![]() ![]() If you’re looking for the biggest bang for your nutrient buck, the best place to look is whole foods. Nutrients give your body nourishment, allowing for growth, muscle recovery, energy, and quite frankly, the maintenance of life-think vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, fiber, water, nitric oxide, and other phytonutrients. The nutrient density of a food is the amount of nutrients you can obtain from it, given the number of calories it contains. To determine which foods will help most, it’s important to consider not only calories but also nutrient density. You just need to consume the healthy foods you enjoy most, with sufficient calorie quantities, and you’ve got it made. Check out this clip:Īs simple as this sounds, implementing this approach into daily life is the real struggle. ![]() If you’re interested in learning more, Matt Frazier and I do a full breakdown of macronutrients in our new book, The Plant-Based Athlete, and not that long ago I shared the technique above, along with my own caloric needs, in an interview for the No Meat Athlete Academy. Combine that with resistance weight training, and you’re on your way to muscle-town. In order to gain muscle, you would need to consume more than 2,500 calories, ideally from mostly real plant foods. If you expend 2,500 calories per day, you need to consume 2,500 calories per day just to maintain weight. This gives you the approximate number of total calories you expend daily… your calorie needs. BMR is the amount of calories you expend simply by existing, based on your gender, age, height, and weight.Ĭombine that number with your actual activity level-any additional movements beyond just existing, like walking the dog, running errands, hitting the gym, or walking up a flight of stairs. Start with finding your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) using the Harris-Benedict equation. Not guessing, or estimating, or assuming characteristics about your current habits, but real, raw data based on who you are and what you do.īelieve it or not, it’s much easier to figure out than you might think. Your quest to build muscle on a plant-based diet relies on understanding your true macronutrient and calorie needs. Thankfully, over time I started to figure it out, and I grew from weighing 120 pounds in 1995 when I went vegan, to a 210-pound champion bodybuilder at my peak, built entirely by plants (and hard work in the gym).Įven if you’ve struggled with building muscle in the past (while plant-based or not), I’m confident you can bulk up when you apply the strategies, habits, foods, and exercises necessary to achieve your goals.Īnd it all starts with nutrition. So little, in fact, that I had to rely almost entirely on trial and error. When I first started my plant-based, muscle-building journey many years ago, there wasn’t much publicly available on the subject. I’m sharing those keys to success with you today so that you too can achieve your bodybuilding and fitness goals. After decades of learning from personal failures and successes, I have officially cracked the code on how to truly build and sustain muscle. ![]() I’ve been there-desperately hoping to gain muscle on a plant-based diet. ![]() And supporting your athletic endeavors with a plant-based diet can be challenging too, especially if you’ve only recently gone vegan. Let’s face it, building muscle is hard, no matter what “diet” you follow. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |