The Best Meal Plan To Build Muscle Faster

You need to make sure you’re accomplishing 3 things for an effective muscle building diet plan: eating at a slight calorie deficit, eating adequate protein every day, and not eating like complete crap. These will account for let’s say 90% of the muscle growth you experience from your bulking meal plan. But what muscle building foods and nutrition tips can we incorporate to get that extra 10%? Well, there are a few additional things we can do when it comes to how to diet to gain muscle and what to eat to build muscle faster that can help speed up the muscle building process. And I’ll show you exactly how to do just that and provide you with a sample muscle building meal plan here.

The first thing you’ll want to do for an effective muscle building diet plan is take your daily protein intake and spread that out into ideally 4-5 meals throughout the day with each of them having a minimum of 20g of protein. It also makes sense to ingest an adequate amount of protein shortly before sleep since that’s the longest period you’ll go without food. That’s also why you might want to bias a little more of your daily protein towards this pre-sleep meal with at least 40g of slow digesting protein.

The next tip here is to incorporate “muscle building foods”. First, you want to opt for high quality protein sources that are not only high in leucine content, but also high in digestibility. In addition to this, you can opt for more unsaturated fats as opposed to saturated fats, which may bias more of the weight you put on to be muscle as opposed to fat. Olive oil and salmon specifically are two unsaturated fat sources I’d highly recommend incorporating in your muscle building diet.

Now the last tip when it comes to how to diet to gain muscle here is to periodize your diet. Although we want most of the weight you put on to be muscle, it will always come with a bit of fat gain with it. And as your body fat creeps up during a bulk, you actually become less efficient at putting on muscle. Meaning, that as you continue to gain weight and your body fat slowly creeps up, then it would be best to occasionally “re-sensitize” your body for more efficient growth by stripping off some of the excess fat you put on before you continue to focus on gaining more weight again.

So, to sum up all the muscle building nutrition tips covered:

1. Evenly distribute your protein throughout the day into 4-5 meals, each consisting of at least 20g of a high quality protein source. Biasing more of your protein (at least 40g) towards a pre-sleep meal is also a good idea to stimulate protein synthesis overnight.

2. Optimize your food choices. Opt for higher quality protein sources and incorporate more unsaturated fat instead of saturated fat (olive and salmon oil may be the most beneficial). This may enable more of the weight you gain to be muscle as opposed to fat.

3. Periodize your diet by transitioning through phases of a calorie surplus (e.g. 3 months) with phases of a calorie deficit (e.g. 1 month). This way you’ll be able to occasionally re-sensitize your body to put on muscle more efficiently.