If you want to gain notable amounts of muscle you’re going to need time and patience.

As you’re going to need to be doing this for a while, the sustainability of your nutrition needs consideration.

How fast can you grow muscle?

Gaining weight too fast will only result in the needless accumulation of fat at no advantage to muscle.

So you need to walk that tight Calorie path of enough to fuel for growth but not too much that you just get fat.

Once you’re past the newbie phase of lifting weights, 1-2% of body weight gain per month is an appropriate goal for most people. 

Do you need to track macros to grow muscle?

The next part is figuring out an appropriate nutrition method tor consistently achieving a sufficient Calorie intake.

Firstly consider the benefit of going straight to tracking (using something like My Fitness Pal), remembering you don’t need to track everything or track all the time.

Tracking has plenty of value even if it’s tracking Calories & protein only for a few weeks to get you started.

But tracking isn’t for everyone. For some, the inconvenience of tracking might actually negatively impact the motivation for consistent muscle gain nutrition.

How can you manage Calories without tracking?

Start off with a baseline intake of varied whole foods that satisfies protein, vitamins and mineral requirements.

As we're talking about muscle gain, increasing Calories is an aim.

So after our baseline whole-foods have been satisfied we can go ahead and make up the additional Calories through easily digestible, Calorie dense foods that make consistently eating in a Calorie surplus, more comfortable, and feasible long term. 

From there, staying within that tight range of weight gain rates is about keeping Calorie intake within an appropriate range, which is largely facilitated by increasing or decreasing intakes of 'junkier foods' depending on your rate of weight gain you measure with your scale.  

Every month you don’t gain between 1-2% of your body weight you simply increase Calories by increasing your portions of Calorie dense foods within your diet.

That’s the part that changes, whilst that baseline whole foods intake stays constant. If you go too far and gain more than 2% the opposite response might be appropriate. 

Here are some easy ways to increase Calories for muscle growth

• Start cooking your oats in whole milk or rice milk, add some honey and sprinkle some coco pops on top.

• Drink full Calorie cordial or sports drink during your workouts or even throughout the day.

• Swap out wholemeal toast for bagels and add jam to them.

How far you take this mindset & approach around food selection and trying to "get more Calories in" depends on whether you’re gaining within the appropriate range.

As always monitor and adjust.

Just remember adjustments come through increases or decreases in Calorie dense foods, not from our whole foods which aim to satisfy vitamin, mineral and fibre needs.

Want to read more about nutrition for muscle growth? Check out our other muscle blogs including these two: