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Bumping Calorie Intake If You Can't Train "Heavy"?

Supplements and Nutrition
#1

Hi all,

I’ve restarted training one year ago but as soon as I did, the pandemic came and since I’ve been stucked training at home with only resistance bands, pull up bar, a weighted vest and a kettlebell. I’ve been able to change my body but I’d like to gain more mass / muscle.

I won’t go into details about my training but basically I was on a full body 3 times a week for one year and just moved to a upper / lower routine 4 x a week.

I also do cardio (Zwift ride) two times a week.

I’m a small guy (5’7 and 140 lbs) and actually I’m eating 2500 kcal a day.

Question is: considering I can’t train heavy, if I want to gain muscle, should I increase my calories intake or will I just gain more fat?

Any tips or advices?

#2

I’m assuming that you mean you’ve been able to change it in a way that you like. Did you stop gaining weight/muscle?

#3

Food is an agent of recovery, like sleep. If you are recovering from your current training with your current intake of food, adding more food on top of it isn’t going to results in any significant degree of muscle gain. Sure, you’ll get SOME, but ultimately, you need to train hard enough to NEED more food in order to recover and THEN eat more food to recover in order to gain muscle.

It CAN be done with just bodyweight/limited resources, but it’s going to be difficult and take a long time.

2 Likes
#4

Hi,

It makes sense. That’s what I thought. I’ll keep training “hard” and hope that gyms will be open soon here in France so I could subscribe.

#5

@Voxel Yes to both questions.