Healthy Fats Are Good For You
Dont be afraid of the word fat. A lot of people, especially when they want to lose fat, think that cutting fat out of the diet is a must-do. In fact, this couldnt be farther from the truth.
Fat supplies energy to the muscles when you are going about your day, and especially when you are exercising. What fats should you include in your meals? Almonds, avocados, fatty fish like salmon, and extra virgin olive oil are all good choices.
Making Adjustments To The Muscle Gain Meal Plans
Once you know how many calories you should be eating each day, choose a mail plan that closely matches your daily requirements.
Its unlikely that the number of calories you need will precisely match the meal plans.
For example, a man with a lean body weight of 152 pounds might have a daily calorie requirement of 2800 calories. In his case, he would take the 2500 calorie meal plan and increase some of the foods across one or two meals, or choose a 3,000 plan and reduce some foods.
Simply adding one slice of wholemeal bread and one large egg to the 2500 calorie meal plan would bring the number of calories up to around 2750, ideal for our 152lb man.
Make slight adjustments if your calorie needs dont match the plans.
Important Note: As I mentioned at the start of this guide, you dont need to stress about getting your calorie requirements dead on. It would be impossible to be 100% accurate with this whole process. Your goal with your daily nutrition is to create a slight surplus of calories to facilitate the muscle building process, and to ingest ample doses of protein throughout the day to increase protein synthesis.
The carbohydrates and fats provide an energy source and aid these growth processes.
Meal Prepping And Cooking
Dont like some of the suggested dishes?
Each meal listed in the plans is optimized for building muscle and shows the type of foods and quantity to eat, but does not provide recipes or cooking guidelines for each meal.
There are simply a list of foods and quantities to eat for each meal, but its your choice to prepare each meal to your taste preference. You can cook the foods and eat them plain, but this could become quite boring, making it a struggle for you to stick to the daily nutrition goals, so add some flavour to the foods if you wish.
For example, meal #3 in the 2000 calorie meal plan is chicken breast and brown rice. There are lots of different recipes for chicken breast and brown rice. You could make a chicken curry, stir-fry, or any kind of flavoured meal with these foods, its up to you.
Meal #5 of the 3,500 calorie meal plan is lean ground beef and sweet potato. Dont like sweet potato? swap the sweet potato for white rice and make chilli con carne with the ground beef.
You see, the meals can be enhanced with flavour and foods swapped around to suit your taste.
Add seasoning, spices, or sauces to enhance the flavour of your otherwise bland dish.
Eggs are another very versatile food that is used a lot in this nutrition plan. When you see eggs listed as part of a meal, cook them as you like omelette, boiled, poached, scrambled or Rocky Style raw, choice is yours.
Although, only eat eggs raw if theyre pasteurised.
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The Number Of Meals Isnt That Important
It doesnt matter if you space out your meals into smaller portions or cram them into 2-3 larger ones.
Studies show that you cant adapt your metabolic rate by spreading food out. Neither will you go catabolic if you skip a meal and eat it later that day.
What is important is the total amount you eat each day and of course, what you eat too.
The only reason to split meals into more regular portions is personal preference.
Note: It does make sense to dose your protein into smaller portions though, just to keep a constant supply of amino acids hitting the muscles. But even then, the difference between that and less frequent, larger doses isnt massive.
Need Help With Your Diet And Workout
Don’t waste another minute of your time searching for what to do. I’ve already done the research for you and created step-by-step plans that work. Select your goal below…
- I Want To Build Muscle If you want to build lean muscle without gaining excess body fat, spending all of your time in the gym, using a diet or workout that isn’t customized to you, or doing myth-based nonsense that only works for people with amazing genetics, check out: Superior Muscle Growth
- I Want To Lose Fat If you want to lose body fat without losing muscle, feeling hungry all the time, using stupid restrictive diets, doing 100 hours of cardio, or struggling with plateaus, metabolic slowdown, and everything else that sucks about getting lean, check out: Superior Fat Loss
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How To Build Muscle On A Plant
Lets face it, building muscle is hard, no matter what diet you follow. And supporting your athletic endeavors with a plant-based diet can be challenging too, especially if youve only recently gone vegan.
Ive been theredesperately hoping to gain muscle on a plant-based diet. After decades of learning from personal failures and successes, I have officially cracked the code on how to truly build and sustain muscle. Im sharing those keys to success with you today so that you too can achieve your bodybuilding and fitness goals.
When I first started my plant-based, muscle-building journey many years ago, there wasnt much publicly available on the subject. So little, in fact, that I had to rely almost entirely on trial and error. Thankfully, over time I started to figure it out, and I grew from weighing 120 pounds in 1995 when I went vegan, to a 210-pound champion bodybuilder at my peak, built entirely by plants .
Even if youve struggled with building muscle in the past , Im confident you can bulk up when you apply the strategies, habits, foods, and exercises necessary to achieve your goals.
