Intermittent fasting lean muscle gain dieting is becoming very popular with natural trainees wanting to build muscle while limiting fat gain, something that’s usually very difficult!
An IF bulk could be the way to get the job done and force your body to use the excess calories for building slabs of lean muscle rather than laying down fat.
In this article I’ll explain exactly how to set up your Intermittent Fasting lean muscle gain diet and show you exactly how you should be eating for lean muscle gains!
4 Steps To Setting Up Your IF Bulk Diet
Setting up your Intermittent Fasting lean muscle gain diet is easy, the 4 steps we’ll go through are:
- Set Calorie Intake
- Set Protein Intake
- Set Carb Intake
- Set Fat Intake
Prelude
When you follow an intermittent fasting style of eating you fast for 16 hours everyday, this never changes. When it’s time to eat, the type of foods you eat change depending on whether it’s a workout day or not.
Here’s a brief overview of how you’d eat:
Rest Days – Calorie deficit, high protein, low-moderate carb, moderate fat
Workout Days – Calorie Overfeeding, high protein, high carb, low-moderate fat
As you’ve probably guessed this means have different daily nutritional targets depending if it’s a rest day or a workout day.
Before we can give you your personal intermittent fasting lean muscle gain diet plan targets, I recommend you get a pen and paper or a file open where you can record your targets as you work through the steps. Your template to begin with should look like this:
Rest Days
Calories:
Protein:
Carbs:
Fat:
Workout Days
Calories:
Protein:
Carbs:
Fat:
Step 1 – Set Calorie Intake
As with any diet calories matter and this intermittent fasting lean muscle gain diet is no different. You simply cannot build muscle out of wishful thinking (lord knows I’ve tried)!
You need to provide your body with an excess of calories so it’s got the fuel to make you bigger.
Knowing how many calories you’ll need is the first step, but before we know how many you need to gain weight, we need to know how many it takes to maintain your current weight.
Action 1: Establish Maintenance Calories
We need to calculate our maintenance calories (i.e. the number of calories you can eat and MAINTAIN your current weight). The easiest way to do this is to multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 15.
Example: If you weigh 180 pounds multiply this by 15 = 2700 calories to maintain your weight
Progress Check:
Action 2: Set Rest Day Calories
On rest days calorie intake is set at 90% of maintenance calories. We calculate this by multiplying our maintenance calories by 0.9.
Example: Our 180 pound dieter has a maintenance of 2700 calories, multiply this by 0.9 which gives you 2430 calories. This is 90% of the original 2550 calories.
Progress Check:
Action 3: Set Workout Day Calories
On workout days you eat more calories than you need, this is the time to consume the majority of the extra calories as your body will preferentially store them in your muscles.
On workout days we set calorie intake at 125% of maintenance calories. To calculate this we multiply your maintenance calories by 1.25.
Example: Our 180 pound dieter has a maintenance intake of is 2700 calories, multiply that by 1.25 which gives us 3375 calories. This is 125% of the original 2700 calories.
Progress Check:
Step 2 – Set Protein Intake
Protein intake is kept stable and consistent everyday of the Intermittent Fasting lean muscle gain diet and it is set at 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight. To calculate this you multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 1.5.
Example: Our 180 pound dieter would multiply 180 x 1.5 to get 270 grams of protein per day.
Progress Check:
Step 3 – Setting Carb Intake
Action 1: Set Rest Day Carb Intake
Carb intake is set at 0.75 grams per pound of bodyweight on rest days.
Example: Our 180 pound dieter would multiply 180 x 0.75 to get 135 grams of carbs per day.
Progress Check:
Action 2: Set Workout Day Carb Intake
Workout day carb intake is set at 2.5g per lb, to calculate this multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 2.5
Example: Our 180 pound dieter multiplies their weight by 2.5 and gets 450 grams of carbs per day.
Progress Check:
Step 3 – Setting Fat Intake
Your fat intake will be different on rest days and workout days but the way to calculate how much fat to eat on these days is the same.
Before you start, let’s check we’ve got the rest of our diet plan targets in place; you should have your calories, protein and carb targets for both rest days and training days:
Rest Days
Calories: 2550
Protein: 270g
Carbs: 135g
Fat:
Workout Days
Calories: 3375
Protein: 270g
Carbs: 450g
Fat:
We now need to calculate how much fat you should eat to complete your intermittent fasting lean muscle gain diet plan.
Rest Days
Action 1: Calculate Rest Day Calories Already Allocated
Using my example above you can see that on rest days our dieter is allocated 2550 calories per day.
To know how much fat they should eat each day we need to know how many of the 2550 calories are already allocated to protein and carbs. Once we know that we’ll know the remainder of calories left for us to allocate to fat.
There are 4 calories in every gram of protein and carbs, this means we simply multiply the number of grams by 4 to find out how many calories are in that amount of each nutrient.
Example:270g of protein x 4 = 1080 calories allocated to protein135g of carbs x 4 = 540 calories allocated to carbs
We then add these together (1080 + 540) which gives us 1620 calories, this is the amount of calories already allocated to protein and carbs.
Progress Check:
Action 2: Calculate Rest Day Calories Remaining
So we know that on intermittent fasting lean muscle gain diet rest days our dieter is allocated a total of 2550 calories per day.
We also know that protein and carbs take up 1620 calories; this means we have 930 calories remaining, these calories will be allocated to fat.
Progress Check:
Action 3: Allocate Remaining Calories To Fat
Fat has 9 calories per gram, as we know that we have 930 calories remaining we simply divide this by 9.
Example: 930 calories divided by 9 = 103g of fat per day.
Progress Check:
Workout Days
To calculate how much fat to eat on workout days we follow the exact process we did for rest day.
Using my dieter above we know they need 3375 calories per day.Protein takes up 1080 calories per day (270 x 4 = 1080) and carbs take up 1800 calories per day (450 x 4 = 1800).
Total calories already allocated to protein and carbs are therefore 2880 (1080 + 1800 = 2880).
We minus this from our total calorie allowance for the day which tells us how many calories we have remaining: 3375 calories per day minus 2880 already allocated to protein and carbs = 495 calories remaining.
Divide the 495 calories remaining by 9 to get the grams of fat per day: 495 / 9 = 55g
Progress Check:
Summing Up
You now know exactly how much of each macronutrient and how many calories you need to eat on rest days and workout days to make your intermittent fasting lean muscle gain diet a success!
It can be daunting at first…the thought of eating all that food in such a small window. How exactly will you be able to eat so much is such a small amount of time?!
My Intermittent Fasting Meal Plans will help you get a grip on what you can eat and my Free Online Diet Plans Tracking Tools will help you track your diet so you know if you’re meeting your targets or not.
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