How Many Calories Do I Need To Grow?

I’m sure all of you guys who are serious about your training have asked this question at one point in your life. I’m also quite sure it’s been met with a different answer each time.

- Coach John Berry

What I plan to do in this article is give you all the information you need to reach your muscle building goals. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll be able to go away and put a plan of action in motion, so that you can finally gain those inches of muscle you’ve been chasing for so long.

WORK OUT YOUR MAINTENANCE CALORIES

Before you do anything else, we need to work out what YOUR maintenance calories are; this is straight forward but does require a little work.

Start by logging your calorie intake for seven days. You are looking for the number of calories you consume to keep you at a maintenance weight (or close to it, with a small fluctuation of around 1-3lbs up or down). You might need to repeat this process a few times to get it right, but this needs to be done to make this whole structure SUIT YOU. For this you can use an app to track your daily intake and use the scale at a regular time each day to track what your weight is doing. Once you’ve worked out the average number of calories it takes to maintain your weight, we can get onto the good stuff!

For this article, I will use an example of a 90kg male consuming roughly 3000 calories per day for maintenance.

The first thing we need to calculate is a calorie surplus; for men I like to use a scale of 200-500 calories above maintenance - 200 calories for a smaller male and 500 calories for a larger male.