Putting on Weight

Eat more – quality first, quantity second

Underweight usually occurs when energy intake is less than the energy used. In other words, you need to eat more in order to gain weight. The secret to healthy weight gain is to make all your calories as nutrient-rich as possible. Consuming more empty-calorie foods like soft drinks and chips is not a successful way to build muscle, strengthen bones or repair tissue after surgery.

Successful weight gain requires that you increase your daily intake of carbohydrates. Avoid low carbohydrate diets.

Eating vast amounts of dietary protein won’t make your muscles grow faster and will put unnecessary pressure on your body, especially your kidneys. Avoid high protein diets.

A healthy snack may include fruit, yoghurt, muffin, rice pudding, low-fat custard, milkshake or liquid meal supplement.

Avoid high-fat junk foods. Instead, choose nutritious high-fat foods such as avocado or nuts.

Top your usual foods with some concentrated calories, like grated cheese.

Spread peanut or almond butter on a whole-grain muffin.

Prepare hot oatmeal or other cereal with milk, not water. Add powdered milk, margarine, honey, dried fruits and/or nuts after cooking.

Garnish salads with healthy oils such as olive oil, whole olives, avocados, nuts and sunflower seeds.

Use a kilojoule-counter book to calculate how many kilojoules you eat on an average day. The amount may be smaller than you think.

Eat three good meals every day. Give yourself slightly larger serves if you can.

If you have a small appetite, eat five to six times a day. Drink fluids before and after meals, but not with them. This helps leave more room for food.

Resistance training

Resistance training promotes muscle growth. Examples of resistance training include the use of free weights, weight machines, your own body weight or resistance bands.

Seek professional advice. You need guidance from a gym instructor, personal trainer, exercise physiologist or physiotherapist to make sure you are doing each exercise correctly.

Good advice will increase your gains and reduce your risk of injury.

Train just two or three times per week to give your muscles time to recover. If you’re tempted to train more often, remember that muscle growth occurs during recovery.

Choose compound exercises that work multiple major muscle groups: for example, the squat and bench press.

Make your workouts short and intense rather than long and leisurely.

*Remember*
Gaining lean body weight is a slow process that takes months and years rather than days and weeks. See your doctor before starting any weight-gain program. To gain weight, you must eat more and stimulate muscle growth.

Don’t waste your time or money on powders, pills and products that claim to increase muscle mass. These claims are not scientifically proven.

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10 Tips to Put on Weight

Best Of Bruno

1- Eat Meat
It’s simple; if you plan to grow, you need to eat meat. Meat is extremely high in protein, is a good natural source of creatine, and has loads of calories.

2- Post-workout nutrition
After a grueling workout, your body’s macronutrient levels are depleted and your muscle fibers will be screaming for nourishment. This is why a good post-workout meal is the most important meal of the day for anyone who’s aiming to put on some weight.

Always try to eat within one hour following each workout, for optimal results. Your body has the capacity to absorb more protein at that stage than at any other time of the day. Generally, you should try to consume 25-30 grams of protein and up to 1.5 times that amount of carbohydrates after each workout.

3- Calorie-dense food
Always try to eat more calorie-dense food. See it as being more efficient. The more calories you get per gram of food you ingest, the better, because you’ll have to eat less of it. They’ll also satiate you faster.

For example, try to reduce your vegetable consumption because they’re low on calories and 80% of each veggie is water. Instead, try eating red meat, eggs and tuna. Weight gainers are also a very cost effective source of calorie-dense nutrients that will help increase your overall caloric intake.

4- Increase your caloric intake gradually
Slowly get your body accustomed to the increased caloric intake. Try increasing your daily caloric intake by 125 to 250 calories until you reach the desired level.

5- Drink plenty of liquids
Water, juice and milk. Hydration is key in increasing body mass, since 60% of your body consists of water. You lose water through perspiration and urination, and will increase your loss drastically with severe physical exhaustion.

