The first thing you’ll want to do for an effective muscle building diet plan is take your daily protein intake and spread that out into ideally 4-5 meals throughout the day with each of them having a minimum of 20g of protein. It also makes sense to ingest an adequate amount of protein shortly before sleep since that’s the longest period you’ll go without food. That’s also why you might want to bias a little more of your daily protein towards this pre-sleep meal with at least 40g of slow digesting protein.
The next tip here is to incorporate “muscle building foods”. First, you want to opt for high quality protein sources that are not only high in leucine content, but also high in digestibility. In addition to this, you can opt for more unsaturated fats as opposed to saturated fats, which may bias more of the weight you put on to be muscle as opposed to fat. Olive oil and salmon specifically are two unsaturated fat sources I’d highly recommend incorporating in your muscle building diet.
Now the last tip when it comes to how to diet to gain muscle here is to periodize your diet. Although we want most of the weight you put on to be muscle, it will always come with a bit of fat gain with it. And as your body fat creeps up during a bulk, you actually become less efficient at putting on muscle. Meaning, that as you continue to gain weight and your body fat slowly creeps up, then it would be best to occasionally “re-sensitize” your body for more efficient growth by stripping off some of the excess fat you put on before you continue to focus on gaining more weight again.
So, to sum up all the muscle building nutrition tips covered:
1. Evenly distribute your protein throughout the day into 4-5 meals, each consisting of at least 20g of a high quality protein source. Biasing more of your protein (at least 40g) towards a pre-sleep meal is also a good idea to stimulate protein synthesis overnight.
2. Optimize your food choices. Opt for higher quality protein sources and incorporate more unsaturated fat instead of saturated fat (olive and salmon oil may be the most beneficial). This may enable more of the weight you gain to be muscle as opposed to fat.
3. Periodize your diet by transitioning through phases of a calorie surplus (e.g. 3 months) with phases of a calorie deficit (e.g. 1 month). This way you’ll be able to occasionally re-sensitize your body to put on muscle more efficiently.
All in all, guys, I hope that you were able to see that it’s the little details like this that really do make all the difference in the long run. And for a step-by-step program that shows you not only how to approach your diet and what to eat, but also pairs this with a weekly workout plan so that you can build lean muscle as efficiently as possible with science, then simply take the analysis quiz to discover which science-based program would be best for you and where your body is currently at below:
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