Muscle Building

Resistance Training

Resistance training is the stimulus that drives your body to build muscle.
Your training needs to be difficult enough to drive growth, and consistent over a long period of time.
It is always best to follow a structured, proven routine created by a professional.

Eating more calories than your body uses, in total, each day. This is necessary both to build muscle and to recover from training
Use any TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) calculator to estimate a starting point, then eat more than that each day, monitoring your scale weight to ensure it’s going up.

To maximize muscle growth, set your protein target each day for whichever of the below is greater:
- 160 grams per day
- 0.8 grams per pound of body weight, per day OR 1.76 grams per kilogram of body weight, per day
Ideally this is spread out over 3-4 meals throughout the day
Remember that after calories, protein intake matters most (see here for list of nutritional studies).

Beyond your protein intake, the rest of your macros don’t matter nearly as much.
For fat, a good minimum to shoot for is 0.3 grams per pound of body weight per day, OR 0.66 grams per kilogram of body weight, per day to ensure you are getting enough essential fatty acids.
Fill in the rest of your calorie budget with however many carbs or fats works best for you.
Eating lots of high fat foods will use up much of your calorie budget and can make it hard to get enough carbs and proteins to support an exercise regimen.
Carbs, after calories, are the most important dietary factor in being able to recover from training, and the harder you train, the more carbs you should have to ensure proper recovery.

Take your “before” measurements.
Estimate your TDEE.
- Expect to have to adjust this number.
Set a daily calorie goal.
- Best place to start is by reducing your TDEE by 10-20% (TDEE x 0.9-0.8). You will want to avoid going under 20% less than your TDEE. Going too far below your TDEE will increase the likelihood of malnourishment, muscle loss, low energy, inadequate fat intake for hormonal balance, and cycles of restriction followed by binge eating.
Track your calorie consumption.
- Recommend the nSuns Adaptive TDEE Spreadsheet, which will adjust its estimate of your TDEE over time. Track everything you eat and drink, including additives and toppings.
Take regular progress measurements.
- Weight should generally be measured once a day (or at least once a week), preferably unclothed and on an empty stomach. Don’t sweat day-to-day fluctuations – track the trend over time.
Adjust your diet over time.
- As you lose weight, your TDEE will inevitably go down – less mass requires fewer calories to fuel. This means that your starting calorie goal will eventually no longer cause weight loss, and you will need to adjust it down.
Regularly take maintenance breaks.
- To minimize muscle loss and maximize health, adherence and performance, Renaissance Periodization recommends an absolute maximum of 12 weeks in a weight loss phase at no more than 0.8% of bodyweight lost per week, and then spending an equivalent amount of time in a maintenance phase.
Expect to be hungry.

You are not losing weight because you are not eating at a calorie deficit.

You must either eat less, or be more physically active.
Calorie balance is really all there is to it, and the chances that you have an undiagnosed metabolic disorder are astonishingly small.
This 1992 study demonstrates perfectly – all subjects with a history of difficulty losing weight had no significant variance in their metabolic rate (ie, they did not have “slow metabolisms”) and wildly under-reported the amount of calories they were eating and significantly over-estimated their activity levels.

Keep in mind the following important points:

TDEE calculators are an estimate only and never to be taken as gospel if it’s in conflict with your results on the scale.
Body weight can fluctuate by five pounds a day or more due to factors such as food, urine, feces, water, and glycogen. There is no need to be concerned just because your weight is not constantly moving downwards. You should be tracking a trend over multiple weeks before worrying.
If you’ve recently started a low carb or ketogenic diet, you likely experienced a rapid up front loss of weight that slowed down significantly afterwards. This was water weight and glycogen stores – not true weight loss – and should not be used as a barometer for your future weight loss.