Why trying to stay lean is killing your muscle gains

If you’re already lean, training hard and still not gaining muscle, there’s a good chance that the thing you’re most proud of is exactly what’s holding you back. For years, I did everything right, solid training, high protein, consistent habits, and yet there was a period where I was completely stalled out with my muscle gain and strength. And the reason was not my training, is that I simply wasn’t eating enough to fuel growth because I was so focused on being ripped. Here’s the truth. It took me too long to learn. Once you’re lean, trying too hard to stay lean can become the very thing that caps your progress. At some point, you don’t need more discipline, you need more energy. However, this does not mean that you need to gain a bunch of excess fat and look like garbage. If that’s happening, there’s something seriously wrong with your process.
There’s a way to do this that doesn’t result in you becoming a puffy marshmallow, and instead means that you consistently look better whether you’re in a fat loss period or not. And means that over time, your body composition actually improves, meaning that ultimately you get leaner. In this video, I’m going to take you through that exact process so that once you’re lean, you can start gaining muscle as fast as possible. And as a result, get your strength, physique, and ultimately your body composition to that next level. If you’re overweight, this probably isn’t your problem right now, but if you’re lean, training hard and still stuck, this is for you. Whether your goal is strength, SARS, longgevity, or simply being as lean and shredded as possible, there are three reasons why you need to spend a large amount of time actively gaining mass. The first is that being lean only works when you have enough muscle.
You don’t look that good if you’re lean and small, you just look skinny. But more importantly, you can only get so lean with a certain amount of muscle mass. The more muscle mass you build, the lower body fat percentage you can get to and naturally maintain. Once you hit a limit of leanness, the only way to look better and continue getting leaner is by gaining muscle. The second reason is that muscle growth requires energy. While your body can build muscle in a calorie deficit, and in the early days, it very likely will. The leaner and more advanced you get, the harder this becomes. A few years into my training career, I’d gotten to the point of leanness where restricting calories just meant my body didn’t have enough resources to make gains. And at the time I thought this was a training problem, but you can chase the perfect training routine all you want.
Ultimately, training is relatively simple. Push hard and get stronger. But what I was missing is that this will only work if you eat enough. Your body simply builds muscle more effectively when it is in a sustained state of surplus energy. And the third reason is that the only way to provide your body with that energy and build that muscle is by sucking up and not getting leaner for now. And this part isn’t so much a nutrition problem, but a psychology problem, because the tricky part isn’t getting your nutrition right. I’ll show you exactly how to do that. The tricky part is committing to an extended period of weight gain, especially when you’ve worked so hard to cut down and get lean, because it feels like you’ll lose all your progress. But if you’ve done the fat loss part well, this is the fastest possible way forward for gaining muscle, for getting stronger, and ultimately for getting to a lower body fat percentage sustainably.
And when I finally did this is when everything changed for me. I went from stuck at around 70 kilos to 80 kilos at the same body composition over a few short years. And for the first time in years, training started working again. I very quickly blasted through all my plateaus and in not too long started reaching lifetime strength goals. And at the same time, my energy skyrocketed, I started looking better, filling out clothes. I started feeling better, mood, motivation, libido, not to mention the mental freedom of being able to eat whatever you want. And then the next time that I did cut down, not only was it easy, I looked like a different person, but all this only happened once I stopped trying to stay lean all the time and started fueling growth. Here’s how you can do that effectively. If your diet is not set up properly, your appetite is going to work against you in this process.
You want to fix that first, because the problem is if you don’t nourish your body properly, your appetite won’t be able to function properly and you’ll be stuck in this constant battle against your hunger signals to try and not overdo it and gain excess fat. All of this is far easier if we have our bodies working for us rather than against us, because the less we have to think and use willpower, the better. Doing this does not need to be complicated. Get a nutritious base into your routine. I get it done in one well-planned meal a day once you have the base of your diet in place. Appetite is then your greatest guard to what you need. To max out muscle gain, you only need about 100 to 300 calories over maintenance per day. Beyond that, more food won’t help, but getting that energy in is essential.
