Uploaded September 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The Path to your Goal Physique: thinkeatlift.com/path
My FREE ebooks: thinkeatlift.com
Video about Setting Calories: thinkeatlift.com/calories-when-bulking
My Training Program: thinkeatlift.com/ggp
The overall philosophy of gaining muscle
This section will show you where most of your focus needs to go.
When your goal is muscle growth, your training is much more important than your nutrition.
The reason for that is because training is the actual stimulus for muscle growth, nutrition is only permissive. Increased tension overload is what stimulates the growth of the muscle fibers and what you eat just supplies the raw materials for that.
A lot of guys think that they can get muscular by having a complicated diet, I used to be like that too, but in reality you just need to eat enough food to allow the adaptations to happen. You can't get muscular through diet alone if your strength is not progressing.
So when lean bulking, the main focus should be on getting your training right. And in terms of nutrition you have to make sure you're eating enough food to be in a slight surplus.
That's it, that's the overall philosophy. Now let me share how I'm going to setup my nutrition and training.
Nutrition
As we talked about earlier, eating for muscle gains is extremely simple:
Eat enough food to gain weight
Eat enough protein to support muscle growth
Eat a good balance of fats and carbs to support training performance and health
Very simple stuff.
The only thing that's more complicated is figuring out how much you need to eat to make lean gains.
When your goal is to gain muscle with minimum fat then you need to eat the maximum amount of nutrients your body can use for muscle growth but not go over that limit. All calories above that limit will be turned into body fat, but will not accelerate muscle growth.
So how much should we eat?
I explained this in detail in a video I made 2 months ago, but I'm going to give the short answer here too.
In short: how much you need to eat depends on how fast you can gain muscle.
The Path to your Goal Physique: thinkeatlift.com/path
My FREE ebooks: thinkeatlift.com
Video about Setting Calories: thinkeatlift.com/calories-when-bulking
My Training Program: thinkeatlift.com/ggp
The overall philosophy of gaining muscle
This section will show you where most of your focus needs to go.
When your goal is muscle growth, your training is much more important than your nutrition.
The reason for that is because training is the actual stimulus for muscle growth, nutrition is only permissive. Increased tension overload is what stimulates the growth of the muscle fibers and what you eat just supplies the raw materials for that.
A lot of guys think that they can get muscular by having a complicated diet, I used to be like that too, but in reality you just need to eat enough food to allow the adaptations to happen. You can't get muscular through diet alone if your strength is not progressing.
So when lean bulking, the main focus should be on getting your training right. And in terms of nutrition you have to make sure you're eating enough food to be in a slight surplus.
That's it, that's the overall philosophy. Now let me share how I'm going to setup my nutrition and training.
Nutrition
As we talked about earlier, eating for muscle gains is extremely simple:
Eat enough food to gain weight
Eat enough protein to support muscle growth
Eat a good balance of fats and carbs to support training performance and health
Very simple stuff.
The only thing that's more complicated is figuring out how much you need to eat to make lean gains.
When your goal is to gain muscle with minimum fat then you need to eat the maximum amount of nutrients your body can use for muscle growth but not go over that limit. All calories above that limit will be turned into body fat, but will not accelerate muscle growth.
So how much should we eat?
I explained this in detail in a video I made 2 months ago, but I'm going to give the short answer here too.
In short: how much you need to eat depends on how fast you can gain muscle.
