To gain weight without gaining fat
Stop swimming in fat while working on a set of weights! Learn how to approach your diet and achieve fantastic muscle growth without the side effects of useless fats.
Every bodybuilder wants to be big. Unfortunately, the desperate desire to gain the cherished muscle pounds often leads to overeating and ends up safely gaining weight, but not muscle, and fat. It is clear that this strategy is not successful. If you really want to be first in the next tournament, you should start preparing for it in the off-season.
Your task is to achieve the maximum possible increase in muscle mass with a minimum accumulation of fat, because the option "to lose an extra 20 kg before the competition", in fact, is not an option at all. To get rid of unnecessary burdens, you will have to reduce the caloric content of the diet too sharply and for a long time, and this will inevitably lead to the loss of muscles earned by hard work. Moreover, most likely, before the competition, you will not be able to lose all 20 kg, because this will require sitting on such a painful and prolonged diet, which will go through your metabolism like a natural disaster.
But sometimes even the best intentions (to stay in shape during the off-season) do not save us from gaining fat kilograms. So is this mission at all feasible – to achieve maximum muscle gain and not get fat? The answer is YES!
The problem has a simple solution-reducing the caloric content of food. But many representatives of competitive bodybuilding do not limit themselves in calories during the off-season, because they are afraid of slowing down the "fantastic" progress. Here it should be noted that the mantra "if you want to become big, you must eat a lot" often becomes an excuse for gluttony, and much less often – a truly effective method of gaining muscle mass. Of course, the fear of slowing down progress has a right to exist, because a drastic and prolonged restriction of calories really affects the weight gain negatively. But to keep fat under control, we still have to cut the energy value of the diet.
I'm not talking about switching to a draconian diet, which we adhere to during the preparation for competitions. I only recommend that you include in your program systematic and carefully planned periods of lifting and lowering the caloric content of the diet, which will not hinder progress and at the same time minimize the accumulation of fat.
Let's digress a little and talk about hormones. You've probably noticed that the first weeks of dieting are both the easiest and most effective. You can easily get rid of fat, maintain strength indicators and do not lose muscle mass. All because with a sufficient supply of carbohydrates and calories, hormones are actively produced that are responsible for burning fat. One of these hormones is Triiodothyronine.
Triiodothyronine is a thyroid hormone that is involved in maintaining a constant body temperature and helps cells use carbohydrates and food calories to generate energy and heat. In other words, with a high concentration of Triiodothyronine, calories are less likely to be stored as fat and more likely to be used as an energy source. When the caloric content of the diet is limited for a long time, the body tries to store energy: the level of Triiodothyronine decreases, and much less calories are used for fuel needs. This is why athletes who follow a restrictive diet before competitions often complain that they are cold.
Leptin is another hormone involved in regulating energy metabolism. Leptin increases thermogenesis by activating the sympathetic nervous system. In addition, this hormone interacts with the centers of the brain and affects eating behavior. If the concentration of leptin in the plasma is high, the body knows that it has enough energy, and there is no need to consume additional calories. By the way, it is a high level of leptin that makes it easy to give up the "extra calories" that are trying to get into our well-thought-out diet. Although leptin secretion is largely determined by the volume of adipose tissue, we can influence this process through overeating and malnutrition!
The body does not immediately respond to a decrease in the caloric content of the diet, because it takes time to adjust the metabolic processes. In the first weeks of dieting, your metabolism is still working at full capacity against a background of consistently high secretion of Triiodothyronine and leptin. This allows you to lose weight quickly even without reducing the caloric content of your diet to an extremely low level. But after a couple of weeks, the body will come to its senses, adjust the metabolism, and maintain the same rate of weight loss will be very problematic.
If we are talking about a diet on the eve of a competition, we either continue to lose weight, but very slowly, or are forced to further reduce the caloric content of the diet. In the off-season, fat burning is not a priority. Your goal is to keep your weight under control and continue to gain muscle mass, so you can increase your caloric intake before your body makes any adjustments. Thus, you will kill two birds with one stone – you will not have to turn away from the path that leads to the muscle Eldorado, and at the same time you will be able to keep a set of fat mass in check.
