The Best Meal Plan To Build Muscle Faster (EAT LIKE THIS!)

If you want to maximize the resulting growth that you experience from your workouts, then you need to be optimizing your nutrition. Because your workouts are what provide the damage and stimulus for your muscles to grow. But the food you then eat throughout the day is what provides the fuel for your muscles to recover and come back stronger and bigger. And if you're seeking to pack on more size with your diet, then you need to make sure that you're accomplishing three things. One, eating at a slight calorie surplus that enables you to gain roughly 1 to 2% of your body weight per month, or two, eating adequate protein every day, and three, not eating like complete crap. Now this on its own will account for, let's say, 90% of the muscle growth that you experience from your diet. But if you guys know me, I'm all about optimization. So how can we get that extra 10%? Well, going beyond what I previously mentioned, there's a few additional things that we can do with our diet that can help speed up the muscle building process. And in this video, I'll show you exactly how to do just that and, and provide you with a meal plan that puts this all together for you. The first thing you want to do is optimize your 24 hour protein synthesis levels. Every single meal is an opportunity to kick start the growth and recovery process within your muscles by elevating your protein synthesis levels. And we want to take advantage of that as best as possible. And to do so, we first need to start with the distribution of our protein. So we know, based on past research, that at least 20 grams of high quality protein is required to give a near maximal increase in muscle protein synthesis, which then lasts for roughly a few hours depending on the components of that meal. Meaning that, ideally, we want to ensure that we're having at least 20 grams of high quality protein in each of our meals and having them at a frequency that enables us to keep our protein synthesis levels elevated throughout the day, rather than having some meals that undershoot the protein synthesis response, and then having some meals with excessive protein that would not further increase muscle protein synthesis patients past the maximum that we're already reaching. And in fact, recent 2020 research has finally tested this theory for growth and compared the effects of evenly spreading out one's daily protein intake into three meals throughout the day, as opposed to skewing most of the protein into just two meals. They found that after 12 weeks of this, combined with resistance training, the evenly distributed protein group gained 30% more lean muscle mass, as opposed to the unevenly distributed group, which the researchers attributed to the 24 hour muscle protein synthesis levels in the evenly distributed group. So to apply this into your diet, take your daily protein intake and spread that out into ideally four, five meals throughout the day, with each of those meals having a minimum of 20 grams of protein, as this will best enable you to keep your protein synthesis levels optimized throughout the day. However, even with this accomplished, there's still another thing we can do to optimize our 24 hour protein synthesis, because although we have optimized it throughout the day, we need to keep in mind that the muscle building and recovery process still goes on overnight as you're sleeping. Therefore, it makes sense to ingest an adequate amount of protein shortly before you go to bed, since that's the longest period that you'll go without food. And for this reason I'd actually argue that you want to also bias a little bit more of your daily protein towards this pre sleep meal and ideally with a slow digestion protein source to extend that muscle protein synthesis response as much as possible overnight. In fact, research seems to agree with this and has shown that while 20 grams of protein gives a near maximal increase in protein synthesis during the day, it appears that you need at least 40 grams of protein to get a significant increase in overnight muscle protein synthesis, which can be done with an adequate amount of ideally a slow digesting protein such as casein, protein powder, cottage cheese or eggs for example, to further sustain that protein synthesis response overnight. The next tip here is to incorporate musc foods. Now although I honestly hate using that term, research does actually suggest that there are certain food choices you can make that may in fact speed up the muscle building process. First you want to opt for high quality protein sources that are not only high in leucine content, the most potent amino acid is stimulated protein synthesis, but also high in digestibility, meaning that the body will be able to use a greater proportion of that protein for growth. And based on the summaries of various studies and literature reviews shown here, we can see what protein sources best meet these criteria. At the top you can see that whey isolate eggs and chicken breasts and Id also add fish to this as well seem to score the best and are therefore great high quality protein sources for you to include in your diet. Whereas plant based protein sources score lower on this list which doesn't mean that they cant be used for growth, but as I've explained in my past videos it does mean that you need to eat them in greater amounts and mix and match them with each other order to compensate for the lower protein synthesis response that we tend to see with them. In addition to this, another tweak that you can make in your diet is opting for more unsaturated fats as opposed to saturated fats. And the reasoning