Personally, I avoid trying to build muscle on a calorie deficit. I
have built muscle sticking with right around my maintenance caloric needs.
This issue has been misconstrued big time in the world of bodybuilding. The notion that unless you consume significant extra calories above maintenance you are catabolic or not anabolic (or not anabolic enough) is nonsense. Not just in the numbers but the very notion. How do you know exactly what you need to maintain at any given moment anyway? Your maintenance isn’t just a daily, weekly cycle it changes by the hour and the month AND the year as you age. Those who needed to eat more to see real lean mass gains (not just fat weight spread out over the body making one look more muscular but a bit smoother) just weren’t eating maintenance all the time to begin with.
If you are very lean naturally then you need to make sure to get enough calories to support growth but force feeding is only going to bring fat with it all. My point is that you need very little extra calories to build muscle and that unless you are well below 10% bodyfat you can even build it on something like a maintenance amount.
Take pictures of yourself relaxed and flexing, check your body weight and Body fat %. Track everything you eat for 7 days (and the size of the portions) while trying to eat normal (not over or under). Now if you didn’t gain or lose fat you divide the total calories by 7 and get your daily maintenance number (approximately). Now try eating 500-800 calories more per day as most suggest. The after a month or two check your body fat and take pictures under same conditions. If you have gained significant weight chances are it is a lot of fat as well. Look a the pics and see how you have smoothed out.
So many people get fooled by this all the time. They add 10 lbs of fat to a 150-175 lb frame and think it is muscle. Fat covers the whole body and especially lean, small build guys can carry extra fat well.
Don’t get caught in the bulking game there is nothing hormonally magical about over eating. Muscle is mostly water and very little tissue and the process of building it isn’t that metabolically costly.
On a interesting note, though I don’t recommend it, I have built muscle on a slight calorie deficit during a 2 week blitz phase. I did this twice, built muscle while dropping a couple of percent in body fat. It is amazing what the body can do if it has to.
What I do is eat above maintenance on training days and the day after, anymore than that and I gain fat. That is my cycle, you may be less advanced and growing faster so you can eat more, more often. You may be younger with greater caloric needs due to hormone levels and life stress. It is all about fine tuning it to you but bear in mind that it is very easy to get too many calories.
Regards,
Andrew
www.zone-training.net