And it all starts with nutrition.
The Body Changes Slowly
There is no get-rich-quick scheme for weight gain or weight loss. In order to obtain a maintainable change, your body needs time to adjust. For muscle gain specifically, its best to think in years not months. It takes hard work and dedication to build muscle and maintain muscle mass. If it were easy, wed see everyone rocking big biceps and six-pack abs.
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Eat Protein Every Day To Lose Fat And Build Muscle
Protein is essential to both fat loss and muscle gain. For fat loss, include protein in every meal to have an increased thermic effect. You see, protein-rich foods help to increase your metabolism because your body requires more energy to digest them.
Which foods increase the thermogenesis, or fat burning process?
- Chicken and turkey
- Cottage cheese and full-fat yogurt
- Red meat like pork and beef
Make Sure To Eat Enough Fat
By consuming sufficient amounts of fat, you obtain the calories needed to promote muscle gain, as fat provides twice the number of calories as carbs and protein per gram.
The general recommendation for fat intake for off-season bodybuilders is 0.5 grams per pound of body weight daily .
This equates to around 80 grams of fat per day for a male bodybuilder weighing 175 pounds .
When embarking on a vegan bodybuilding diet, it may help to track your intake of macronutrients protein, carbs, and fat for the first few weeks to ensure youre meeting your needs.
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Spice Up With Condiments
Condiments are inexpensive and an excellent way to spice up nutritious meals. Try mustard, hot sauce, salsa, ground pepper, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and natural coconut sugar for flavor without a lot of added calories.
Topping salads and vegetables with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar is flavorful and budget-friendly. Skip creamy salad dressings, margarine, and anything that is high in sodium, added sugar, or saturated fats.
How To Eat On Nontraining Days
Muscles require rest days to grow, but you shouldnt scarf down the quantity of carbohydrates you do on training days since the demand for carbs can fall considerably when youre inactive. This is where people often get into troublethey continue to maintain a high-carb intake on days they dont hit the iron and arent burning through a lot of carbohydrates. The end result? A rise in unwanted body fat, especially around the lower back and midsection.
The basics of our lean-mass meal plan sum up what youve just learned. As far as portion size goes, the diet delivers a roughly equal amount of protein and carbs for most meals. Youll eat six times per day to supply your body with critical nutrients, especially aminos, for driving muscle growth, and meal timing focuses around workouts and time of day. On training days, you get to eat more carbs overall and your post-workout meal is loaded with themthe meal plan on page 3 includes 177g of carbs after training. Try this at another time of day and it could lead to fat gain here it will spur muscle growth.
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George Rudy
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Understanding Tdee & Bodybuilding
As mentioned, a well-structured meal plan needs to create a calorie surplus. It comes down to energy balance: calories in vs. calories out. Everyone has a different total daily energy expenditure based on body size and activity level.
The first step in creating an effective meal plan is figuring out your TDEE. Once you find your TDEE, the next step is adding calories to create a surplus. When you’re bulking, weight gain and building muscle are your goals. How many calories depends on where you are in your lifting journey.
If you are just starting out and about to take on a beginner Olympic weightlifting program , you have more potential muscle to gain, and you can be more aggressive with calorie intake. On the other hand, intermediate and advanced lifters can’t build muscle as quickly. Therefore they don’t need as many additional calories.
For a beginner, gaining 1-1.5% body weight per month is a great goal. Calorie-wise, 15-20% above maintenance is a good starting point. For intermediate and advanced lifters, gaining .5-1% body weight per month is more realistic.
If you have been training for over five years and are fit enough to handle a 6-day split or even a 7-day workout split, stay on the low side of that range. Advanced and intermediate lifters should add 5% of calories on the low end and 15% above maintenance on the high end. Setting calories more aggressive than this would lead to unnecessary fat gain.
Fats: Quality Not Quantity
In addition to carbohydrates and proteins, a good supply of healthy fats plays an important role in a muscle building diet.
Certain body functions like the release of testosterone and hormone production require valuable fatty acids.
Unsaturated fatty acids from plant oils , fish , avocado and walnuts are ideal.
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The Big Bulking Mistake
You see, the way most people approach bulking is by eating a ton of calories and gaining a bunch of weight really fast.
Advice like you gotta eat big to get big or eat whatever isnt nailed down is common. As are guidelines to gain a whopping 1-2lbs per week or an insane 25lbs in 25 days.
And the thinking behind it all is essentially this: the faster youre gaining weight, the faster youre gaining muscle.
Which sounds great, except for the fact that its not actually true.
In reality, weight gain can happen fast, but muscle growth cannot.
Why? Because
There is a limit to the amount of muscle each person can gain and the speed at which they can gain it. These limits are predetermined by factors like genetics, age and gender, as well as our experience level and the amount of muscle were still capable of gaining. These limits are set in stone and cannot be changed .
