, number of hormones, bone structure, endurance, etc.)
- AGE (the older the person, the slower the metabolism and the less calories are needed)
- SEX (woman is a real accumulator of nutrients, unlike men)
- REGIMEN (these are the things you can control)
The first three things are external factors that you cannot affect. But REGIMEN is what you can and should use. REGIMEN is:
- Speed of weight progress
- Percentage of fat and muscle
- Number of calories
- Proteins fats carbs
- Meal time
- Additives
- Cardio
- Lifestyle and stresses
- Concentration
- etc.
All these things need to be optimized in such a way that you have SURPLUS, which is enough for the growth of new MUSCLES. But not enough for the growth of FAT DEPOSITS!
OPTIMIZATION SCHEME
The general optimization scheme looks like this:
- GET RID OF SUBCUTANEOUS FAT COMPLETELY. What is meant here is a percentage of subcutaneous fat within 5-10%. This should be done for an objective assessment, in order to normalize testosterone production (the more fat on the body, the worse sex hormones are produced), and to start an objective search for your NORM, when muscles rather than fat are added.
- START ADDING CARBS into your diet. We’re talking about very small and very gradual addition. I recommend that you add no more than 50 G OF CARBS PER WEEK.
- MIRROR ASSESSMENT OF FORM. At the end of the week (after eating +50 calories in a week as compared to what you had the week before), evaluate your form in the mirror. Your muscles will gradually swell in size after a low carbohydrate diet. That’s good because you get the calories that go into your muscles. But as soon as the mirror shows that you are a little bit more “flooded” than you were the previous week - this is a STOP signal! That means from this week extra +50 grams of carbohydrates went into the fat instead of muscle.
- RETURN TO YOUR OPTIMAL GROWTH POINT. This means that as soon as your shape gets worse, you’re cutting the 50 grams of carbohydrates you added earlier next week. For example, if you added 50 grams every week from 200 grams to 350 grams and everything was fine until you made 400 grams, it means that your optimal growth point is 350 grams of carbohydrates.
- OPTIMAL POINT CORRECTION every few months. Your energy needs can vary either upwards (if your muscles got bigger) or downwards (if your muscles got smaller). This means that from time to time, every few months, you need to make a correction (add/decrease and watch what happens to your body).
This scheme allows you to find the optimal amount of calories, where muscles grow, but growth of fat deposits is minimized.
OPTIMIZATION CONDITIONS
CALORIE STABILITY EVERY DAY. Typically this means that you need to eat the same foods in the same quantity, day after day. That is, you need to standardize your diet so that you can comfortably monitor and control it.
RIGHT BALANCE OF PROTEINS, FATS AND CARBS. This means that you eat a lot of boiled animal protein (poultry, meat, eggs, milk) as a source of protein, and you eat some complex carbohydrate (buckwheat is recommended) to change the amount of calories every week.
OPTIMIZATION OF MEAL PORTIONS AND TIME. The classic bodybuilding diet scheme means that you should eat fractionally (5-6 meals) and that most of the calories (carbohydrates) you should eat in the morning and after workout. I usually recommend that you eat at least 50% of all daily carbs in these two meals because most of the energy at this time goes into muscle rather than fat.
PROPER WEIGHT TRAINING is essential to maintain and grow muscles. When I talk about proper training, I mean a program with a good set of compound exercises that are performed in a progressive style. If you do not use your muscles with progression, they will not grow and your diet will not work.
CONCLUSIONDon’t wait for miracles. It is actually difficult for a “natural” gym goer to grow muscle mass. And growing muscles while getting rid of fat is a fantastic thing. You can only optimize this process so that fat grows slower than muscle. But it will take a lot of hard work and an extremely tough diet. And I’m sure the very few can do it, if anything.
