The best way of gaining muscle without gaining fat is not by eating in a caloric surplus. Please don’t misunderstand, a caloric surplus is the most efficient way of building muscle, but you do run the risk of fat gain.
Instead, you want to eat a maintenance level caloric intake and build strength in the gym.
In this article, we are going to discuss:
- Lifting metrics
- Why some people should not eat in a caloric surplus to gain muscle.
- Relative Strength vs Absolute Strength
- Ways to increase strength while staying lean
You Need to Hit Certain Lifting Metrics
The number 1 rule of building muscle is progressive overload. It doesn’t matter whether you’re eating in a caloric surplus, maintenance, or a deficit. You must be able to consistently overload a major compound movement to build muscle.
Some of the best exercises to build strength on include:
- The Incline Bench Press
- The Overhead Press
- The Bulgarian Split Squat
- The Weighted Chin-up
- The Weighted Dip
For instance, if you can consistently add 10-15 pounds a month to your incline bench press for a 5-rep max, you will have well-developed upper chest, shoulders, and triceps.
For advanced and intermediate lifters, 80% of muscle growth comes from strength gains.
Why You Wouldn’t Want to Eat in a Calorie Surplus
If you are not at a decent level of leanness or a level of leanness you are content with, then eating in a caloric surplus wouldn’t make sense from a physique development point of view.
You may be a guy who successfully cut from 27% body fat down to 20% body fat and now you’re stuck. The body fat percentage you desire to be is 12%, but you can’t breakthrough 20% body fat.
Unfortunately, 20% body fat is not the ideal body fat to start bulking.
Instead, you would want to:
- Eat at Maintenance for 1-3 months.
- Bring up leptin.
- Bring up metabolism.
- Bring up testosterone.
At 20% body fat, you still have enough food energy reserves to support strength training and muscle growth even in a maintenance phase.
If you jump from a deficit straight into a surplus, you may put on weight, especially fat too quickly.
This can set your long-term fat loss goals back significantly, because now you would have to spend a longer time cutting when you go back into a caloric deficit.
Building Muscle Without Fat Improves Relative Strength
When you focus on building muscle while maintaining leanness, you are increasing relative strength. This is your strength to body weight ratio. Relative strength is the greatest indicator of body composition.
The stronger you get relative to how much you weigh, the better you will look.
If you can get to the point where you’re bench pressing 1.7x your body weight for 5-6 repetitions, you will have a high level of muscle mass and a low level of body fat.
This is why you may lose a little bit of fat, even if you are eating at maintenance over the course of a few months.
As you increase your relative strength, you add lean muscle tissue to your body, which increases your metabolic rate. Therefore, fat loss occurs.
This effect only last but so long though. To keep losing fat, you would eventually have to eat at a caloric deficit.
Relative Strength vs Absolute Strength
Absolute strength is how much weight you can lift with maximum effort. It’s not true strength or a good measure of functional strength.
A 240-pound guy bench pressing 275 pounds for 5 repetitions will have more absolute strength than a 160-pound guy bench pressing 240 pounds for 5 repetitions, because that 240-pound guy is simply lifting more weight than the 160-pound guy.
However, the 160-pound guy will have more relative strength than the 240-pound guy, because he is lifting more weight proportionate to his body weight.
The 160-pound guy will also have a higher level of lean muscle mass and a lower level of body fat.
This is another reason why you wouldn’t want to gain weight too quickly. Relative strength can go down, resulting in you becoming weaker in proportion to your body weight. You would have less defined aesthetics and more blur.
Fat gain is a faster process than muscle gain for natural strength athletes. Many people want to build 10 pounds of muscle in a couple months and that’s just not realistic.
Maybe if you were taking a laundry list of performance enhancement drugs, you can build 10 pounds of muscle in a couple months, but as a natural you can’t.
Ways to Increase Strength While Staying Lean
Adding muscle and maintaining your fat levels is not hard when you have a good training program in place. This section of the article highlights some key best practices for improving training performance while staying lean.
1. Reverse Pyramid Training
Reverse pyramid training is the opposite of what most people do in the gym. Most people do about 3-5 sets of a heavy compound exercise where they pyramid up each set.
They lift progressively heavier each set.
The problem with pyramid training is you are pre-fatiguing yourself and making it difficult for yourself to hit a personal record each lifting session.
Instead, you want to do reverse pyramid training, where your first set is your heaviest set and the other 2 sets, you lift progressively lighter.
It makes sense to perform your heaviest set when you are not fatigued.
For instance, if you know Friday is your shoulder-focused upper body day, you are going to perform the overhead press before any other exercise. You would be able to test for improvements in 4-6 rep max strength in the first set.
Please don’t misunderstand, it’s ok to do 1 or 2 explosive warm-up sets on a compound movement with a light weight to wake up the nervous system, but your first work set should be your heaviest set.
This style of training will enable you to make the fastest rate of strength gains as a natural.
We will dive deeper into reverse pyramid training in a future article.
2. Prioritize Muscle Recovery
Recovery is one of the most overlooked aspects of building muscle and strength. If you don’t recover properly, your muscle won’t grow. If your muscles won’t grow, you won’t gain strength.
Some of the best things you can do to improve recovery from a workout include:
- Not lifting weights everyday or not lifting weights 2 days in a row
- Getting 7-9 hours of sleep each night, but ideally 8 hours.
- Walking more to increase blood flow and rebuild muscle tissue.
It’s not advantageous to you from a muscle-building standpoint to be in the gym training 5-6 days a week. You are not giving your body adequate time to heal and your central nervous system adequate time to recover.
You will also eventually get yourself injured training that often because you don’t have a recovery plan in place.
Instead, you want to adopt a 3-day-a-week training system. You would get the perfect amount of recovery and make the fastest rate of strength gains.
With all the extracurricular activities you have going on outside of the gym, training 5-6 days a week may not be sustainable for your lifestyle. A 3-day training split allows you to not treat the gym like a part time job.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of 3 workouts a week, check out this article The Fitness and Lifestyle Benefits of Training Only 3 Days a Week.
3. Exercise Rotation
You should have a plan in place as to what to do when you plateau on certain exercises. Unfortunately, gaining strength on a weekly basis will eventually plateau as you become more advanced at a movement.
For example, you may be able to add 5 pounds a week or every other week to your incline-barbell bench press for a 4-6 rep max, but eventually you will reach a point where you are no longer able to add weight and get at least 4 repetitions.
In this case, you want to switch the exercise to incline-dumbbell bench press and stay on that movement for as long as you can make strength gains.
You are still working the same muscle group but with a different variation and fresh stimulus.
Once you plateau on the incline-dumbbell bench, go back to incline-barbell bench, and continue to make progress.
4. Increase Carbohydrate and Fat Intake When You Go into Maintenance
Carbs and fats should go up when you bring your calories up to maintenance. The same amount of protein you were eating when you were in a deficit is the same amount you want to eat at maintenance.
At maintenance, your caloric intake is not going up that much. Therefore, you don’t want to allocate so much of your caloric budget to protein.
Protein is the most satiating macro-nutrient until you get enough of it. Once your protein needs are met, you are better off eating more fats and carbohydrates.
Carbs are going to be essential for fueling training performance and supporting your ability to lift heavier weights over time. Fats are going to be essential for maintaining your hormonal health.
Conclusion
The main takeaway from this article is you don’t have to gain fat to gain muscle, especially if you already have enough fat on you. If you focus on increasing your lifts and your relative strength, the muscle will come.
It is best to add muscle slowly, over a period of months or years. If you try to do it faster than that, you won’t maintain leanness.
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