Mass Weight Gain Diet

Is your mass weight gain diet structured properly? If you’re looking to gain some weight and muscle mass this year, then you probably know that you need to get your nutrition plan in order.  While your workouts and supplements are an important part of the muscle and weight gain process, there is nothing that will have a bigger impact on your weight gain goals than your mass gain diet strategy.

If you’re reading this post, it’s more than likely because you’re someone who has traditionally had a hard time gaining weight and building muscle mass in the past. Because of that, I’m going to cater my advice specifically to the “hard gainer” types out there who just can’t gain any traction when it comes to building up your body. The guidelines of this muscle weight gain diet are ideally suited to anyone who has never been able to gain any weight or muscle mass at all.

This means that the advice listed below is a bit more extreme than I would recommend for the typical person who just wanted to gain a few extra pounds of muscle mass. If you’re not a hard gainer and you implement this mass weight gain diet advice, it’s a sure bet that you will gain a decent amount of body fat along with your muscle mass, so be forewarned. But is should really work well for those of you out there who just can’t gain and weight or muscle mass.

Whenever I teach people how to put together an effective weight gain diet, I always start out by teaching them how to calculate their muscle mass weight gain calorie target.  This is the basis of your entire mass gain diet.  If you get this right, it becomes pretty easy to build muscle mass and gain weight, but if you get it wrong, you will not gain any weight or build any muscle mass at all.

How To Set Your Mass Weight Gain Diet Calorie Target

In a nutshell, all you need to do to get your mass weight gain diet started off on the right foot is to calculate how many calories your body needs to maintain it’s current condition and then increase this number by a reasonable amount. I like to teach hard gainers who really want to pack on some muscle mass and size to bump up their daily calorie target by an extra 500 – 1000 calories per day, and then to simply monitor their progress every few weeks and either adjust the value up or down based on the numbers (body fat % and weight).

photo credit: Magnus D

It’s important that you get yourself into the habit of tracking your progress on a regular basis in order to know whether you’re actually heading towards your goals or not. Simply “feeling” like you may have gain weight and muscle is not enough. It’s a proven fact that you will be able to improve on the things you regularly track and pay attention to and gaining weight and muscle mass is certainly no exception. That said, don’t go overboard here, taking measurements every few weeks (every week at the most) should do the trick and give a real good idea of whether or not you are making the kind of progress that you want to be making.

The Math Behind Your Mass Weight Gain Calorie Target

The first thing that you need to do in order to figure out how many calories you need to set your mass weight gain diet up for each day is to calculate your estimated Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).  This is the number of calories that your body requires to maintain normal resting bodily function through out the day.

In order to calculate your BMR you will need to have your body fat % measured and know your current weight. Just take those numbers and plug them into the formula below.

BMR Formula

Next take your BMR and multiply it by your activity level multiplier from the table below in order to get your estimated daily expended energy value.

Now it’s time to account for the energy costs of your workouts.  This is a step in the process that many people (even very experienced trainers) forget when they put together a mass weight gain diet. But it is absolutely critical to the overall process so make sure to do it.

Simply pick the type of exercise that you regularly perform and find the associated MET value from the list below.  Then multiply the frequency of your training sessions by this met value for a total calorie value of your workout sessions. I like to teach people to calculate this value based on your total weekly estimate workouts and then divide it up evenly through the week (just divide the total calorie number by 7).

Take this number and add it to the total daily expended energy value that you calculated earlier and you have a base calorie value that should be pretty darn accurate to work with. For your mass weight gain diet daily calorie target, simply take this total daily calorie value and add somewhere between 500 and 1000 extra calories to the number.

Well, there you have it.  A step-by-step plan for setting your mass weight gain diet daily calorie target. If you’re serious about gaining muscle mass and gaining weight, then simply “run the numbers” and get your weight gain diet started off on the right foot. It’s much better be working from hard numbers rather than to be guessing when you’re trying to gain weight.

In the next post in the weight gain diet series, we’re going to take a look at exactly how to take your weight gain calorie target value and create your first daily weight gain diet menu. Basically how to take your weight gain diet from hard numbers to something that you can actually use to start building muscle mass and gaining weight right away.

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