How Many Calories Do You Need To Build Muscle?

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You ever wonder how many calories you need to build muscle?

If you are the least bit serious about building muscle, you know that Nutrition is a big part of the equation.

Without it, eveything else just falls apart..literally.

So I answered what you should be eating and when you should be eating in previous blogs.

Now, I will tackle, how much you should be eating.

I’ve come across many formulas for this..Some simple, and some complex.

A very simple one is Your Bodyweight x 15-18 = DAC (Daily Average Calorie intake) to build muscle.

You can find an excellent excel worksheet I’ve done for you that has a more complex and accurate formula with the formulas already done for you.

DAC Calculator

You simply need to enter your current weight and daily activity percentage.

It’s crucial that you adjust these numbers as you gain weight.

As I’ve seen, as you gain weight, you’ll need more and more calories to keep that rate of weight and muscle gain going up steadily.

This is another good cause of plateaus.  People reach a nutritional plateau, thus they reach a muscle plateau because the muscles can’t build what they don’t have.

Undercutting this daily average is just as bad as overshooting it.

Just like you can’t bake a cake for 20 mins at 460° when the directions say cook for 30 mins at 350°, you can’t throw 4000 calories into yourself everyday and expect to gain huge gains over night.

If you aren’t burning close to 4000 calories a day, the rest of that will just be stored up as fat and we don’t want that do we?!

The trick is to exceed your Basic Daily Requirements by about 500 calories based on your bodyweight and level of activity.

This will give you just enough and then some to really build and build.

The next step is to count out the calories in the food you’re eating.  This can be a pain at first, but once you get used to it, it’ll come naturally to you.

Remember, no one ever got better by doing the same thing over and over.  You won’t transform your body by being nonchalant about your eating habits.

You can type in Calorie Counters in Google.  Google actually has a pretty easy calorie counter itself.

I’ve also found another very useful site here.  It’s by nutrition.gov and gives you tons of information including vitamins, fats, acids, etc. in just about every food you can think of.

Lastly, another good ratio of carbs to protein is between 4:1 to 2:1.  You can do this with simple calculation at the grocery store or by pre-planning your meals ahead of time by using the Muscle Building Recipes ebook.

This was a short post, but very targeted.  Be sure to download that free Excel Worksheet here so you’ll know where to start.

Until next time, Happy Lifting!

Mitchell

Related posts:

1. When Should You Eat To Build Muscle?
2. How To Build Muscle Mass Quickly
3. Eating to Build Muscle – The Basics
4. Which Exercises Burn The Most Fat/Calories?

Tags: how many calories to build muscle, weight lifting nutrition