MUSCLE GAIN & PERFORMANCE

This week we’re looking at gaining muscle and performance increase.

This program has mainly been about fat loss and health.

Now we’re getting to the final weeks, you may be thinking about longer-term goals after you’ve hit your body fat targets.

Building muscle to shape your body into something you’re proud of and focusing on fueling your body to perform at its best.

Fitter, faster, stronger, and leaner!

This section of the program is something you’ll likely want to visit after you have reached your fat loss target.

In my opinion that should take priority before starting this phase.

MUSCLE GAIN & PERFORMANCE

Being in a calorie deficit is key to fat loss.

For muscle gain/performance, we want a small surplus.

Don’t fall into the trap of going HAM on your food intake thinking it will net you more muscle, it won’t.

All that excess food will turn into body fat.

Step 1:

Training - You must give your body enough stimulus to gain muscle through resistance training and progressively increase this stimulus as the months/years go by.

Focusing on Strength days/movements rather than long aerobic days as an example will be beneficial.

It’s hard to gauge true muscle gain on a weekly/monthly basis so I recommend you focus on getting stronger as a short-term outcome to track as well as continuing with weight, photos, measurements, and clothing fit.

Step 2:

Maintenance Phase - Find your maintenance calories (the amount to keep you at a steady weight, with no gain or loss).

This will be different for everyone, you can find tons of calculators online that can help guesstimate.

However, you have just been in a fat loss phase and know for a fact how many calories it takes for you to lose weight.

You may be better off simply adding 300-500 calories to this number and monitoring your weight over 2 weeks.

You will likely have an initial increase of 1-2kg but then stabilise after a few days. This is your maintenance.

Step 3:

Gaining Phase - After 2 weeks you will now go into your gaining phase by adding 100-300 calories to your maintenance.

Monitor this using the chart below for 2 weeks.

You will now play the game to see how your body reacts until you find a sweet spot.

Note that if you go faster than this, the weight you are putting on will probably be proportionately more body fat.

Protein intake is important to make sure you’re giving your body the building blocks to synthesize muscle tissue.

Head on back to the Protein section of the course to make sure you’re hitting these targets.