If you want to gain weight and bulk up your muscle mass, there are specific aspects of your diet that you must attend to, although the main key is to understand the energy equation.

If you take in less energy than you use in exercise, then you will lose weight. Too many people start a diet and exercise regime more suited to weight loss than weight gain, and wonder why their muscles are not getting bigger. What will happen in such a situation is that the body will first make up the energy deficit from your body fat, and when that has been depleted it will use your muscle mass.

Yes, that’s right. If you do not take in more calories than you use, then the more exercise you carry out the SMALLER your muscles will get, not the larger. I know that you likely think that your muscles should develop in line with the amount of exercise you do, but this is a misconception. The energy you expend, not only in exercise but also in your normal metabolism (the life processes such as breathing, digestion and blood circulation) must come from somewhere.

If not from the food you eat, then it must come from your body store. The first to go is the liver’s store of glycogen – the body’s emergency energy store. Then the fat stored under the skin. The muscles start to go along with the hard fat deposits around the abdomen and major organs that cause so many health problems. Ultimately, your muscles lose so much density that you get too weak to exercise. That is the bad and ineffective way to try to bulk up your muscle mass.

The correct way is to take in more energy than you use. Let’s refer to energy as calories, since basically that is what the calorie is – a measure of heat content or heat energy, but in dietary terms a measure of the energy potential of food. Not exactly, but near enough for most people to be able to equate calories with diets and weight.

If you eat more calories than you use, then you will put weight on. If you don’t exercise much, then that weight will be as fat. If you do exercise, what happens is that more blood flows to the muscles being exercised and certain biochemical reactions work to build up the muscles. It’s a complex process, but the end result is that if you use up most of the calories you eat in exercising your biceps, then your biceps will grow in preference to any other muscle in your body.

However, if you use up more calories in doing that than you eat, then eventually your biceps will waste away along with the rest of your body tissue. The answer to bulking up your muscles is to eat a carefully controlled diet offering a balance of short and longer term calorie release, together with a controlled exercise program aimed at developing specific muscle groups. Golfers can do this by swinging a club with added weight, and all the muscles used in their golf swing are made stronger and larger thus allowing them to impart more speed and energy to the club face as it drives through the ball.

Weightlifters do it by working the muscles used in their lifts, so that those most needed in doing what they do are used during the exercise program. Swimmers do so by exercising their shoulder and leg muscles: you don’t see swimmers with massive biceps or a fantastic grip, but their shoulders are well developed. The secret is to eat more calories than you need, and then use the excess by working the muscles you want to build up.

Check up your muscle girth and also your total weight. If you need more calories, then eat them, and if you’re putting on too much weight then either eat less or exercise more. It is a simple equation and it cannot be altered. It is a law of biochemistry, and just as Scotty claims that ‘You canna change the laws o’ physics’, you also canna change the laws o’ biochemistry. Nobody can.

So, to recap: if calories in < calories used, you lose fat first then muscle mass. If calories in > calories used, you add weight. If you don’t exercise, that weight is fat. If you do, that weight is added to the muscles you exercise.

If you know the best foods to eat for a balanced calorie diet, and what exercise to take to bulk up the muscles you want to strengthen or make bigger, then you can control your diet/exercise/muscle bulk. It is not just any calories that you should take in. For example, a diet of sugary sweets or chocolate cake generates rapid energy that has to be used up faster than you are probably able to, and hence will result in fat no matter what exercise you take.

Your calories should be released at a rate equivalent to the rate at which they are used up for best effect in allowing you to gain weight in the way that you want to. Most people who are trying to achieve this are advised to take supplements containing who knows what! However, there is a way to pack on muscle where you want it, and to bulk up either for a better shaped body to wow the girls, or even from competition.

There is also a way for the girls to do the same, again without the use of dubious supplements. Most websites on the internet offering advice on muscle bulk and gaining weight are very incomplete in that they go no further than recommending expensive supplements. However, there are a few that demonstrate how to achieve what you are looking for in a safe and inexpensive fashion.

If you want to know how to gain weight and bulk up muscle mass safely in without the cost of expensive supplements, there are sites online that can provide you with that information, and also the exercises needed for you to bulk up your major muscle groups and gain weight in muscle not in fat.

By: Peter Nisbet

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Build Muscle, Lose Fat