Gain muscle mass and hypertrophy are two goals perhaps more difficult than losing fat , because for this we need, first, increase calorie intake, and making mistakes in the calculations may mean that we accumulate more fat than desired.
And if in addition, to this we add the great myths that today continue to spread , the result can be catastrophic.
“You have to eat five or six times, every three hours”
One of the great myths is the affirmation that if we want to gain muscle mass or hypertrophy, we should eat food every two or three hours at most, that is, we should make between five and seven food intakes a day .
When our goal is to gain muscle mass , it is clear that we should eat more calories than we spend, which should be supervised by a dietitian-nutritionist who are trained professionals , but this does not mean that we have to eat a certain number of calories. sometimes or every so often, as this can lead to a state of stress if it is impossible for us to eat every three hours due to our working hours.
Therefore, what we must do is organize ourselves based on our schedules and distribute the total calories to be consumed among the number of meals that, for our day to day, we can “assume”: it can be three meals, four, seven .. . what really matters is the total calories ingiramos (but this does not mean that we can get from any source of food because it is not the same for example the fat of an avocado or salmon that bacon or of a package of sausages) and between one meal and another and we are hungry and end up biting between hours .
“In each intake we must take 20 grams of protein”
Another myth is the need to ingest 20 grams of protein in each ingestion . Neither maximum intake nor minimum or individualization for each person is what we come to say with this myth. That is, both a person weighing 60 kilos and 90 who want to increase muscle mass should ingest 20 grams of protein in each meal intake made at the end of the day.
The “normal” values of protein intake are around 1.8-8.5 grams of protein per kilo of body weight , so for an average adult weighing about 80 kilos, the daily intake of protein would be between 144-200 grams of protein . If we take into account that recommended intake of 20 grams of protein in each meal, assuming that we are in the maximum intake of 200 grams of daily protein, we would be talking about having to make 10 meals! up to date.
“You have to consume 20% more calories”
Another affirmation many times repeated is that the calorie intake should be 20% higher than the maintenance calories . Again, incurring the topic of not individualizing the intake for each person, they again ignored the phrase “each person is a world”.
To affirm with totality that the total of calories of more to consume is of 20% can take us to error, since that percentage of more can be excessive. What we can say is that the excess calories to eat to gain muscle mass is between 10-20% , so playing with this fan can be much more beneficial.
In addition, we must not forget that by ingesting more calories than we spend, a percentage of these calories ingested more will be stored in the form of fat (it is impossible for 100% to be stored in the form of muscle), so that The higher the percentage of calories we eat, the greater the percentage that is stored in the form of fat.
“The supplements are essential”
And here one of the star myths: “supplements are essential to gain muscle mass . ” The supplements are precisely that: supplements and that their purpose is to complete a deficit contribution of macronutrients, vitamins or amino acids (for example) that we may need due to our diet or our daily physical activity.
If we have gone to a professional dietitian-nutritionist and we do not have any food intolerance, it is more than likely that we do not need any type of supplements, so to say this kind of thing does not obey a scientific basis.
Eye, with this I do not mean that the supplements are not useful. There are certain supplements such as whey protein, the creative ( however much Beatriz Rico says it is very harmful and she did it very badly ) or the Omega-3 that can be useful depending on the cases .