Which is why if you attempt to exceed these limits and gain weight faster, the excess weight being gained will always be body fat, NOT additional muscle.
Its also why eating more calories and nutrients than your body can actually put toward the muscle building process will never actually lead to more muscle being built. It will only lead to more body fat being gained.
But yet this is how most people approach bulking. Ive been there and done it myself. Its one of dumbest mistakes Ive made, and Ive made it more than once. Why? Because I thought it was the best way to do things.
It wasnt.
Tips To Build Muscle Without Increasing Fat
Building muscles and maintaining or even reducing your current body fat is possible. All it takes is sticking to the right tips and plan.
Your diet is going to be different from every other person. But besides diet and food in general, there are things that will guide you to make the right decision.
So, if you are just hitting the gym for strength training and wondering how you could build muscle without gaining more fat, these tips should guide you even if you stick to your bulking meal plan.
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What Is A Vegan Bodybuilding Diet
Bodybuilders strive to develop their musculature through intensive resistance training for aesthetic purposes.
Nutrition plays a key role in the process of muscular development. Its generally accepted that for optimal muscle growth to occur, protein intake should be rather high at around 0.71.0 grams per pound of body weight per day .
A calorie surplus of 1020% is also beneficial for gaining muscle mass, especially for those who are not brand new to training .
Traditional bodybuilding diets include a lot of animal source foods due to their high protein and calorie content.
The vegan bodybuilding diet is devoid of all animal products and higher in protein than traditional vegan diets .
This presents a challenge for bodybuilders following a vegan diet, as plant-based proteins tend to be of lower quality than their animal-based counterparts, which can affect muscle gain .
Therefore, it takes careful planning to ensure sufficient intake of protein, calories, and several micronutrients that a vegan diet may lack.
The vegan bodybuilding diet also changes during different stages of a bodybuilders life, such as whether theyre in their off-season or undergoing contest preparation, when fat loss is common.
Summary
The vegan bodybuilding diet is high in fruits, vegetables, and plant-based protein. It excludes all animal-based products and is usually higher in protein than a traditional vegan diet.
Do You Need A Meal Plan To Gain Muscle Mass
It may surprise you, but you do not need a specific meal plan to gain muscle. The most crucial factor for building muscle is a caloric surplus. A caloric surplus is when you consume more calories than your body requires to maintain weight.
We will go over this more in-depth in the section on TDEE. After calories, the next most important factor is protein intake. Protein is used for repairing and synthesizing new muscle tissue. As long as your diet has adequate calories and protein, it can effectively build muscle.
Now, wed love to say thats the end of it, but it’s not always that simple.
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Try Protein Shake Recipes
Combine your favorite ingredients with protein powder to create refreshing, delicious protein shakes for muscle building.
Blend the following ingredients together to create a custom-made protein smoothie:
- 1 1/2 2 cups of milk or plant milk
- 1 scoop of protein powder
- 1/4 cup of fruit OR 1 teaspoon of nut butter OR coffee OR matcha green tea powder
- A handful of ice
Use this basic protein shake recipe but plugin ingredients of your choice based on your taste preferences.
When using protein shakes for weight loss, drink them as meal replacements or consume smaller shakes between meals.
Rule Number : Pre & Post
Your energy reserves need constant replenishment before and after exercise to give you enough energy during your workout and after.
Pre-workout meal: A pre-workout meal should consist of complex carbohydrates and protein.
A combination of 300g of quark with 100g of berries about 1 hour before your workout is ideal.
This equates to about 250 kcal, 2g fat, 21g carbohydrates and 37g protein. A quick alternative is a protein shake with whey protein and a banana.
Post-workout meal: After your workout, your energy stores need quick and effective replenishment to prevent nutrient deficiencies and loss of muscle mass.
Your body needs a sufficient supply of protein and fast carbohydrates within 30 minutes of completing a workout.
Post-workout meals like a homemade shake made of quark, bananas and milk, offer a quick supply of energy.
A protein shake with fruit juice and a banana is a suitable alternative.
Another meal 60-90 minutes after exercising is a good idea if you are on a protein-rich muscle building diet.
This meal should consist of high-quality protein sources like low-fat fish, meat or egg whites, as well as complex carbohydrates from whole wheat pasta, potatoes or oatmeal, etc.
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The Ectomorph Body Type/hard Gainer
Training: The focus should be on weight training, because calorie consumption is very high during endurance training.
Ideally, this body type should concentrate on increasing muscle mass and flexibility. However, caution is advised. Ectomorphs become over exercised very quickly.
Nutrition: Carbohydrate-heavy nutrition. A calorie surplus is needed to build mass.
The diet should consist of plenty of protein and good fats, and plenty of fruit and vegetables. Make sure to drink plenty of fluids, too.
