Will this even work...? Question about muscle gain.

Hi, I lost over 65lbs and been (mostly) maintaining since February (it's still hard for me to eat enough on days I exercise a lot so I've lost a little more weight over the past few months). I've been mainly focusing on cardio in order to burn more calories, but now I'm sick of working so hard without improving and I want to gain more muscle. I know that to gain muscle you need to eat more then you burn off and I know that a person who weighs more but has more muscle is better off then a person who weighs less but has less, but I still don't want to gain any weight. I think that if I start to see the numbers of the scale go up I'll start to panic that all my hard work was for nothing and give up the goal to gain muscle, despite the fact that I know I'd be healthier.

I've been thinking of a way to not gain much weight but gain muscle, but I don't know if it would work. I burn about 1700 calories in a day without exercise. Let's say I strength train 3 days a week and eat something like 200-300 calories over on those days. Then the 3 other days during the week I do cardio and eat at a total of a 200-300 calorie deficit while eating at maintenance for any days I miss exercise all together. Will a plan like this enable me to gain muscle, burn fat, and not gain much weight? I know that the going will probably be slow doing it like this, but I'm not in any sort of rush. Like I said before, I still have problems eating enough sometimes and I'm a little scared of knowingly eating more then I am burning. I want to try doing something like this, but I don't think I'll be able to start it until I get some kind of reassurance that it makes sense and will work.

Thank you!

Rmember, muscle weighs ALOT more than fat.

Stick to your regular diet+exersise but add some strength training. If anything, have a protein smoothie 1 hour before training.  if you do this and see the scale going up you'll know that you're gaining muscle..not fat :)

or you can do my fave, pilates. you'll gain lean, long muscles with minimal weight gain and maximum toning.

g'luck  

Muscle weighs 3x more then fat. So 1 pound of muscle is = to 3 pounds of fat

Some people say its impossible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time..Well its not, i've done it, my friends have done it, even professional bodybuilders have done it. (and they now how to do it properly)

The problem behind muscle gain and fat lose is that muscles require +calories to grow, fat requires -calories to be lost. But, carbs can become the answer. If you cycle your carbs, and i mean if you have high carbs on training days, low/no carbs on non training days or even cut out carbs all together with increase in protein intake, You can gain muscle and lose fat.

As carbohydrates are stored as glucogen in the liver to be used as energy cutting them out means your body will have to use other sources to power its self.

On training days if you preform strength exercises before your cardio and increase your protein levels to compensate for the reduce of carbs your body will use glucogen then fat stores to power its self as the muscles have all ready been in use and the body is telling its self that it requires power, but because it cant eat something that it is using it has to change to something else and if the glucogen levels are gone...yes that means it will use fat.

Also ways to increase the difficulty of your body using muscle to fuel its self is to take amino acids, these are the building blocks of protein, the body can only create 10-20 amino acids, the rest we get from food so the more the better. Any way.. Amino acids get in the muscles to help growth, as proteins are carried on blood cells as you workout and blood is pumped into the muscles taking amino acids during a workout will allow them to travel to the muscle quicker.

Summary:

-Decrease carbs so your glucogen levels are depleted.

-Increase protein and take amino acids to help muscle growth.

-Preform strength exercises before cardio to help fat lose.

-Take amino acids during workout

-Vary Calorie increase/decrease to associate with workout/non- workout days. ie. High calories on workout days, low calorie on non-workout days but increasing protein and decrease carbs on all days.

End Note: Now i have done this, and i recommend it to any one. I even have my dad running on this program, preforming compound lifts (using more then one joint/muscle) instead of isolation lifts (using one joint/muscle). And his progrress is coming along steady, he is losing the weight and inreasing muscle mass.

Try it :) but remember not every one is the same, change it to your needs.

O and also get a bodyfat % analyser as these are more accurate then actual scales (use them in the morning on an empty stomach) as food can change the results.

That plan won't work. Switching calories around that fast doesn't give your body long enough to start to use fat as fuel and the day after weight training your muscles need nutrients to repair and grow.

This whole muscles weights more than fat is really miss leading. 1 pound is 1 pound. Muscle just takes up less space that's all. So a pound of muscle will be smaller than a pound of fat.

Try switching your diet around and eat high protein moderate carb. diet with low fat. your body composition will change over the course of 4-6 weeks. Do a total body exercise plan three times a week and continue your cardio. You should she results in no time at all.

-That plan won't work-

Yes it will work, it has worked for me for the past 7 months, i've lost over 14% bodyfat.

-Switching calories around that fast doesn't give your body long enough to start to use fat as fuel and the day after weight training your muscles need nutrients to repair and grow. -

Read much?, if you noticed i said increase protein and also take amino acids, protein helps growth, amino acids can help with repairing. And the body doesnt have to get used to anything, the body is using something because it hasnt got anything else to use (uses fat because no carbs=no glucose=no glucogen), it doesnt take it 4 days to figure that out and act.