Most bodybuilders are afraid of limiting the caloric content of the diet during the off-season, because this can negatively affect muscle growth, and the athlete will not be able to approach the next tournament fully equipped. But in fact, if you can stay slim during the off-season, you will be able to rise to the stage both more defined and more muscular. Why, you ask? Another secret is that when you briefly reduce the caloric content of the diet, you stimulate an additional release of anabolic hormones, in particular, testosterone and somatotropin.
Since the proportion of carbohydrates in the diet decreases slightly and for a short time, tissue sensitivity to insulin remains high. This means that during the reduction of caloric content of the diet, the body continues to actively spend fat reserves and directs calories to muscle growth. Moreover, reducing carbohydrate intake during these periods stimulates the secretion of growth hormone due to a drop in glucose concentration in the bloodstream. And once the calorie restriction is not too long and pronounced, you do not have to risk slowing down muscle growth. Using this approach, you only run the risk of gaining significantly more muscle mass by the time you go on stage.
It is proved that a radical restriction of the energy value of the diet slows down the production of somatotropin and testosterone, and at the same time provokes a significant increase in the breakdown of amino acids. But it is a radical restriction of calories that is a prerequisite for losing 20-25 kg of excess weight. If during the off-season you keep the weight within 10-12 kg of the competition, you can avoid such drastic measures, which means that you will still have all the muscles earned in the off-season.
Another reason why you should stay slim during the off – season is the secretion of growth hormone and testosterone. The production of these hormones is determined not only by the caloric content of the diet, but also by the amount of fat reserves in the body. A persistent increase in the volume of fat mass inhibits the secretion of somatotropin and testosterone, and for muscle building this is not the most optimistic scenario, right? Moreover, a significant increase in the percentage of fat reduces the number of testosterone receptors in the muscles. As a result, you not only lose the anabolic hormones responsible for muscle growth, but also deprive the existing hormones of half their effectiveness due to a decrease in the number of receptors in the target organs. This does not mean that if you are overweight, you can not build muscle mass, but the growth rate will be far from optimal.
So what should I do?
To make a proper nutrition plan during the off-season with periods of growth and decrease in calories, you first need to determine your level of balance. This is the caloric content of the diet, at which your weight remains stable. The intensity of metabolic processes is an individual value. Two people with the same physique may need different amounts of calories, and a trial-and-error method will help you determine your level of balance. Having determined the level of balance, you should increase the caloric content of the diet by about 400-600 calories.
For example, if a bodybuilder's balance level is at 2,800 calories, they should get between 3,200 and 3,400 calories a day. This will allow us to achieve stable, but not too fast growth. Stick to this caloric value for 2-3 weeks, and then reduce the caloric content of the diet by 400-600 calories below the balance level. In the same example, a bodybuilder who consumed 3,200 to 3,400 calories will now have to switch to 2,200 to 2,400 calories a day. A low-calorie diet should be followed for 1-2 weeks, after which you can return to the high-calorie option for the next 2-3 weeks. Repeat this cycle throughout the entire mass gain phase.
How to make a balanced diet?
You need to start by counting the protein and fat in the daily diet, when these nutrients are enough, the remaining calories are obtained using carbohydrates. To reduce the calorie content should be primarily at the expense of fats and carbohydrates, maintaining a consistently high protein intake. This ensures that your weight loss will not affect your muscle mass.
Errors in the diet should be kept to a minimum, otherwise the lion's share of time you will devote not to periods of growth, but to periods of drying. Of course, many will have to call on all their willpower to help, because it is very difficult to limit yourself when there is no urgent need, but this nutrition strategy is really worth it. And if you are desperate to win, you must experience it for yourself.
Champions are born in the off-season, and those who approach the off-season with full responsibility, it raises to the top. You can't change your genes or increase your training experience overnight, but there are two things that every bodybuilder can fully control:
1) how hard does he work
2) how well he does it.
By adhering to the proposed strategy, you will achieve an advantage in both categories.
