How To Gain Muscle

Have you ever wondered how to gain muscle effectively?

One of the most common questions that is asked in the fitness industry is how to gain muscle.

Gaining muscle is not the same as gaining weight and trying to gain pure muscle is a hard endeavour.

When it comes to gaining muscle there are multiple different factors that need to come into consideration.

Today,  I’m going to share with you what to focus one.

Here are my Top 3 tips for how to gain muscle

To gain muscle mass you need to give your body the energy and nutrients required to do so. 

This means you have to eat more than you’re burning on a daily basis. 

Your  body’s main priority is not to gain muscle mass so it needs a reason. 

When you eat food your body will break down that food and use it for it’s main functions first and then whatever calories are leftover will then be distributed to “luxuries”. Gaining muscle mass is one of those luxuries.

The calorie surplus you want to start off with is going to be about 10% above your maintenance calories. The reason this number has been chosen is because it’s personalised based on your size and calorie consumption.

That means if you’re eating 2000 calories a day, bump up your daily calories to 2200.

There’s no point being in a calorie surplus if you’re not giving your body the stimulus it needs to gain muscle.

Having stimulus means that you are training hard and consistently in the gym.

This means that each time you’re in the gym you’re aiming to push a little bit harder than last week. This is known as progressive overload.

You can progressively overload by increasing the amount of reps you do, the amount of weight you lift or the sets you do for an exercise.

If you can bench press 60kg for 10 reps for three sets, your goal the following week should be either to increase the reps, the weight or the sets to add more total work load.

Your training should be improving each week and you should be pushing a little harder every time to give your body a reason to grow.

You can slam yourself as much as you want in the gym and you can eat in a surplus but if you aren’t recovering you’re limiting your muscle gains.

When you’re in the gym and training you’re breaking down muscle and the recovery part comes in the hours after training.

Making sure that you get enough sleep is crucial for muscle gains.

When you don’t focus on recovery you’re impeding the growth you could be making because you’re too sore from training or the muscle hasn’t fully recovered yet.

You need to make sure you’re getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night, every night.

This also means you need to be eating ENOUGH like we covered in the first tip to recover and grow from your training session.

Here is a video and podcast that I recorded with Anita Baz explaining to you exactly how to have a successful gaining phase.