How To Gain Weight But Not Fat

If you're wondering how to gain weight, the first thing to keep in mind is that you want to gain muscular bodyweight, and not fat. Unless you're a genetic marvel you should know that you'll almost certainly gain a small amount of fat as well, because it's tough to eat enough food to add muscle without the body storing some of the extra food as fat.

Certainly you will need to step up the amount of food that you eat. It's easier to do this as a gradual process, so that your body can adapt to the extra food. Just as important is to eat quality food, not junk. Here is a way to work out how much you should be eating if you wandering how to gain weight;

Let's assume that your diet consists of 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and 20% fat. I'm not saying that all diets should fall into this pattern, this is for illustration purposes.

You will need to keep track of your lean body mass, to make sure that you're adding mostly muscle and not fat.

Let's say that your lean mass is 150lb. You will need one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, so that's 150 grams protein - which will form 30% of your total calories a day in the example above. One gram of protein equals four calories, so that's 600 calories from protein a day.

Remember that equals 30% of your total intake, so your daily total will be 2000 calories a day. Half of that will be carbohydrate, which is 1000 calories. One gram of carbohydrate is four calories, which means you'll eat 250 grams of carbohydrate daily. The remaining 400 calories is fat intake, and know that 1 gram of fat equals 9 calories, which comes out at 44.4 grams of fat a day. (Aim for good fats and not saturated ones.)

So to sum up, 2000 calories a day - broken down as 250 grams carbohydrate, 150 grams protein and 44 grams of fat. This may be more food than you're used to, and the easiest way to tackle it is to divide your meals up into five or even better six meals a day - eating more often means you can keep the meals slightly smaller, and this also helps speed your metabolism up, which will make fat burning easier.

Of course, as you put weight on, you'll have to recalculate and add more food gradually as you go if you want to keep gaining weight.

That will give enough fuel to your muscles to allow them to grow. Next, you need a well planned bodybuilding routine - this is how to gain weight without getting fat.

You'll want to concentrate on major compound exercises like the squat, dead lift and leg press for the lower body, and the chin up, dip, bench and overhead presses for the upper body.

A big mistake a lot of amateur bodybuilders make in their quest of how to gain weight is that they neglect to train their legs - your legs contain some of the largest muscles in your body. The quickest way to gain weight is to build up the largest muscles in your body first.

Know also that over two thirds of your muscle mass is contained in the legs and back - this is why squats and dead lifts are the two muscle builders par excellence, so make sure you learn how to do them, and then train them hard.

Understanding how to design and plan home workout routines that will work for your body is perhaps the most important part of bodybuilding.