Get Big Muscles: How to Gain Weight Fast By Eating Right

“How to get big muscles”

“How to gain weight fast”

“How to get ripped fast”

As hardgainers, these are the concerns we are obsessing with, day in and day out.

In order to achieve these goals, the 3 pillars a bodybuilder must master are Nutrition, Training and Mind Training (for motivation and focus). These are the things you need to get right in order to make the muscle gains you’re after.  There simply are no shortcuts or subtitutes to these.

What usually happens though is that many of us focus on our weight lifting routines, and when we don’t get the results as quickly as we want, we resort to downing bucketloads of weight gain pills, powder and weight gain supplements. Yes, the first aspect that always get sacrificed is proper nutrition – which is silly, because nutrition plays a huge part in determining our bodybuilding outcome.

In this article we’ll discuss just the Nutrition aspect of gaining muscle weight. If you’re more interested in the Training part, read “How to Get Muscles: The Basics of Building Muscle Mass”.

The principles I’ll discuss here are actually things I learned from Tom Venuto, author of  Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle. You can read my review of  this excellent bodybuilding resource here.

Get BIG Muscles by Eating Enough of the Right Foods

When it comes to nutrition, gaining muscle weight is simply a matter of eating food at the right frequency, of the right quality, and the right quantity. In other words, you need to achieve calorie surplus and consume the optimal macronutrient ratio appropriate to your body type and goal (right combination of Protein, Carbs and Fats).

For many hardgainers, the primary challenge is eating enough food to gain weight. If you’d been blessed (or cursed, whichever way you want to look at it) with a Ferrari-fast metabolism, you just have to accept that you need to eat a truckload of food everyday just to attain the calorie surplus you need to build muscles. If you’d been training hard and still hadn’t managed to put on weight, therein lies your answer.

Gaining weight is really as simple as consistently consuming more calories than you expend. As a general guideline, you will need about 3,500 calories to gain about 1 lb.

Possibly the best education resource I’ve found about Optimum Nutrition for Bodybuilders is Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto. There, Tom laid out a comprehensive step-by-step formula to determine a personalized calculation of:

• How many calories you need to consume per day in order to: maintain your weight / gain weight
• How to ensure you gain lean muscle weight -  NOT fat!  (using an ingenious trick used by the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models)

To help you determine how many calories you need to be consuming, I’m going to show you a couple of formulas.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)

BMR is the minimum level of energy required to keep the body functioning at rest.

A simple formula developed by Dr. Fred Hatfield of the International Sports Sciences Association is:

Men = 1 x [ Body weight (kg)] x 24

Women =  .9 x [Body weight (kg)] x 24

*1 kg = 2.2 lbs

This formula is best used if you don’t know your muscle to fat ratio (how much of your body is lean muscle and how much is fat). If you know your muscle mass percentage, another formula can be used but I won’t delve in too much detail here to keep things simple and to not overwhelm you.

Next you’ll need to determine your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, or TDEE.

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)

To get your TDEE you simply multiply your BMR with a number determined by how active you are:

Activity factor:
Sedentary =BMR X 1.2
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375
Moderately active = BMR X 1.55
Very active = BMR X 1. 725
Extremely active =BMR X 1.9

So if you’re male, 150 lbs., 25 years old and very active, your BMR will be 1636 calories and your TDEE will be 2823 calories.

If you’re female, 100 lbs., 25 years old and moderately active, your BMR will roughly be 981 calories and your TDEE will be 1521.

Note that these are just guidelines and estimations. There are other factors that will affect your calculations like your genetics, age and activity levels. That’s why you need to use these figures as baseline figures. You will still need to adjust, observe your results, tweak accordingly, and then do a trial an error until you hit what seem to be your optimal combinations.

What To Eat To Gain Weight?

To gain healthy weight, ideally you want to eat foods that are high both in nutrient density and energy density. This means you want foods that have more nutrients per calorie and more calories per gram.

Fat has more than twice the amount of calories per gram compared to protein and carbohydrates, (Fat has 9 calories per gram whereas Protein and Carbs contain 4 calories per gram) but beware, because you want to gain healthy weight, not gain body fat. So you must do a suitable bodybuilding weight training program as part of your healthy weight gain plan.

For a list of foods that are deemed best for weight gain by Nutritionists, click here.

How Much do I need to Eat to Gain Weight?

Now to gain weight, Tom Venuto advised that a good place to start is to eat 300 to 500 calories more than your TDEE. So if your TDEE is 2900 calories, then make sure you consume 3200 to 3400 calories everyday from now on. The best way is to experiment – eat X more calories, observe your results, then tweak accordingly. For example, if you started eating 350 more calories per day and still not putting on any weight, crank it up a bit. Similarly, if you notice that you are starting to gain fat and not muscle, then lower your calorie intake a bit and see what happens.  Obviously you’ll need to track your results and measure your body metrics regularly (weight, body measurements, body fat percentage), I’d say about once a week.

Now I know what your next question will be – “Are you saying I need to be calorie counting? (gasp)”

In a word – yes.

But don’t worry, you only need to do it initially, and you don’t have to do it right down to the exact number. Pretty soon you’ll know your calories and you won’t need meticulous calorie counting. Just think of the pay off!

I mentioned earlier that Tom revealed a super ingenious way to ensure you attain a calorie surplus needed to gain weight without gaining body fat. I will not reveal that here but here’s an excerpt of Tom Venuto‘s description about its effectiveness:

“Using these calorie guidelines, you can expect to gain muscular bodyweight at a rate of 1/2 to 1 lb. per week, or slightly slower if you are female. If two weeks go by and you haven’t gained any weight, you’re doing something wrong; most likely, you’re not eating enough and you should increase your calories. After 3 – 4 months, the rate of muscle gain tends to slow down closer to 1/2 pound per week. Eventually, as you get closer and closer to your genetic limit for carrying muscle mass, the rate of muscle gain will slow down to 1/4 lb per week. Even at this rate, that’s still 13 pounds of solid muscle per year.”

13 lbs. of muscle a year may not seem that much, but note again that your genetics will play a role in your results as well as other factors i’ve mentioned before.

As I said earlier, it’s not just about the calorie surplus. Your macronutrient ratio is another aspect of your nutrition that you need to educate yourself about, but that’s for another blog post! =)

Highly Recommended

Burn The Fat Feed the Muscle

Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is the most detailed book about Nutrition for Bodybuilders that I’ve ever read (and I’ve read loads!). After reading this, you honestly wouldn’t need to read another book on nutrition – it’s that comprehensive.

Empowered Nutrition Plan

If you want convenient, fast, easy meals that are great for bodybuilders without having to research, calculate and plan, here are done-for-you meal plans. All you need is follow instructions.

Vince DelMonte’s Empowered Nutrition Done-For-You Meal Plans will show you EXACTLY what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat it, how to cook it and exactly what to shop for.

You can easily tailor the meal combinations and portion sizes to suit your bodybuilding needs, whether you’re on the bulking phase or cutting (getting ripped) phase. These meal plans are for men and women who want to make their own healthy meals – without the hassles of meal planning.

If you find meal planning confusing, challenging and time-consuming, this ready made meal plans is the answer. I highly recommended you check it out now.