Hardgainer? Impossible to get bigger? READ THIS.
Diet is 75% of bulking up IMO. You can lift like Ronnie Coleman, but bottom line you will not grow any muscle without the calories behind it for bulking. Simple biology and one equation---->
Calorie balance=Calories in - Calorie expenditure
If you aren't gaining weight, you are not in a positive calorie balance so you need to either cut out all cardio, eat more, or both.
There are two ways to bulk: A clean bulk (slower, but leaner gains) and a dirty bulk (faster gains, more fat storage if metabolism isn’t fast) The main difference is that on a clean bulk, you NEVER eat carbs and fats together. Milk is bad for this reason. Eating carbs and fats together causes almost all of the fat to get stored instead of used for energy. Don’t eat carbs in your last 2 meals of the day because they get stored as fat while you sleep. Eat at least 40g protein with every meal, and make meals either protein/fat or protein/carb.
PWO=Post Workout, the most anabolic (muscle building) time in anyone’s day is the half hour following a workout. It is best to use a fast-acting protein like Whey. Your muscles soak up protein like a sponge. It is also useful to eat twice as many carbs as protein to help shuttle the proteins to the muscles. The PWO shakes I use are
---50g Optimum Nutrition Whey
---50g Dextrose (Corn sugar, causes an insulin spike to increase absorption of protein)
---50g Maltodextrin (Powdered complex carb supplement)
Some people prefer to drop the maltodextrin and just do 100g of dextrose. Try both and see what works for you.
Eating approximately every 2.5 to 3 hours is good for 3 reasons…
1. You can eat more calories in a day if your meals are smaller. Its easier to eat 600 calorie meals 6 times a day then it is to eat 1200 calorie meals 3 times a day.
2. Your body can only digest so many calories at a meal, and the rest gets stored as fat. Lowering the amount of food eaten at one time reduces the “extra” over what you need.
3. Muscles start to catabolize (break down) if they are without protein for 3-4 hours unless you are sleeping.
For all you 130-150 pounders thinking about taking steroids... re-evaluate your diets. If you can't gain weight naturally, steroids aren't going to do anything for you except shrink your balls. Think about it... raw materials to form muscles have to come from somewhere right? Try eating 300g protein, 400g carbs, and 150g fats.
You will grow.
A couple useful links
1) www.fitday.com <----Huge database of foods, can look up pro/fat/carbs and calories on them.
2) http://www.ntwrks.com/~mikev/chart1.html <------Basically the same
3) http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/berardi41.htm <----- An equation that you
plug in your weight and bodyfat percentage and it will tell you how many calories you need to eat every day to grow.