Make sure to replenish yourself with fluids often. Drinking water will help improve your digestion, while milk is filled with quality proteins and juice will provide all the essential sugars your body needs.

6- Sleep on a full stomach
The second most important meal of the day is the one you eat before going to bed. The average male burns 67 calories/hour while sleeping. So if you expect to sleep eight hours, try to get in roughly 536 calories before going to bed.

Growth hormone levels peak during sleep since the body does a large part of its recovering at night. There’s a popular belief that everything you eat before going to bed will turn to fat. It’s partly false. Obviously, if you munch on a Big Mac right before bedtime, it will likely be stored as fat. Instead, ingest a quality protein shake — they’re low on fat and simple carbohydrates.

7- Take Multivitamins
Calorie-dense food generally lacks micronutrients such as vitamins, water and certain minerals. To avoid the pitfalls of micronutrient deficiency, I strongly recommend taking a multivitamin every day.

Vitamins are needed to maintain optimal levels of micronutrients. Try to take them between meals for faster digestion.

8- Eat More Often
Eating more often goes hand in hand with eating more since, logically speaking, the more meals you eat, the more calories you’ll ingest. Eating more often will also help with digestion. It’s obviously easier to eat eight smaller meals of 500 calories each than four huge meals containing 1000 calories each.

Also, when it comes to bigger portions, some food doesn’t get processed correctly due to a lack of hormones in your metabolism. That excess food can potentially turn to fat down the road. Keep in mind, however, that by eating more, you’ll automatically gain some mass from fat.

Don’t forget that when you eat less often, you allow for a longer lapse of time between each meal, causing your insulin and concentration of nutrients to peak and drop, resulting in mayhem when it comes to your metabolism.

9- Get all the right proportions
Protein is the main building block of muscle tissue and unquestionably the most important nutrient to gain weight and build mass. But keep in mind that you should always ensure that you’re getting the right amounts of carbohydrates and fats.

The recommended proportion of carbohydrates, protein and fat for a bulking diet is 50/35/15, respectively. This proportion applies to all diets regardless of the total caloric intake. Again, expect to gain some fat from this sort of diet.

10- Eat More Food
Chances are, if you’re training and not growing, it’s because you aren’t eating enough. How can you expect to gain weight if you don’t consume enough calories to cover your daily calorie burn rate?

As an average male, you should consume roughly ten calories per pound of bodyweight just to maintain your current bodyweight. Now to gain weight, you should consume at least 500 calories more than your normal caloric intake.

The more you eat, the more growth potential you create. You should obviously be selective with your choice of food in order to gain quality mass without gaining excess fat.

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More Weight Means Bigger Muscles Myth

Bruno Body

Some guys focus solely on pushing the weight in their sessions. This is because they think there is a strict correlation between the amount of weight lifted and an increase in muscular size… and for many guys, the size of muscles like the biceps and pectorals is the point of bodybuilding.

This is not always the case. The fact of the matter is that regardless of what you do in the gym, you can’t build more muscle tissue out of nothing. If you aren’t eating more than enough of the nutrients that your body needs to maintain itself and to build the new muscle tissue, you aren’t going to get bigger — no matter how heavy the weights you lift are. It’s that simple.

Now, contrary to the point above, others think that if size is their goal, then life should become a 24-hour buffet. They eat everything and anything in sight, in the hopes that it will help spark new muscle growth.

What these individuals need to realize is that, yes, they do require more calories, however, the body can only assimilate so many of those extra calories into lean muscle tissue. After that, the remainder will go toward fat mass. Your P-ratio is what determines the amount of surplus calories going to fat and the amount going toward lean muscle mass. Your P-ratio is partly influenced by genetic make-up — which is something you can’t change — but the changeable factors that affect are your workout program, your nutritional intake and the timing of your meals.

So if size is your goal, you need to make sure that you are eating enough to get growth in the first place, but not so much that with the additional muscle mass, you get a great deal of fat mass as well.

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