But it should. 500 calories a day either way and you’ve screwed up your diet. Calculating your caloric requirements is the first thing you do when you’re want to change your body composition. There’s no way around it. Three things are necessary to know when planning a sucessful diet.
Calorie intake vs. expenditure or energy balance (RMR, calorie cost of activity, TEF, and adaptive thermogenesis)
Once you’ve nailed this down (your maintenance level) then you can begin applying advanced techniques for building muscle with low fat gain, or conversely, losing fat without losing muscle - you can get into the other goodies as talked about in many of the posts above.
Meal combinations (combinations of foods you should eat and when you should eat them)
Your own physiological responses to nutrients (how is your insulin response? do you store fat easily?) What supplements will help make your physiological responses more favorable?
Kellyb pointed out that the number one reason he’s found that trainers don’t grow is lack of calories. I think it’s a combination of both lack of and too many calories - only with no consitancy (starve one day, eat too much another), and with no regards to the quality and timing of the foods they’re eating.
That’s an exaggeration of my statements. What I’m saying is that adequate protien is the first thing that absolutely has to be present in order to build muscle mass, because muscle tissue is manufactured from protien and not simply from “calories”.
Gee…here’s what I’ll do. I’m just gonna eat 1000 calories per day of tuna from now on. Since I’ll be getting 250 grams of protein and only 1000 calories per day I oughta “shred up” and “muscle up” right quick eh?
Obviously, to subsist on 250g of protien per day and nothing else would constitute an extreme circumstance. My argument is not intended to extend to ridiculous scenarios like this.
Show me one guy past the newbie stage who has gained a significant amount of muscle using this approach and I’ll show you 100 who haven’t. I can go into any gym and within minutes find 20 guys spending a minimum of $300 per month on supplements who think they can “repartition” their way to muscle gains and don’t.
Completely irrelevant- there many factors that contribute to muscle gains other than caloric intake. SUPPLEMENTS not being among the important ones.
The reason they don’t get results is because they’re afraid to eat.
How do you know this?
U]Excess[/u] fat gain isn’t necessary but additional calories are.
Those calories can come from the bodies own fat in some people, at least initially, but after that they gotta come from somewhere and if you don’t get them from your diet then what’s gonna happen? You’ll end up like 99% of the scrawny bastards in gyms everywhere who don’t gain because they’re afraid to eat in fear of putting on a few lbs of fat.
First of all, most people have more than enough bodyfat to supply the calories necessary for muscle growth- you’d become extremely lean before you ever ran out.
Secondly, and more importantly, building muscle does not require all that many extra calories! If that were true, then building mucle would result in a directly proportional increase in basal metabolic rate. We know that that building muscle does cause an increase in metabolic rate, but it is not that great of an increase - something in the neighborhood of a couple hundred calories per day. That’s nothing compared to the increases in caloric intake are typically suggested in the bodybuilding community.
The problem that I have with this is that it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to calculate your caloric requirements in the first place. Some people claim to be able to do it reasonably accurately, but I say bullshit. It’s impossible. Generally, people don’t calculate their caloric requirements at all; they simply pick an arbitrary round number that is either safely high enough or low enough.
Nobody said it was easy. That’s why people like Chad Nichols, Chris Aceto and Author L. Rea get paid to do it. But really it’s not rocket science.
RMR is easy to calculate - take your body fat percentage and multiply it by your body weight (kg). This will give you your fat mass (FM). Next simply subtract this number from your total weight and you’ll have your fat free mass (FFM).
RMR (in calories per day) = 500 + 22 x fat free mass (kg).
One difficult variable is Cost of Activity. Since it’s hard to determine just how many calories a person burns doing the multitude of exercises that are available. However can figure out your Cost of Activity without your workouts added (the only activity measured will be your everyday non-workout day activity)
Activity Factors:
1.2-1.3 for Very Light (doing nothing at all/sleeping)
1.5-1.6 for Light (sitting on your ass all day)
1.6-1.7 for Moderate (some activity during day)
1.9-2.1 for Heavy (hard labor)
So…
RMR x Activity Factor = calories from above x one of the numbers above = number of calories required to breathe and carry out an ordinary non-workout day
There are a number of metabolic equivalent exercise charts out there to figure out the calories you’d burn during a workout. Here’s the formula for that.
Cost of Exercise Activity = Body Mass (in kg) x Duration (in hours) x MET value (number associated with the type of exercise you’re performing)
You use this formula for each exercise session per day say you do weights in the morning and cardio later, you’d have two formulas to calculate.
So then we add this to the formula above
(RMR+Actvity Factor) + Cost of Exercise= Number of Calories per day you need to eat to maintain (if you didn’t eat)
So say we’re at, just to use any old number, 3500 calories. Now we have to figure out the TEF.
You can use these formulas to determine the number of calories the TEF burns.
