Your Evidence Based Guide to Building Muscle (Part 7)

Nutrition and Recovery

Nutrition

Nutrition is probably the most important lifestyle factor to consider and discuss first. You have to eat enough to grow muscle, there is no way around it. If you are trying to gain muscle, that weight has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is the food you eat. While it is possible for beginners and some intermediates to achieve body recomposition, where you gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time, the best gains will come from being in a small calorie surplus, meaning you are eating slightly more food than necessary to maintain your body weight. There is so much debate on exactly what that number is, but somewhere in the range of 250-500 calories a day is thought to be the sweet spot for gaining muscle effectively without gaining too much body fat. This would mean gaining anywhere from a half pound to a pound a week. In this process, it is inevitable that you gain some body fat. But building muscle is slow, and hard, whereas with proper diet and lifestyle factors under control losing weight can go quite quickly. You could spend 6 months in a surplus gaining muscle, and then spend 6 weeks losing the body fat you gained while retaining all the muscle. Do that 3 or 4 times and you can look like a completely different person. How do I know if I’m eating enough? The scale is your best guide here. If you aren’t gaining weight, you’re not in a calorie surplus, and you need to eat more. If you’re gaining weight too quickly, dial back your calories a bit. 

What types of foods should I eat? We have to make sure we are eating enough protein to provide the raw materials from which the muscle will be built, and enough carbs to fuel our workouts effectively. Generally, a pound of protein per gram of lean body mass is about the upper limit to what you can benefit from protein wise. For carbs and fats you can distribute these how you like, assuming equal calories. If you feel like you can perform well and don’t run out of energy midway through your workouts then you’re eating enough carbs. 

It’s hard to overstate how important nutrition is. While this section is quite small, it could be five times the size. Outside of training, your nutrition is probably the biggest factor for how much muscle you can add. You can train for years and get much stronger, but unless you are eating enough you won’t get bigger. 

Recovery 

Recovery is the other absolutely essential factor to consider as part of a program focused on building muscle. Recovery, from a muscle building perspective, really has to do with your performance at the end of the day While there is nothing inherently wrong with training a sore muscle, if you are consistently incredibly sore, you are probably training too much. If you are feeling consistently tired and beat up as a result of your training, or having moderate to severe joint pain you are probably just overtraining. But at the end of the day, a lot of the subjective factors we associate with recovery are not necessarily great metrics to base your training off of. Many popular recovery algorithms like Oura or Whoop are not designed for muscle building training. The best metric is simply your performance. If you are able to consistently improve your performance week after week, and you feel good doing so, you are recovering effectively. If not, then we need to look more closely at your program. 

If we feel consistently overtrained, the best thing to do is simply train a little bit less. We can reduce the amount of sets we are doing per workout, the frequency of our workouts, or the intensity. It is important to note that the factors we can control outside of the gym are few and not sexy. Compression, ice baths, sauna, massage guns, foam rolling, stretching have all been shown to be ineffective at speeding up the rate of recovery. What really matters is getting good quality sleep, eating enough food, specifically carbs and protein, and doing our best to manage life stressors as well as possible. It may be worth looking at your lifestyle through this lens and trying to identify which areas are possible to improve if we are struggling with our recovery. If we can improve our ability to tolerate more training, all else being equal, we will make better gains. Realistically, this is often impossible for most people living hectic lives. That’s ok. Acknowledging where the bounds of how much we want to dedicate to the gym is important.