Beyond Brawn - The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle && Might

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. e best way to determine the caloric intake that maintains your body-

weight is to keep your food intake steady for a period without trying to gain

or lose weight. While doing this, calculate your daily caloric intake. Get a

kitchen scale, a book that gives you the caloric and macronutrient value of

each food and drink item you consume, a calculator and notebook. Keep a

log of the caloric value of everything you consume, together with how many

grams of carbohydrate, protein and fat you take in. At the end of a period of

three weeks, compute your daily average caloric intake.

. If your bodyweight is constant over this three-week period, you will have

discovered your maintenance intake. If you lose or gain weight, make an

adjustment to your daily caloric intake and carry out a further test period.

Continue this process until you find your maintenance intake.

. Once you know how many calories you are targeting each day for main-

tenance purposes, you should only need a week or two of weighing and

computing to familiarize yourself. Unless you are always changing your food

selection, or are making very fine adjustments, you can quickly get to grips

with sizing up your food for its caloric value without having to weigh and

compute every item. But you will need to check on foods you add to your

diet that are not regular inclusions. To make it very easy, you could compose

several dietary schedules that meet your needs, and rotate them. To keep

tabs on your caloric intake—to see whether or not you are straying from

your target—keep a dietary log on a sporadic basis.

. All this numerical work is time consuming, and involves some hassle. But it

is necessary because without it you will never really know where you stand

nutritionally.

Gaining muscle

. Many hard gainers simply do not eat enough. On top of that, they overtrain

and focus on the wrong exercises. No wonder they do not build any muscle.

Almost any male who is consuming fewer than , calories is never going

e harder and more seriously you train, the greater the need to

satisfy nutritional requirements. Better to oversupply on the nutri-

tional front than undersupply. Do not give your all in the gym and

then sabotage your progress by cutting corners with your diet!

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