Thread: how many extra cals for muscle gain

to get bigger you need to eat in a calorie surplus, it's that simple. Eating a certain number of calories over maintenace is not going to make you gain muscle instead of fat, that is not how it works. If you over eat you gain weight. If you over eat, especially if you are eating clean foods, you can gain muscle but some fat is going to also come with it. If you over eat way over your caloric set point for maintenace then you have a great risk of adding more fat however if working out muscle will also come with it. So what to do?

Find out how many cals you need to maintain your current bodyweight. Once you do that the simply add some cals to put you into caloric surplus. Start small, maybe 200-500cals over amintenace and slowly, over a couple of weeks, continue to raise it up. Then once you have gained some size, maybe after 6 weeks, do a small cut and start to lower your cals slowly so that you can drop what ever body fat you have added. Juist go slow so that you don;t lose any of that muscle you put on.

Originally posted by HIC
1 lb fat is 3500 cals."

But how many cals in 1 lb muscle?

Somewhere between 600 and 800kcals, but it requires somewhere in the region of 2400kcals to synthesize 1lb of muscle.