-how much weight gain should you aim per week (1lb/week is reasonable?)? Or you should aim to eat as much as possible?
-How often should you up your calore intake? When the weight gain is lower than expected?
-Do you really need to count your macros? I find it much easier to just count proteins (about 0,8-1,2g per pound of bw) and calories, cause due to my tastes it allows me to have a much wider variety of foods in my diet (some days will be higher in fats and some days will be higher in carbs, but protein will stay anyway in the above range)
1lb per week is somewhat aggressive but doable. 250-500 grams is usually what youāll see recommended in plenty of articles. Another way to think about that is achieving a weekly caloric surplus of 5-10%, ideally with more calories on training days than off-days. A decent starting point, Iāve found, is:
Training day: bw (in kgs) x 35
Off day: bw (in kgs) x 25
If you prefer pounds, try
Training day: bw (in kgs) x 16
Off day: bw (in kgs) x 12
If you fail to gain weight for two consecutive weeks, increase your caloric intake on both type of days by 250-500 calories or as many calories as your body weight in lbs, so in the second example thatād be increasing the multiplicative factor by 1,
Training day: bw (in kgs) x 17
Off day: bw (in kgs) x 13
To gain weight? Depends just how crazy you get with avoiding fat on your high-carb days. Try and get at least 40-50g of fat.
This is probably fine for any of us not crazy restricted (like bodybuilding lean).
Iāll agree with @Voxel on being careful how aggressive you get - at some point, youāre just getting fatter. Apparently some of you monsters canāt gain weight no matter how hard you try, though (@flappinit), so maybe this doesnāt apply to you.
I can gain weight just fine, I just hate eating the amount of food it takes for me to do so, whereas some people love it and some people can just eat that amount without even thinking about it. But the amount of muscle I can gain, Iād imagine, is right along with most other people - if I gain a lot of weight in a short span of time, a lot of it is fat.
Also, how much of it becomes fat is affected by how hard you train. Thatās why, where I used to assume everyone ate like shit, Iām actually of the opinion these days that plenty of people are eating āokay-enoughā but training with such little intensity that none of the food is put to good use.
Thatās an interesting thought. I think Iām coming around to that, to some extent anyway, myself. I sometimes get scared to eat when Iām wanting to lose weight, but then my intensity definitely goes down. I think I under-condition more than overeat most of the time. I probably also give myself an out on lifting by āacceptingā strength loss long before Iām lean enough to earn it. I still think a lot of us eat like crap, but maybe the scale is less balanced that way than Iād previously decided.
PC did write a decent nugget about getting to be lean at a certain bodyweight wherein you get to 30-40 pounds beyond where you want to be lean and stay there for 6 months before dieting down to your goal weight while continuing to set PRs.
Compounds will be harder to gauge as leverages change but on machines you shouldnāt be getting weaker.
This is kinda what Greg duecette advocates. He said get a comfortable bf % thatās easy for you to maintain and slowly gain from there. Not really a poundage but just whatever is comfortable and easy to maintain. Some ppl itāll be 10% and some maybe 15% . Iāve been doing this and life has been better Iām much healthier and not near as fat as I was.
