You are probably asking yourself what you need to do to put on muscle mass, especially in the legs. You might be a leaner person and have struggled for the majority of your life to put on weight. It is a real issue and you have properly tried with little progress. You might have followed a program and even looked through various videos online which show various techniques of building muscle.

Let’s educate ourselves on the process of building muscle (regardless of whether it’s the legs or not). We need increased stress or volume placed on the muscle through resistance training- tiny tears occur within the muscle belly and recover over time with increased size.

You’ve probably already heard the above and actually implemented progressive overload into your training. From here, it’s important to take control of nutrition variables. Eating at a surplus is a must for those who are pushing themselves in training. Not just to fuel training sessions (which is also an added benefit) but also to ensure that the body is in the best state to build on its current size.

The role of nutrition when it comes to building the legs is aimed at giving the body the resources necessary to rebuild and repair damaged muscle tissue that occurs when performing resistance training.

We will dive into a breakdown of the calories and macro focus for growing those legs.

A higher carbohydrate diet allows for increased performance and allows for a longer duration of high work output for the muscle.

Positive hormonal changes occur when someone eats at a surplus which creates a great environment for muscle production (or the rebuilding and repair of damaged tissue). The opposite occurs when eating in a deficit of calories, the body is in a state of stress and the hormones follow.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates (a macronutrient) are the main source of energy used during weight training. Increasing your carb intake to support the training demands of resistance training is important as 30%-40% of carbohydrate stores can be used throughout the course of a session.

The amount: generally- 4-7g of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight per day.

Fats

Lean mass gains have been frequently shown to impair the body’s ability to put on lean tissue in a ketogenic or high-fat diet.

Keeping fats above 15-20% is advised as anything lower than this generally makes it a lot harder to prepare meals and consume the calories required to push into a surplus. Fat is used in the transportation of essential vitamins throughout the body A D E and K. Taking care of your health is also important for growing muscle as sickness and disease will set you way back in regards to training.

The amount: generally- 20% of total calorie intake.

Weight gain itself and also lean tissue is not really affected by whether the main source of energy is coming from carbs or fat as long as you’re eating at a surplus of calories you will be muscle-building. Training however can be affected by restricted consumption of carbohydrates- due to the potential reduction in energy stores used to progressively overload the muscle in training sessions.

Protein

Responsible for the rebuild and repair of damaged muscle tissue (which is what happens when you train). Protein synthesis has been found to occur most efficiently when consuming 1.8 – 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. There is a lot of talk at the moment about increasing this amount by even more with little backed-up evidence of 2.5 – 3.3 grams per kilogram of body weight.

If we now link this back to building mass on the legs there is no fruit or meat that is going to put muscle mass on the legs only. This generally comes up to the amount of tonnage (weight x reps x sets) that the legs are enduring over the course of a week/ month/ year. It is cumulative stress that the body can endure which causes an increase in the size of the muscle.

A way to break it into a simple form is to think of it like this. Put yourself into the best possible muscle-building state, followed by a steady increase in the amount of stress the legs can handle, expressed in an increase in tonnage that the legs move over a period of time.

Increase the stress on the leg muscles, eat enough to recover and you will notice growth.

Find out more about how you can train to build leg mass or muscle mass at our upcoming seminar: Build Your Leg Mass.

When: Saturday 9th April | From 10.30 am – 11.30 am
⁣Where: XGYM h146 24-32 Lexington Drive, Bella Vista⁣
This is a free event and non-members are welcome!⁣

Click here to register: https://xgym.uhp-pt.com.au/xgym-seminar-build-leg-mass