Muscle building: how to build muscle with food, training and a 4-day plan

• Training: three to five weight sessions a week, 10-20 hard sets per muscle group a week, and a bit more load or reps each week.
• Calories: 5-15% above your maintenance. Building muscle does not mean eating anything and everything.
• Protein: 1.6-2.2 g per kg a day, spread across three to five meals.
• Pace: a few hundred grams of lean muscle a month for beginners, less later. If you gained faster than that, most of it is fat.

How big should your calorie surplus be to build muscle?

Building muscle needs a surplus, but not a big one. A small surplus (5-10%) puts on less fat and suits most beginners and intermediates; a bigger one (10-15%) is more for lean frames or very hard training. The Fit Chef and the calorie calculator use a 12% surplus for muscle gain, a sensible middle.

These are calories; your own needs come from the calorie calculator. If you gain faster than 0.25-0.5% of body weight a week, take off 100-200 kcal; if you gain nothing, add the same. A slow, controlled gain (a “lean bulk”) comes with less unwanted fat; we cover it in our lean bulk article.

What not to do: the “eat everything” bulk

An uncontrolled bulk with a big surplus (a “dirty bulk”) does not build much more muscle, but it adds far more fat that you then have to diet off. The speed at which you can build muscle is limited, so the rest of the surplus turns into fat. A moderate surplus, weekly weigh-ins and regular waist checks are the better route.

A diet to build muscle: protein, carbs, fat

Protein is the main building material. According to the ISSN position stand and a large meta-analysis (Morton and colleagues, 2018), the useful range is about 1.6-2.2 g per kg a day, with no further benefit visible above that. Carbs fuel your training, and fat (about 25-30% of calories) supports hormone function. The rest of the calories come from carbs.

Spread the protein over three to five meals, aiming for roughly 25-40 g each. Choose sources from the high-protein foods chart, and the protein calculator works out yours. If food alone makes it hard, protein powder is a convenient add-on, but not a must.

Muscle building workouts: sets, reps, frequency

• Sets: 10-20 hard sets per muscle group a week produced more growth in pooled studies (Schoenfeld and colleagues, 2017). Beginners can start with 8-12.
• Frequency: training a muscle twice a week gave better results than once a week (Schoenfeld and colleagues, 2016), though what matters most is the total weekly work.
• Reps: 6-12 reps for most main lifts and 10-15 for accessories. About 8-12 reps at a moderate load is the standard range (ACSM), and lighter loads also build muscle if you go close to failure (Schoenfeld and colleagues, 2017).
• Rest: 2-3 minutes for the big lifts, 1-2 minutes for accessories.
• Close to failure: the last one to three reps should be hard, but technique should hold.

A 4-day upper-lower plan

Four sessions a week, for example Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, with Wednesday and the weekend off. Each muscle group comes twice a week, and the plan adds up to roughly 10-16 sets for the big muscle groups. As a beginner, start at the lower set number and add if recovery allows. Warm up for 5-10 minutes first, then do one or two light sets of the first lift. A beginner full-body alternative with three days is on the workout plan page, and gym for beginners helps with starting at a gym.

Monday: upper A

Tuesday: lower A

Thursday: upper B

Friday: lower B

Progression: how to make it harder

Muscle grows when it is given more and more work. The simplest method is double progression: choose a rep range (say 8-12) and stay on the same weight until you hit the top of the range on every set. Then add a little (2.5 kg on lower body, 1-2 kg on upper body) and start again from the bottom of the range. Write the weights down, or progress is guesswork. If you do not get stronger for two or three weeks, check your sleep, your calories and whether you are doing enough sets.

How much muscle can you gain, and how fast?

As a beginner the first months are the easiest: a few hundred grams of lean muscle a month is realistic, and your strength rises almost weekly. Later the gains slow, and as an intermediate lifter a kilo or two of lean muscle a year is already good going. Individual variation is large: age, sleep, genetics, hormones and diet all matter. The scale does not show this accurately, so measure your waist, take photos and track your strength.

Sleep, creatine and the rest

• Sleep: 7-9 hours. Muscle is built during recovery, and short sleep worsens recovery and appetite control.
• Creatine: optional, but the best-studied supplement for strength and muscle: 3-5 g of creatine monohydrate a day. Details in the creatine guide.
• Other supplements: they rarely matter. Our supplements page goes through them.
• Stress and alcohol: heavy drinking and chronic stress slow progress.

What to eat with it

When you are building muscle the bigger calorie budget means meals around training do not have to be small: a solid source of carbs and protein before and after helps performance and recovery.

Daily targets for a 30-year-old training 3-5 times a week (Mifflin-St Jeor, as in The Fit Chef app)

Example	Goal	kcal	Protein (g)	Carbs (g)	Fat (g)
Woman, 65 kg, 168 cm	Muscle gain	2,410	130	304	75
Man, 80 kg, 180 cm	Muscle gain	3,090	160	397	96
Man, 90 kg, 185 cm	Muscle gain	3,320	180	418	103

Your own numbers come from the calorie calculator and the protein calculator. For people who train, the ISSN suggests 1.4-2.0 g of protein per kg of body weight a day; the high-protein foods chart and the weekly meal plan make it easy to actually hit it.

Recipes for before and after training

Per serving, calculated from the recipe data

Recipe	When	kcal	Protein (g)	Carbs (g)	Fat (g)	Time
Double Chocolate Overnight Oats	before	437	35	60	9	5 min
Strawberry Cheesecake Overnight Oats	before	376	22	59	6	5 min
Chicken & Broccoli Stir-Fry	after	504	44	60	10	20 min
Tuna Sweet Potato Cakes	after	490	50	43	12	30 min

Breakfast · 5 minDouble Chocolate Overnight Oats437 kcal35 g proteinBreakfast · 5 minStrawberry Cheesecake Overnight Oats376 kcal22 g proteinDinner · 20 minChicken & Broccoli Stir-Fry504 kcal44 g proteinDinner · 30 minTuna Sweet Potato Cakes490 kcal50 g protein

These recipes sit at roughly 375-505 kcal with 22-50 g of protein and plenty of carbs, so they fit easily into a surplus day. More on timing and more recipes on the pre and post-workout meals page; creatine and protein powder have their own guides.