behind this is partly based on a really interesting recent paper that overfed 39 subjects who were on the same standardized diet with an excess of 750 calories a day, which was done with either cupcakes made with saturated fat as opposed to cupcakes made with unsaturated fat. After seven weeks, both groups gained similar amounts of weight as expected. However, what's interesting is that in the saturated fat group, about 80% of the weight that was gained was fat and 20% was muscle, whereas in the unsaturated fat group only 50% of the weight gained was fat and 50% was now muscle. Although the reasoning behind this is unknown, another study did find similar results and likely involves various differences in fatty acid oxidation and storage depending on the fat sources you intake. Meaning that relying less on saturated fats like cheese, fatty meats and butter for your fat intake and instead opting for unsaturated fats such as olive oil, nuts and fatty fish may in fact bias more of the weight you put on to be muscle as opposed to fat. More specifically though, olive oil and salmon specifically are two unsaturated fat sources that I'd highly recommend incorporating in your muscle building diet based on some of the recent research on them. For instance, incorporating more olive oil into ones diet has consistently been shown in past studies to significantly boost testosterone levels in rats, but a more recent study put this to test in humans. They had a group of 60 young and healthy men from first consume a standardized diet with the addition of 25 grams of butter as a control for two weeks. They then swapped the butter for 25 milliliters of extra virgin olive oil instead and analyze the results. After just three weeks of the swab, the testosterone levels in the men increased by an average of 17.4% and luteinizing hormone also increased by a whopping 4.3percent, which is honestly quite the significant boost, especially for such a minor change. And as I've noted in my past testosterone video can in fact have a meaningful impact on your body composition given the powerful effects of these hormones on muscle growth. In addition, a few servings of fatty fish per week such as salmon is also a good idea to include in your muscle building diet given the omega 3 fatty acids that they provide, which as I've stated in some of my past videos as well, does to an extent seem to play a role in promoting animals metabolism in your muscles and even potentially enhancing your muscle contractions, and thus would be an excellent choice as an unsaturated source of fat in your diet. Now the last tip here is to periodize your diet, or in other words have phases that your diet will go through over time to accomplish different goals. Because as mentioned earlier, to prioritize muscle growth, you want to be in a calorie surplus, which means that you're going to be gaining weight. Now, although we want most of the weight that you do put on to be muscle, it will always inevitably come with a bit of fat gain with it. And what research has shown is that as your body fat creeps up during your bulk, you actually become less and less efficient at putting on muscle, which seems to be due to hormonal changes in the body as your body fat creeps up. In fact, one overfeeding study actually showed that after 100 days on a bulk, the rate of fat compared to muscle gain on day 100 was about 10% higher than it was on day one. Meaning that as you continue to gain weight and your body fat slowly creeps up, then it would be best to occasionally resensitize your body for more efficient growth by stripping off some of the excess fat that you put on before. You then continue to focus on gaining more weight again, which can be simply done, for example, by following a calorie surplus diet for three months and then follow that up with a month of a calorie deficit diet. By reducing some of your carbs and fats from your diet this way you're going to be able to keep your body fat levels in check and ensure that for the weight that you do put on that most of it is indeed muscle and not fat. So to sum everything up for you, here are the main points that you want to keep in mind and for your convenience, I've applied all these little tips into a free muscle building sample meal plan so that you can clearly see how it's put into practice and start actually using the meal plan right away. It comes complete with a full day of meals, full recipes, timing of workout guidelines and more. I also go through how to exactly adjust the calories of the meal plan to cater to your body weight and where you're currently at. To grab a copy of this, just simply head on over to builtwithscience.com musclemealplan and I'll send it right over to you and I'LL also leave a link to this in the description box down below. All in all though, I hope that you were able to see that it's the little details like this that really do make all the difference in the long run. And for a step by step program that shows you not only how to approach your diet and what to eat, but also pairs this with a weekly workout plan so you can build muscle as efficiently as possible with science, just like countless of our members have done with their Built with Science programs. And simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and and take the analysis quiz to discover which program will be best for you and where your body is currently at. Anyways guys, I hope you enjoyed this one. Please don't forget to show your support by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next, subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really is helping out. Thank you so much everyone. I'll see you next time.