In order to build muscle, the number one requirement is that you eat more calories than it takes to maintain your weight. If you do not do this, it is literally impossible to build new muscle tissue where you’re not giving your body with extra blocks to form this muscle.

Generally speaking, to build muscle at the rate of one pound per week, you should be consuming 500 extra calories a day. This will mean that a total of 3500 calories, which is what it takes, on average, to create one pound of body tissue.

Remember though, this is not one pound of solid muscle, as you will get some fat while building muscle process, but if you’re smart with how you go about building muscle, you can control how much extra fat is reached.

Action A Slow Quantity

One option that some guys use is a much slower process to build muscle. This is when they eat less amount of calories over what they need to maintain their weight in the hope that this will prevent them from achieving all that much fat.

While this may be a good idea in some cases, if you only eat an extra 100 calories over maintenance level, you may find that progress is incredibly slow or almost non-existent.

For some people, when their body is faced with a small amount of excess calories, it speeds up just to accommodate this excess rather than actually using these extra calories to gain weight. This is what is the “thrifty” metabolism and generally what makes a “hard gainer ‘a’ hard gainer ‘.

Assuming this little excess amount to about 250 extra would be a good way to hopefully overcome this situation it will give you enough extra metabolism should just catch up, but still minimize the amount of fat you put in.

At 250 calories, this will have to put on about half a pound a week, which is about max amount of lean muscle tissue you could build every week (assuming an ideal training environment).

Stepping It Up

Then, for those who aren ‘t afraid achieve little fat and would like to speed up the whole process, you might be able to step up to the maximum of 1,000 calories of what you take to maintain your weight. Notice that I would not go higher than this, then you really must putting unnecessary amount of fat.

This is a major problem that many people do not face. They adopt a ‘see-food “type of diet – where they eat almost everything in sight. While this will definitely get you to put on weight, unless you are planning to dedicate a few months after muscle building is finished dieting, this is not advisable. You should still keep your overall health in mind and eat a lot of junk food is not going to maximize nutritional status.

For some people really struggle to gain weight, you need access to 1000 calories the value of seeing noticeable results, though.

Also, do not be surprised if as you make progress on your weight gain you need to keep increasing the amount of calories you need to eat to continue gaining weight.

Remember, as you build a stable new muscle, the muscle tissue will be metabolically active and as such, calorie requirements just to maintain your weight will also go up.

So, keep this in mind when trying to determine what kind of approach you want to take when it comes to your quest to build muscle.