How to Build Muscle without Gaining Fat

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Yusuf Paterson

Nutritionist & Coach

Yusuf Paterson is our lifestyle and nutrition writer (and you may spot him working up a sweat in some of our product photography too!)

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How to build muscle without gaining fat
5 ottobre 2022 3 min read
How to Build Muscle without Gaining Fat

“How do I build muscle without gaining excessive fat” is one of the most common questions I get asked, second only to “how do I lose fat?”

First off, to build muscle you need to be eating at least a maintenance number of calories (the number of calories you need to maintain your current weight) or, ideally, a surplus number of calories.

Because you’ll be taking on additional calories, you will often find this leads to better gym performance and better recovery from your sessions, not to mention experiencing generally better mood or energy levels.

You might even find you become more fidgety (increased NEAT!) or talkative… all of these will burn additional calories. NEAT, if you don’t already know, is “non-exercise activity thermogenesis,” and basically describes the calories you burn just going about your everyday life – breathing, moving, cleaning, cooking etc.

Lean muscly man

Finding the Right Balance When Gaining Muscle Without Gaining Fat

So, how do you find what works for you? In some cases, I have had clients where their predicted maintenance calories are 2700, but they’ve been able to eat 3500 calories on a build while gaining hardly any weight.

To be honest, the fat loss question is much simpler. Fat loss, in simple terms, is your body using your body's fat stores for energy. If you are not replacing that energy with calories (energy!) from food and drink, then you should technically lose fat.

However, you should note: I said it's simple, not easy!

You might get hungry due to the low calories and in some cases, depending on how your body adapts, the fat loss can be slow. But generally, with fat loss, you can reach your goal in a reasonable time frame.

Nevertheless, gaining muscle requires us to use calories and turn them into lean, contracting muscle tissue on either the quads or biceps for example. But simply eating more calories doesn’t just turn extra calories into muscle. There is a lot more at play…

You need to have the right stimulus for training, adequate recovery, genetics, and a lot more other stuff for this to take place.

With fat loss, losing 1% BW per week can be quite realistic. However, increasing 1% of BW, especially with muscle, is very unrealistic. Unless you are juiced up to your eyeballs - and even that will be some going to gain that much that fast!

Squatting at a gym

So how do you Get it Right?

The most common mistake people make is that they do not respect how slow a process the building of muscle is compared to fat loss. And, frustratingly for many, increasing your calories week on week in the process of wanting to build muscle often leads to fat gain.

This is something you should look to limit because you will eventually need to lose an excessive amount of fat whilst trying not to lose any of the muscle that you’ve gained!

But it can be frustrating when you are eating all of these additional calories and your weight is staying the same…

So rather than just being focused on the scales, focus on the other factors at play.

How do you feel? How is your mood? How is your gym performance? Are you feeling strong? Are your numbers going in the right direction? Are you recovering well?

If the answer to those is yes, then don’t just keep increasing the calories. Stay at these calories for a while, then once you feel like you’ve hit a plateau, it might be time to increase them again.

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