How to accurately determine BMR and calories for muscle building?

CrazyAK47

New Member
I checked on the internet for calorie calculators, and most of them give different conflicting results. Please, if anyone can help me to accurately determine my calorie needs to build muscle.
I'm 6'0 inches tall, and 170 pounds with slightly moderate intensity (30-45 minutes every 3 days of week).
 
I checked on the internet for calorie calculators, and most of them give different conflicting results. Please, if anyone can help me to accurately determine my calorie needs to build muscle.
I'm 6'0 inches tall, and 170 pounds with slightly moderate intensity (30-45 minutes every 3 days of week).

If you're looking to get it to the gram, you're doing it wrong. Eat until you see results, which means eat until you gain weight. That's why the old gallon of milk a day protocol worked so well. Nothing special about milk, it just added a TON of calories to your diet.

One analogy I've used is a building. It helps me demonstrate thermodynamics and everything else too. All buildings once built will require maintenance, a certain amount of materials to keep the walls nice, the paint looking good, the windows clean and uncracked, etc. Your body is a building, and now you want to add another wing to it. Think of the relatively massive amount of materials you'd need to take in relative to maintenance to build a new wing for a building, and eat proportionately that much more.
 
Cosign on what CDB said.

You can't get down to the gram on calories anyway, so don't try. All calorie measurements are estimations, and so is any calculation you do on your BMR. Personally, I recommend starting at 18 x bodyweight in calories minimum and go from there. As CDB said, add more food until you are gaining weight. Notice he said weight not muscle. Go by the scale. If you are not adding a couple pounds a week then eat more. And realize that the more weight you gain, you will require proportionally more calories.

I tell people that if they are not at least slowly gaining a layer of fat as they bulk, then they are not eating enough to build any significant muscle. People are so afraid of overeating and getting fat, but in reality, they always end up undereating and as a result, staying tiny and weak.
 
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