The objective with any muscle gain phase is pretty straight forward but most people actually have two goals when they say they want to gain muscle. They want to gain as much muscle as possible while minimizing or preventing any fat gain. The second option isn't usually all that possible or easy but we can still look to minimize it. So how do you set up your goal to accomplish this?
When setting up your diet, the RP Diet Coach app provides you with the ability to set your goal weight target and timeline for your muscle gain phase. Please note that on average, we recommend around 0.125% - 0.5% of your body weight to be the rate of gain per week. For those that are highly advanced, being closer to the lower number is likely your best bet. For those that are brand new, being closer to 0.5% per week is recommended. Lastly, if you are intermediate, falling somewhere in the middle is usually best.
Examples:
- 150 pound beginner going into your very first muscle gain phase, opting for 0.5% of weight gain per week would be best. This would equate to around 3 pounds gained per month.
- 180 pound advanced lifter who is seasoned in muscle gain phases, opting for 0.125% of weight gain per week would find them gaining around 0.225 pounds per week. This is just under 1 pound per month.
- 170 pound intermediate who is looking to still pack on as much as they can, will again find that something closer to the middle is best. Perhaps 0.3% of weight gain, which is around 0.5 pounds per week or around 2 pounds per month.
You will see in the example above, setting the goal to around half a pound per week is likely most closely aligned with an intermediate lifter who still has quite a bit of muscle they can pack on and are not yet an advanced lifter.
Setting Muscle Gain Length:
The longer you can find yourself in a muscle gain phase, the better. You can generally break these up with maintenance phases as well, but if the idea is to gain as much muscle as possible, spending large portions of time in a fat loss phase is just taking time away where you can be adding on more muscle. There are health constraints and possible staleness constraints both physically and mentally by spending all of your time in a muscle gain phase so it is absolutely recommended to switch to maintenance and eventually fat loss with time. So for length, set it for 8 weeks or up to 16 weeks. Which ever fits better with your long term goals and your future events or plans. If you have a wedding coming up in 20 weeks that you want to be super lean for, and you spend the next 16 weeks in a muscle gain phase, 4 weeks after likely isn't enough time to lean back down. So be aware of the time needed for future events or goals and get to packing on the muscle!