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Eating over maintainence question

J

jimmy

Member
If you are eating and training to gain muscle (say you want to build muscle and try to put on as little fat as possible) is there a certain % of calories over maintainence that you should eat, and is there a point where you can have to many calories for no benefit?
ie say your maintainence was 2200, what difference would you see between eating 3000, 4000 or 5000. Would you gain the same amount of muscle at 5000 that you would at 3000 but put on more fat? Or would you put on more muscle than 3000 but also more fat?
 
Best bet is to work up to a higher amount. You don't need to double your maintenance cals to gain weight.
Start with 200-300 over and work up to 500 over, upping them each week and see how you go.

If you consume double, you'll put on a lot of fat.

Works the same way when cutting, you wouldn't cut on half your cals, so no need to bulk on double.
 
unlike fat, it takes about 600-1600 surplus calories to build a pound of muscle. Not sure of figure, but it is a lot less than fat.

So, unless you think you can put on many pounds of muscle per week, I would go no more than 500 calories over maintenance per day. I burn about 3000 per day, so would try to eat 3500 at most.

When I was a labourer burning 4500, would eat 5000.

Even with 500 extra per day, you will probably put on a bit of fat, but better to be safe rather than under eat searching for magical number.
 
My maintenance was around 2300 last year and I bumped it up to 3000. I put on a lot of fat. 10kg weight gain in about 5 months before 3000 was maintenance. I would say only about 2kg of that 10kg was muscle. So yes, going too far into a surplus has no benefit in regard to muscle gain. No doubt I could have built the same amount of muscle on 2500 without the excess fat gain.

Like White_Lie said, increase calories incrementally. For someone maintaining on 2200 a day, I would only increment by 100/day per week. I think about 20% above maintenance would be about right. So for 2200, increase by a total of 440 calories incrementally.
 
Start off with X calories and work your way up as you keep an eye on weight gain and the mirror...
 
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