Gaining lean muscle helps improve your appearance and your health. A body that has more lean muscle looks toned and fit. Lean muscle also helps you better manage your weight because muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue. You cannot gain lean muscle without a structured resistance training program. You must also follow a healthy diet to maximize your exercise efforts.
Features
To promote lean muscle gain, you must consume slightly more calories than you burn. Go for about 250 to 500 more calories a day that can be directed to helping your muscles repair and grow. Eating too many extra calories will cause you to put on fat pounds, and starving your muscles with too few calories will not encourage their growth.
Types of Food
Do not eat just anything to up your calorie intake. Calories must come from quality sources like lean proteins, low-fat dairy, whole grains, vegetables, fruits and unsaturated fats. Examples of good proteins are egg whites, skinless poultry, lean ground bison, whey protein, beans and non-fat Greek yogurt. Go for one percent or skim milk, low-fat cottage cheese and plain yogurt. Choose non-starchy, leafy vegetables like broccoli, romaine lettuce, arugula and spinach. Whole grain choices include quinoa, brown rice, and whole wheat pastas and breads. Seek out unsaturated fats like those found in olive oil and nuts, or foods high in omega-3 fatty acids like salmon and ground flax seed.
Foods To Avoid
Highly processed foods will derail your efforts to build muscle. Excessive sodium causes bloating. Too much sugar adds calories without nutrition. Refined flours offer little in the way of nutrition and spark cravings. Too much saturated fat---found in fatty cuts of meat and full-fat dairy---may promote fat gain and health problems, warns the American Heart Association. Trans fats, a man-made fat present in many processed and fast foods, can actually cause fat gain even if you carefully watch your calorie intake, concludes a study on monkeys published in a 2007 issue of the journal Obesity.
Protein
Your diet should also feature a higher than standard intake of protein. Kristine Clark, Ph.D., R.D., of Penn State's Center for Sports Medicine, writes on the Oxygen Magazine website that the average person needs just .25 to .5 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, but when you seek to add lean muscle mass, men and women should increase that intake to between 1 and 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight. Your body needs the amino acids in protein to help repair and synthesize muscles broken down during weight training.
Timing
Three, large square meals will not assist your muscle building efforts as well as will several mini-meals consumed throughout the day. Eating your calories in smaller doses at regular intervals keeps your metabolism revved and maximizes the use of nutrients. If you overload your body with protein, for example, it will only use 30 g to help with muscle development---the rest is simply excreted as shown by a study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in September 2009.
Eating a quality meal containing protein and a small serving of carbohydrates right after your strength-training workout will also help your body build lean muscle faster and more effectively. Convenient foods like whey protein shakes or soy or whey protein meal replacement bars can help enhance strength training-induced lean muscle mass, according to an Ohio State University study in the Journal of Nutrition in 2004.
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