This is how to gain muscle
without gaining fat.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismastrjohnphd.com, and this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the
name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we have a
question from Christopher shown on the
screen. Christopher asks, "How do I build
muscle without getting fat, starting from
a healthy ideal weight, that is, after
having lost fat for metabolic health?"
If you've recently lost fat for your
metabolic health, then your goal if you
want to gain muscle is to gain muscle
without gaining any of that fat back, and
what that means is that you need a
caloric surplus that is gentle enough
that it does not exceed what you can use
for muscle growth because any leftover
would get stored as fat. But you need the
caloric surplus if you want to optimize
for muscle growth. The principles
providing muscle growth are the same
principles that protect muscles during
fat loss, which we talked about in a
previous episode. The only difference is
that during fat loss, we had a caloric
deficit. During optimizing for muscle
growth, we have a caloric surplus. So the
three principles are: Number one, provide
an exercise routine that has a
sufficient anabolic stimulus.
Number two, get enough protein.
Number three, get the right gentle caloric surplus.
In terms of the exercise routine,
you want to get into the gym
at least three sessions a week.
Three sessions of a full-body
routine is the best way to save time, but
if you're going four sessions or more, you
can break your full-body routine up into
different body parts. So for example, you
could do two upper body, two lower body
days or something like that if you're
doing four workouts. But you want to
get at least three one-hour sessions in.
When you're in the gym, you want to do a
mix of strength training at complex
movements, such as squats and deadlifts
with long rest periods, where your focus
is on completing the movement correctly,
and you're doing fairly low reps, so 4, 5, or 6 reps
with 3 or 4 minutes rest between sets.
That optimizes for mechanical tension. It's
good for your body to get that strength
training in, but also to be able to
optimize for the mechanical tension is
one stimulus that helps you grow your
muscles. It's good to get the diversity
of rep ranges, and it's good also to get
in sets where you're having low rest so
you can maximize metabolic stress, which
is a different stimulus for muscle
growth. And having a diversity of rep
ranges also helps target different types
of muscle fibers and probably is better
for total muscle growth. So in addition
to the strength training, also include
rep ranges around ten reps per set and
rep ranges around 15 reps per set, and in
those sets, try to reduce your rest time
to 40 seconds or so, and in those
exercises, focus less on completing the
movement and more on the mind-muscle
connection, making sure that you're
always throughout the entire exercise
feeling the muscle and that you're
squeezing and that you're holding it at
the end to really flex and feel whatever
muscle you're trying to target.
That's the exercise routine. Number two
is the protein. Estimate where you want
to be at the end of three or six months
or whatever you're going to use as your target to hit your goal.
Then take that and eat one gram of
protein per pound of body weight.
It's okay to go higher providing you don't
have any negative, like you know, negative
symptoms in response to eating more
protein. If you don't feel well
when you eat that much protein, you can
cut back a little bit. But ideally you
want to at least hit a gram of protein
per pound of target body weight.
Then number three, you want to provide a
gentle caloric excess. I would start with
100 calories per day over what
you're eating to maintain your weight.
But you can test this because
if you have measures of body fat, you may
have a bioimpedance scale at home, I would
at least use waist circumference, keeping
in mind that your waist circumference
can be affected by holding water or
bloating or other things
like that. But if you measure
consistently, your waist circumference is
a pretty good indicator of the amount of
fat you're holding in your
abdominal region. So if you can verify
that your waist circumference is not
consistently increasing and to whatever
extent you have access to other measures
of body fat you can verify, you can
corroborate that your body fat is not
increasing, then you can start to push
the caloric surplus a little bit higher
and go as high as your body seems to
tolerate without gaining that fat. But if
it's really important to you
to hold on to your fat loss gains, then you
really want to do this slowly
and gently so that you don't overshoot.
If you do overshoot, start cutting back
to the surplus that you can maintain
over time that does not produce
any fat gain for you. Now, where should that
caloric surplus come from? Well, the
easiest thing to turn into muscle is
protein, and you never really know
whether the protein that you're eating
is actually the protein load that would
maximally support muscle gain given the
anabolic stimulus that you have. So the
safest thing to add is protein. If you're
trying to add 100 calories, add 100
calories of a protein-rich food.
If you're trying to see if you can push
that to 200, add 200 calories of a
protein-rich food. If you have to use
something else, it's better to use
carbohydrate than fat because fat is
most easily turned into fat. Carbohydrate
is more easily—most easily stored as
glycogen. Carbohydrate is somewhat
protein-sparing more than fat is. But the
safest thing to add in this context is
the caloric surplus entirely as a
protein-based food.
The audio of this episode was enhanced
and post-processed by Bob Davodian of
Taurean Mixing. You can find more of his
work at taureanonlinemixing.com.
This episode is brought to you by
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. This has been
Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.