subject: Gain Muscle, Not Fat! 3 Key Tips for Training and Nutrition [print this page] Gain Muscle, Not Fat! 3 Key Tips for Training and Nutrition
If you're trying to build musce mass, you may be worried about the body fat gain that sometimes comes with eating big. It's a common mistake for beginner bodybuilders to eat wrong and train wrong so that they end up gaining more fat than muscle. To gain muscle, not fat, you'll have to be spot-on with both your dietary discipline and your training intensity.
You can learn exactly how to train with weights, eat the right foods, and take the right supplements to gain tons of muscle mass in record time, or you can read on to discover the 3 top tips for your training and nutrition.
1. Time Your Carbs and Fats
When it comes to muscle building nutrition, pretty much everyone understands that you need tons of protein to grow optimally, and that you need to eat it all day long over 5-6 meals. The hard thing to do when you want to gain muscle, not fat is to figure out how to eat carbs and fats properly. You've got to eat them, since protein alone can't provide enough calories to grow!
The best way to eat carbs to gain muscle, not fat is to consume only complex carbohydrates from whole grains, potatoes, and other produce, and to eat them only for your first meal of the day and around your workout. Any other time and you are likely to store them as body fat. Likewise, it's best to eat healthy fats at all other times of the day to gain muscle, not fat.
2. Train Frequently
As you may already know, your muscles don't actually grow in the gym! They grow when you leave to eat and rest. The more often you can finish the cycle of training, eating, and recovering a muscle, the faster it will grow. Therefore, to gain muscle, not fat most efficiently, you should be training each muscle as frequently as possible. This will ensure a high likelihood that the extra nutrients you take in actually go towards building new muscle tissue.
3. Taper Your Calories
There are a lot of gimmicky bodybuilding diets out there that claim it's best to eat the brunt of your daily calories toward the end of the day. Some of these theories may have merit, but the vast majority of people who try to gain muscle, not fat get their best results by starting the day off with big meals and ending it with small meals. The more calories you put at the front of your day, the more likely they are to be used for energy and not stored as fat while you sleep.
