Column 43 | Muscles up, fat down

ANSWER

you seem to have a very fast metabolism. Athletes who eat huge amounts but still don't gain weight or only gain it insufficiently are also known as hardgainers. First of all, you should check your nutrition plan. "Eating a lot" is very relative. For some, that means three regular meals a day, for others, eight or even more. In my experience, most bodybuilders always claim to eat a lot, but a closer look at the nutrition plan shows that eating a lot is just a drop in the ocean. In order to gain weight in the form of muscle mass, you need to eat a significant amount of calories, and this is especially true for a hardgainer.

Based on your body weight, your basal metabolic rate is around 1800 calories per day. You also need to add your energy expenditure, digestive loss and your increased metabolic rate. To determine your average energy expenditure, multiply the 1800 calories by a factor of 1.5/1.6. This results in around 2700 to 2880 calories per day that you need to consume every day in order to neither gain nor lose weight. Now increase this value by at least 500, or better yet by 1000 calories due to your fast metabolism, to put on some mass.

Your diet should be rich in carbohydrates: some "quick" - especially in the morning when you get up and after training - and some complete carbohydrates that provide you with energy throughout the day. You should eat 500 grams of carbohydrates during the mass phase to provide enough energy for the muscle building process. You should consume around 2.5 to 3 grams of protein per kilo of body weight every day to give your muscles the number one building material. Your fat intake should be around 80 grams per day. Eat healthy fats like rapeseed oil, linseed oil and safflower oil. With such a high calorie intake per day, the problem is often that you are not hungry enough for the amount of food. In this case, I recommend that you partially rely on liquid food. My personal tip for this is my "Andreas Standard Breakfast" - for breakfast, but also for in-between meals. I have, among other things, COLUMN 10 // HARDGAINER I wrote about it, which was also about mass gain. There you will also find the exact nutritional information for the shake.

If you want to increase your weight gain even further, I can recommend the product MEGA-GAIN highly recommend. 1-2 MEGA GAIN shakes per day provide a decent calorie boost, which effectively contributes to weight and muscle building.

ANSWER

Regular cardio training is especially important during the diet phase. To continue losing weight, I definitely recommend it! Start with 30 minutes twice a week.

Your pulse should be between 140 and 160 beats per minute so that your metabolism can increase. Without such a high pulse, your metabolism remains almost unchanged and only a minimal fat burning effect occurs during the training phase. With a high pulse, however, you can increase your metabolism and burn fat even beyond the aerobic unit ("afterburn effect"). You can gradually increase the cardio, starting with two 30-minute sessions per week to four or five 60-minute sessions per week. The maximum should be seven 60-minute sessions per week - more is not necessary for a successful diet phase.

But not only aerobic training should play a bigger role, strength training is at least as important. Regular strength training also ensures a permanent increase in metabolism, which means you burn more calories at rest. Strength training also ensures more muscles, which - as so-called active mass - in turn need to be supplied with nutrients through a further increased metabolism. The result: the basal metabolic rate increases, as does calorie consumption, and fat reduction is more even.