-This whole muscles weights more than fat is really miss leading. 1 pound is 1 pound. Muscle just takes up less space that's all. So a pound of muscle will be smaller than a pound of fat. -

Yes that is true a pound is a pound, "whats heavier a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers" their both the same its a pound. But i was talking about mass, muscle is more dense so takes up more less room per lb compared to fat.

-Try switching your diet around and eat high protein moderate carb. diet with low fat. your body composition will change over the course of 4-6 weeks. Do a total body exercise plan three times a week and continue your cardio. You should she results in no time at all.-

I agrea..

bodyscience: That plan won't work-

djwild: Yes it will work, it has worked for me for the past 7 months, i've lost over 14% bodyfat.

That's great, but isn't enough info to support your claim:  your total lean mass could have increased, stayed the same, or even declined while your body fat percentage was dropping.  For example, if you started at 200 pounds with 100 pounds of fat, and lost 50 pounds of fat with no change in lean mass, body fat percentage would have plunged from 50% to 33 1/3%.  If you additionally lost 10 pounds of muscle too, body fat percentage still would have declined dramatically, from 50% to 50/(200-50-10) = 35.7%.

It's possible that you did gain significant muscle mass too (although my experience of the world makes me skeptical) -- I'm just pointing out that the evidence you presented isn't enough to justify that conclusion.

Thanks for the replies. This is exactly why I decided to ask here after doing some reading on my own - no one agrees on anything.

Maybe I'll just play around trying things out until something starts to work for me. To tell you the truth while I do eat a lot of protien I'm very agiasnt low carb diets so I'm sure I'm not going to start restricting them even if that will help. Also, I'm not setting out to gain a lot of mucsle so I'm not looking for the best diet for a body-builder or anything. What I'm really wondering is not so much what I should be eating, although that is helpful as well, but how MUCH I should be eating. That's the part I'm unsure about and the part that scares me since I'm still so used to eating under mantinence.

Since you're a woman I don't think you're going to bulk up so much that the scale is going to jump all that dramatically. It's more likely that you'll gain muscle while losing fat and the scale will stay about the same - you'll just look thinner and more tone all over, because your body composition has changed.

Realistically most people can only gain maybe 1-2 lbs of muscle a year. Can you afford to see the scale go up 1-2 lbs - over the course of a year's worth of strength training?  

Of couse. I'm not too worried about the weight gain from muscle, more about gainning back fat if I start to eat more to gain muscle. Basically, what I want to know is if I eat more, gain some muscle and fat, then diet and use cardio later, will I be left off will an end result of more muscle, less fat? It makes logical sense to me, but that doesn't mean it's right. 

Maybe I'll just play around trying things out until something starts to work for me.

Well, in fact, that's what you have to do -- but it needn't be scary.  Get your body fat percentage measured every week.  From that you can compute your pounds of fat and non-fat (the sum is your total weight) from week to week.  With measurement everything is possible, but without it you're doomed to flying blind.

Then make gradual changes.  Measurement will tell you what does and doesn't work for you at this time.  For example, shift your calorie intake by just (no more than) 10%, and note what happens as a result.   Huge results simply can't occur quickly as a result of small changes, and with weekly feedback (from measurement) you'll never continue with a "bad" change for long.  The same approach works for adjusting the percentage of calories you get from carbs versus protein, and so on.  Make gradual changes, avoid extremes, measure, and let measurement guide the next changes -- over time, that's the whole "secret".

Too many people hope for a fixed plan spelled out in infinite detail.  You can buy thousands of those ;-)  But even if you stumble into one that happens to work for you, it will eventually stop working for you too -- our bodies are very good at adapting to any fixed stimulus.

Play with it instead -- it's fun :-)

Basically, what I want to know is if I eat more, gain some muscle and fat, then diet and use cardio later, will I be left off will an end result of more muscle, less fat?

Yup!  That's exactly what serious bodybuilders do, year after year:  gain both muscle and fat in the off season while eating more than they burn (the "bulking up" phase), then some months before competition switch to a calorie deficit and more cardio work to burn the excess fat (the "getting ripped" phase).  Even female bodybuilders drop to less than 10% body fat for competition (men under 5%), so it's hard to make a case that they don't know what they're doing ;-)

The one thing that doesn't change between these phases is strength training.  That's obviously needed when bulking up to gain muscle (as well as fat), but is less obviously also needed when "getting ripped" to minimize (or prevent) muscle loss.

That said, there are genetic freaks in bodybuilding who seem to be able to gain mounds of muscle and drop mounds of fat at the same time, and bodybuilding naturally attracts more of those than most professions.  But they're relatively rare even in those circles.

Thank you! Like I said - makes logic sense but it makes me feel better to hear from someone else.