Gain Muscle Without Gaining Fat – Here’s How

One of the most common problems with going through a bulking phase is gaining more fat than you would like or had planned on. We all go through it sometimes. I go through it sometimes. There’s a fine line between the extra calories to add muscle mass and the extra calories that go unused and head straight for your waist. In order to walk along that line, you have to be seriously attentive to how you’re eating and how you’re training. There are things you can do, though, to maximize your ability to gain muscle without gaining fat.

You Need a Map to Get You Where You Want to Go

The first thing you need to do to gain muscle without gaining fat is to have a very clear map of where you’re going, where you’ve been and what lies between the two. That map is a careful record of your diet and your training from week to week. I’ve said many times that what gets measured gets managed. The same thing is true from the opposite direction; what doesn’t get measured often becomes unmanageable.

What I mean by that is that if you’re not tracking your progress, you’re very likely to get several weeks down the road and find that you’ve gained too much fat but you have no idea where you went wrong. Now you have a ton of work to do in the cutting phase to make up for your mistakes along the way. Even worse, since you don’t know exactly what you did that caused you to gain that extra fat, you’ll probably repeat the mistakes the next time around.

But if you’re tracking your macros, your calories, your training volume and everything else, you’ll be able to spot problems right away. If you’ve gained too much fat this week, it’s pretty easy to look back over your activity of the last week and see what happened. Then you can immediately take action to correct the problem before it becomes unmanageable.

Without that tracking, you can’t spot problems before they get out of hand and you won’t know what caused them either.

What Needs to Go On Your Map

Your training journal isn’t just a way for you to track your progress now; it’s also a way for you to plan your program tomorrow. The trial and error, mistakes and triumphs of this bulking phase will help you to design a better plan for the next one.

To do that, you need to track some very important information about how you’re eating and how you’re training. You need to keep track of your macros and how your calories are distributed, not only how they’re distributed between proteins, carbs and fats but how they’re distributed throughout your day. This way, if you gain a little too much fat you might look at your numbers and decide that maybe you should cut your carbs by 200g or stop eating carbs after 6pm. If the action you take fixes the problem, then it becomes part of your plan the next time around.

You need to track your training sessions, including your workout specifics, how much cardio you’re doing and what kind and how you’re timing your workouts. If you gain too much fat, you can look over your journal and decide whether you need to extend your cardio sessions or maybe add some HIIT sessions to your program. Again, if it corrects the problem, you might want to make it part of your plan from the get-go for your next bulking phase.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it gain now: this is all just as much an art as it is a science. You have to learn by doing and sometimes you learn more from your missteps than you do your successes.

You have to try different things when you’re manipulating all of the variables that go into bulking (or cutting for that matter), but first you have to know what those variables are. You have to have hard numbers in front of you so that you know what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong and what works to correct any problems.

You know the expression, “Nipping the problem in the bud?” This is how you gain muscle without gaining fat; by fixing the problems as they come up, not several weeks down the road when you’ve already gained 30% more fat than you were planning. It’s a whole lot easier to recover from gaining an extra pound of fat than it is to recover from gaining ten.

The beauty of it is that you’ll know more the next time you bulk than you do this time. And you’ll know even more the time after that, as long as you’re tracking your progress, you know the numbers behind your variables and you can identify what worked to correct any issues.

By: Vince DelMonte Fitness

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