How Much Of A Caloric Surplus Is Needed For Maximizing Muscle Gains?
Intensity Is Everything By Cliff Wilson
How Much Of A Caloric Surplus Is Needed For Maximizing Muscle Gains?
Well, if you don't want to get excessively fat in the process, there is some research coming out saying that the more advanced someone gets they might need more of a surplus, but it's so preliminary. I'm not really ready to hang my hat on that. Muscle growth is such a slow process and muscle growth doesn't occur at intervals it occurs every day. If you break it down into a daily number, you're looking at an infinitely small excess of calories needed to create muscle growth, so generally I have always taken the approach of smallest surplus possible. I will increase food to get somebody within their healthy normal physiologically comfortable body fat range which will optimize hormones so i'll push to get to that point, but then once hormones are optimized and they're in a good spot, we're going slow because if I go any faster than what’s required, I'm just minimizing their growth time because once we get to a point that is too heavy we need to cut back down, whether that be a mini cut or for the next contest prep. If we gain too much fat we need to start contest prep earlier than I would typically advise, so I'm trying to generally maximize growth time in a surplus versus maximize the intensity of the surplus.