TEF = RMR x 0.10 (1 gram per pound of bodyweight)
TEF = RMR x 0.15 (more than 1 gram per pound of bodyweight)
Add that number to your 3500 calories and voila - you have your daily calorie requirements.
Not hard is it?
The tricky part now is adjusting this number to compensate for physiological variables, so usually, the first few weeks are spend tweaking this number slightly to guage the response of your body. Supplements are also added at this point.
This number is basically your starting point. If you want to lose fat, you will lower this by the amount of fat calories you want to lose per week. Conversely if you’re looking to build muscle you begin to add calories.
These calculations have to be done on a frequent basis because as your body composition changes, so will your calorie requirements.
Generally, people who don’t calculate their caloric requirements at all and simply pick an arbitrary round number - are people who fail.
The reason they don’t get results is because they’re afraid to eat.
How do you know this?
Because I do this stuff for a living and have spent nearly every day the last 13 years either in the gym or around athletes in some capacity. I get at least 10 emails per week from guys misled on the muscle building path. I’ve had messages from 3 people from this forum who have already told me “I’m EXACTLY like the 150 pound guy you’re talking about” so it’s obviously pretty rampant everywhere.
First of all, most people have more than enough bodyfat to supply the calories necessary for muscle growth- you’d become extremely lean before you ever ran out.
Secondly, and more importantly, building muscle does not require all that many extra calories! If that were true, then building mucle would result in a directly proportional increase in basal metabolic rate. We know that that building muscle does cause an increase in metabolic rate, but it is not that great of an increase - something in the neighborhood of a couple hundred calories per day. That’s nothing compared to the increases in caloric intake are typically suggested in the bodybuilding community.
On paper being able to go from say 15% bodyfat all the way down to say 5% bodyfat while building muscle and using the calories dervied from the burning of fat to build that muscle may make perfect sense - but it doesn’t work in the real world beyond a certain range. Under a certain window of percent bodyfat that your body feels comfortable, or your bodyfat settling point, which will vary but will range from 8-15% for most males, the body will begin to resist lipolysis (the breaking down of fat) and increase protein catabolism, - as well as drastically decrease all positive endocrine functions, which are just as much if not more important to the muscle building process then the nutrition.
The body is designed to run out of fat and muscle at the same time during starvation. So this means that you might be able to build some muscle while going from 15 to 10% bodyfat but you get under the lower end of your bodyfat settling point, lets say 10% - and suddenly start to lose muscle or spin your wheels at an accelerated clip. No longer will your body take the calories derived from fat and use them to build muscle in fact it will start to piss away, or utilize for energy, nearly as much much muscle as fat, as it perceives the threat of becoming too lean and starving.
By the same token guys who attempt to remain extremely lean while building muscle find that they struggle, but if they allow their bodyfat to creep up a few points they suddenly reach a magical window where the muscle gains start to really pile on. What occurs in this situation is the body was resisting muscle growth and the endocrine status optimal for that because evolution and instinct tells us that being lean is synonymous with famine and famine is a threat to survival. Adding more muscle (which requires more energy) during a lean state or during caloric restriction (either of which for all your body knows might be a famine) is not conducive to survival for our hunter/gatherer ancestors whose genetics and instincts we still carry today. This is why eating is anabolic and starving is catabolic. Check out the hormonal response to both under and overfeeding.
As for muscle not requiring many additional calories this old Mike Mentzer approach also looks great on paper but the interpretation is suspect. It is rare to find a single individual with significant muscular development who hasn’t spent some time packing on the proverbial feedbag. I don’t think it’s necessary to eat an extra 1000 calories per day to gain muscular bodyweight, in fact I can live with an extra 250 per day but the people who struggle to gain muscle are usually shocked when they find out how many calories are required to meet their requirements and increase their muscular bodyweight. In large part this is the point Berardi was trying to get across with his “massive eating” articles, but everyone took everything EXCEPT the important stuff. What usually happens when one wants to gain weight is their metabolism upregulates really quick. Thermogenesis and energy expenditure increases at a rate that surpasses what can be accounted in all the formulas etc. One might go from needing 2500 calories per day to maintain but gain a couple of pounds and suddenly they need to eat 4000 calories per day or they lose weight.
However, many (and here is where you can identify who has genetics and who doesn’t) will find that simply eating enough food to maintain bodyweight will get them nowhere at all with regard to muscle gains. The guy who eats at maintenance for 6 months and trains his butt off may very well find himself with EXACTLY the same amount of muscle that he had 6 months before. But if he increases his caloric intake by 500 calories per day all the sudden he gains 3 lbs of muscle the first 2 weeks! The hormonal response to overfeeding is one reason - as simply being fed does a whole lot of things to optimize endocrine function…it will also speed up metabolic rate which partially explains the large increase in maintenance calories. All of these things combined mean that eating big is synonymous with muscle and vice versa.