How many calories should I be eating if I want to gain muscle?

How many calories should I be eating if I want to gain muscle?

Aug 9, 2024 mindpump

In order to optimize gains you want to make sure you have a sound workout program and possibly more importantly, a proper nutrition protocol to go with it. How many calories should you consume to achieve your goals effectively? To establish a baseline, it is important to understand what intake you need to consume to facilitate muscle growth.

Find Your Maintenance

You can get fancy and calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). Rather than plugging all those numbers in you can use our calculator. If you want to go a step even lazier, generally speaking you can multiply your bodyweight times 10-13 if you are lower activity and 14-16 if you are very active (training for an hour or more each day). Ultimately you would need to test this over a couple weeks as no method is 100% accurate. This will help dial in that number.

Get Into a Surplus

If you really want to optimize growth, you need to be in a surplus. That is 200-500 calories above whatever your maintenance is. It doesn’t require much so if you are worried about putting on too much excess fat, start on the lower side and increase as needed. All you need is a slight surplus to ensure you are getting more than enough calories to repair, recover, and grow after your workouts.

Protein Intake

The general recommendation is 1 gram per pound of body weight. The exact science calculation is .82g per pound. If you are on the heavier side aim for 1 gram per pound of goal bodyweight. Aim for high quality sources of protein like chicken, fish, meat, eggs, dairy, legumes, tofu and tempeh. The more animal based meats have a higher amino acid profile for muscle building. That is, per 100g of food weight, more of that protein goes towards muscle building.

Carbs and Fats

There isn’t an exact recommendation on how to spread the remaining macros out. I always say play around with it to see what gives you the best energy in the gym and results outside of it. Some people do better on higher fat, lower carb and some do better on the reverse. Opt for carbohydrate sources like whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and get your fats from avocados, nuts, seeds, and olive oil.

Test and Adjust

Just remember these are simply baselines. No matter how precise you try to get, you will likely have to adjust week to week. Your activity level, workout intensity, and a host of other factors can change week to week requiring different intakes. I generally recommend weighing every day if you want to see overall trends. If you do not want to track then I recommend going by how you feel, and if your strength is going up in the gym. As long as it is going up, and you feel good, you are probably in the perfect zone. If you find yourself getting too soft (gaining more than 1lb per week), or not seeing any progress, you may need to remove or add calories.

Consistency

Building muscle takes time. No matter how hard you want to lift, or how quick you want the results, you can’t speed up muscle growth. Your genetic rate of gain is what it is. Beginners will put on muscle faster. As you gain more experience in the gym (5+ years of lifting) your rate of gain may slow down to only a couple pounds of muscle a year. Control what you can focus on. Make sure you are in a surplus, lifting regularly, and progressively overloading week after week. Don’t worry about perfection and you will find you can put on a decent amount of size in just a couple years.