Muscle-Building New Year's Resolutions: Part One

 Muscle-Building Resolutions: 
Part One - Eating for Mass

Garrett Sloan takes his muscle-building diet serious, and the results show.

     It is, once again, the start of a new year, the time of year—the only time it seems—when the majority of people (at least here in America) make some “serious” resolutions, which usually involves either kicking a habit or getting in better shape.  Typically, “losing weight” is the New Year’s resolutions’ raison d’etre.  But “losing weight” is really no better of a resolution than “gaining weight” if you’re a bodybuilder or strength athlete.  In other words, it’s just too damn vague.

     I thought this week and the next, I would post a few “resolutions” articles.  This one, quite obviously, is for those of you with the resolution to get big, or get jacked, or get massive, or, well, you get the point.  This one is all about building mass for the new year, with the emphasis on developing the proper eating habits for mass-gaining.  The second one that I will do later in the week, or early next week, will be on the training aspects of mass-building.  And, lastly, I will do a post on fat-loss to round them out.

     Bodybuilders and lifters are unique in that they are one of the few subsets of the American population that actually want to get bigger, but, of course, do it in the “right way.”  So here are a couple tips to make your mass-building goals for the new year come true through diet.

Tip #1: Eat some Damn Food

     The first one should be obvious, but you wouldn’t imagine the number of emails that I’ve received over the years from readers asking what was wrong with their mass-building program, only to find that a lot of them weren’t even tracking their caloric intake, or were only eating one or two meals-per-day.  Now, granted, most of this was just from the fact that they didn’t know better because of how new they were to the entire muscle-building “cosmology” of methods, but others were obviously knowledgeable enough about nutrition that they should have known better.  I’ve had folks tell me that they just couldn’t understand why they weren’t gaining muscle while following the Warrior Diet (intermittent fasting’s original diet) or while following a low-carb ketogenic diet (more on carbs shortly).  But the truth is that no one is going to gain an appreciable amount of muscle—or any at all—without eating a lot of food.

     If you’re trying to gain muscle mass, eat at least 15x your bodyweight in calories on a daily basis.  Space those calories evenly throughout the day, so that you are remaining in a constant “anabolic” state.  This means that, if you’re 150 lbs, you need to at least eat 2,250 calories each day to ensure you’re gaining muscle.  Space your meals out over 4 or 5 meals so that you are consuming around 450 to 550 calories at each meal.  Do this consistently and, as long as your training is in order, you’ll begin to see some muscle-building results.

     Even better is if you can eat upwards of 20x your bodyweight in calories on a daily basis, just make sure you’re not eating “junk.”  The more you CAN eat, the better.  But don’t force it.  Just slowly add calories and you’ll get there.

Tip #2: Eat Some Carbs

     Carbs are not your enemy when it comes to building muscle mass; carbs are your friend.  The best way to think of carbs is as an energy source, which they most assuredly are.  The more you train, and just move in general, then the more carbs that you need.

     For the same reason that carbs can be bad when trying to lose body fat (more on that in my follow-up piece on fat loss), they are necessary when trying to gain weight.  As just mentioned, carbs are your body’s primary source of fuel, and if you don’t give your body its primary source of fuel, it will find other sources to pull from, generally fat but also muscle mass.

     Make sure you’re eating enough carbs so that you are in an energy expenditure surplus, which means that you also need to expend fewer calories than you consume.  If you’re a hardgainer, and you really want to get big quick, don’t make it too complicated.  We’re great at complicating things in our modern age, whether it’s training or nutrition (or almost anything else, for that matter).  But getting big really shouldn’t be too complicated.  Here’s a diet from the book “Super Squats” (published in 1989, but based on the diets and programs of old-school lifters from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s) that is still just as effective as any other crap out there today:

7AM - Breakfast

 3 eggs

1 piece toast

1 glass milk

9:30AM - Snack

½ sandwich (meat)

1 glass of milk

12PM - Lunch

1 sandwich (meat)

1 sandwich (cheese)

1 glass of milk

1 piece fruit (banana, apple, etc.)

3PM - Snack

1 egg

1 slice cheese

1 glass of milk

6PM - Supper

¾ pound of meat

2 vegetables

2 glasses of milk

1 piece of fruit

9PM - Snack

¼ pound of cheese

2 glasses of milk

     According to the book, this diet provides approximately 4,500 to 5,000 calories (depending upon type of meat, type of fruit, etc.) and around 250 grams of protein.  Here’s some additional advice that Strossen gave in the book when embarking on such an eating regimen: 

     The size of your meals, along with the size and frequency of your snacks, depends on how heavy you are to start with and how quickly you would like to gain weight.  You might begin with three basic meals, the milk, and one snack.  If your weight gains aren’t satisfactory, increase your milk consumption and your number of snacks.  For both your meals and your snacks, stick with basic, wholesome foods… If you focus on healthful food, rather than viewing this as an excuse just to pig out on junk, you will look and feel much better as a result.

     If you really struggle with gaining weight because you have a hard time eating enough food, make sure you’re getting enough carbohydrates first and foremost, then follow this up with making sure you’re getting enough protein and fat.  If you really struggle with getting enough carbs, and overall calories, then try one of these mass-gaining shakes.  I actually wrote a recipe for these two shakes almost 30 years ago, in a 1995 issue of IronMan entitled “Raw Mass: Your Guide to Getting Huge and Strong.”  Here they are:

The Strawberry Bomber

16 ounces milk

½ cup nonfat milk powder

½ cup fresh strawberries

½ cup vanilla ice cream

Vanilla Protein Drink

16 ounces milk

2 eggs

½ cup nonfat milk powder

1 banana

½ cup vanilla ice cream

     Both of these easy-to-make drinks have around 80 grams of protein and between 1,000 to 1,100 calories.  They’re good examples of the sort of mass-gaining shakes you can create even if you’re on a limited budget, or simply don’t have time to make one of your meals.  If you have trouble getting them down at first, then simply split the drinks in half.  Drink ½ of the shake, and wait a couple of hours, and have the other half—an easy replacement for two meals.

     This should be enough on nutrition.  When focused on getting BIG, don’t make your dietary regimen too difficult.  Keep it simple.  Get enough calories spaced evenly throughout the day, and get enough carbs so that your body won’t try to pull on muscle for extra energy.  Make sure you get enough protein, about 1 gram per pound of bodyweight, which won’t be a problem if you take the other advice, or follow a similar diet as the one above.

     In a few days, I will release Part Two, with some advice on training for muscle mass.

Sources

“Super Squats: How to Gain 30 Pounds of Muscle in 6 Weeks,” by Randall J. Strossen, Ph.D., published by Iron Mind Enterprises, copyright 1989

“Raw Mass: Your Guide to Getting Huge and Strong,” by C.S. Sloan, published in the December, 1995 issue of IronMan Magazine