Ok, so you want to get huge?!
All you have to do is make it to the gym, crank out reps until you get a sick pump, head home and get on with the rest of your day, right? If bodybuilding were only that simple.
Nutrition plays a very large part of recovery, growth and general fitness and without it your body won’t put on any lean muscle mass.
So, if you want to be a true bodybuilder, you’re going to change your lifestyle and develop a muscle building meal plan.
Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds. We’ll give you the complete breakdown on how to determine your dietary needs to build a muscular physique.
Determining Calories for your Bodybuilding Diet
Bodybuilding diets are constantly changing due to the increase of your muscle mass as well as the changing difficulty in your workouts.
If you increase your muscle mass and/or the time you spend weight training, you have to eat more. If you lose muscle and/or if you lessen the intensity level of your training, you need to eat less.
So how do you know if you’re building or losing lean muscle mass?
You measure of course. There are two main means that would work very well. The first is the good ole scale that sits gathering dust in the corner of your bathroom. You should monitor your weight to see if your goal to build lean muscle is causing an increase in bodyweight.
If the scale shows that your weight is staying the same (or going down) then it’s time to look at your diet and make healthy changes to create a high calorie bodybuilding diet.
If your weight is increasing, is it muscle mass or fat mass? If your stomach is getting larger then you might be eating too much. You can expect to put on some bodyfat when trying to put build muscle (especially if you’re eating a high calorie diet), but you want to monitor to make sure that dreaded fat percentage isn’t increasing too much.
Another good tool to track your progress is a set of body fat calipers. Using calipers every two weeks will provide you an idea of exactly what is happening. If your lean body mass is going down, you might want to increase the amount of calories that you eat. On the contrary, if body fat is increasing, you might want to decrease your food consumption. Finding the sweet spot where you can gain muscle without fat is every bodybuilder’s dream.
All good gyms will have a set of calipers and as long as the same person does the measurements every time you should be able to get a true reading as to what exactly is happening. Once you have obtained the amount of total millimeters and your bodyweight, the chart that comes with the calipers will show what your bodyfat percentage is.
Now comes the clever bit. If you take your bodyweight in pounds and times it by the bodyfat percentage, then you will be able to figure out your total level of bodyfat. Then you subtract this number from the total bodyweight and that will give you a figure for your fat free mass. The figure is not all muscle (technically it includes internal organs, bones etc.) but we’ll use the figure as muscle for our calculations.
The two figures you have just worked out (total bodyfat and fat free mass) should be written down and kept. Then next time you have your measurements done you can compare the two and see if your bodyfat percentage has gone up.
You will find that if your food intake is right, then with proper amount of exercise, your fat free mass will go up and your total bodyfat will go down. But if you’re not eating enough, you will find that your fat free mass (muscle) is going down and your bodyfat goes up, which is definitely not what you want!