And the bulletproof easy way of getting this right is just to listen to your body. If you’re hungry, eat more. If you’ve got your nutrition basics right, this should work perfectly. If you’re scared of overdoing it and want to be conservative, especially when you’re just transitioning into this, then you can track your calories and actually hit a target until you feel comfortable with it. What I’d also suggest doing regardless is to also track your body weight day to day. That way you can watch the trend and know objectively that you’re not overdoing things. If you’re transitioning from a deficit, expect to see a sharp initial spark of one or two kilos, and then you want to see yourself settling into a steady increase in weight over time of somewhere around half a kilo to a kilo a month. If you want to make figuring out all these numbers a bit easier, I’ve made a simple calculator.
You can download it in the description below. Chuck in your numbers and you can get an estimate of your muscle gain, calories and a guard of projected weight gain. Once you’ve got that clear, we can move on. And this next step is where most people mess up because even if they do finally decide to eat more, they never train in a way that actually turns that extra energy into muscle mass. Let me show you how to avoid that. If you are not getting stronger, there is no point to the surplus. The key thing to remember is that nutrition, while essential, is facilitative of this muscle growth. And what this means is that our calorie surplus is necessary for building muscle, but in itself, it’s not sufficient. One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that you can force muscle gain by force feeding. You can’t.
The one and only way to stimulate muscle growth is through your strength training. Training is still and will always be the driver of growth. So if you want to make the most of this calorie surplus, then you should be pushing as hard as possible to get stronger every single time you train, and you should be seeing tangible improvements in your strength at least monthly. So not eating enough is going to inhibit your body’s ability to respond to the signal you send through training, but calories won’t do the work for you. Your body needs a clear signal to respond to, to know where to put those calories to work. If neither your strength or your weight are increasing consistently, you can bump your intake up one to 200 calories a day until it starts to work. You might at this point be wondering, how do I get leaner over time by eating in a calorie surplus?
And if you are, then you are thinking exactly the right way, because if you do not have a plan to lose fat, it is going to seep into your gaining phases and cripple your results. You need a sustained period of time to be in a calorie surplus to build significant amounts of muscle. For best results, we’re talking three months minimum, three to nine being optimal. The more advanced you get, the more relevant this becomes. As I said, you can get away with a lot as a beginner. The further on you get with this, the smarter we need to be. So when do you cut body fat and get leaner? The simple answer is to run distinct cuts in between these periods of gaining to reset your body fat down and get leaner. And we just want to keep these short, sharp, and results based. I’ll save the how to fat loss for another video, but the rule of thumb I work with is that once you are relatively lean, aim to spend no more than 12 weeks per year in a calorie deficit, losing fat.
That gives us a solid nine months every year to slowly, steadily gain muscle. And that, in my experience, is how you make serious progress. You will not need any more time than that cutting if you follow this gains process properly. If your basic diet’s good, you will not gain excessive amounts of fat. I still look great after a long period of gains. Maybe I gain a bit of fat and don’t look peak as an Instagram photo level, but arguably actually peak in terms of just general life, how it looking, clothes, energy levels, mood, and my ability to enjoy myself. And so within those boundaries, you can structure things how you want. 12 weeks of gains followed by a short four-week cut if you want to keep things tighter, or if you want to do a more seasonal approach, nine months of solid gains followed by a longer 12-week cut to get really lean.
I just track these things and kind of decide how I go based on how I’m feeling the season and what I’m motivated to do. If you stay within these limits, excitement is generally a very good cue to listen to. So if it’s been three months, once you’re sick of gaining, feel free to transition to a cut. It won’t be long before you’re ready to get back onto gaining muscle because that’ll become much more exciting for you. Regardless of how you approach things, just keep the two phases distinct. Cutting time is fat loss time, and when you’re gaining, just gain. Even if it’s hard initially, don’t be worried about incidental fat gain. There will be plenty of time to hit a deficit and knock that fat off again. If you want to be in the best position possible by the time you get there, then just gain as much muscle as possible.
Every bit of muscle you gain in the next few months is going to make everything better for you for years to come. And hey, enjoy it. There are genuinely few things more satisfying than training hard, eating well, and watching your body grow stronger every week. Hope this helps. Speak soon.