Calculating Your Caloric Requirements
Okay, now you have a good understanding of the essential nutrients and their importance in building muscle. Now let’s calculate how many calories you should be consuming each day in an effort to build maximum muscle.
This is just a guideline you understand. Every person has what I call “metabolic-individuality”. Two people may weigh the same and have the same build yet one could require 500 more calories a day to maintain his current body weight than the other. This is “metabolic-individuality”.
Your body requires energy – calories – just to exist. Even sleeping your body burns calories at a rate 70 to 100 calories per hour. This is called Basal Metabolic Rate – BMR. BMR estimates can be calculated with decent accuracy, but there are variables such as sex, age, body size, body weight, and of course “metabolic-individuality”. Even so, you can get a good number using the BMR Variable .42 multiplied by your bodyweight to find the calories per pound of bodyweight per hour. Women should use the BMR Variable .35.
So using the above formula, if you weigh 200 pounds your BMR would be 200 x .42 x 24 = 2016. That’s 2016 calories per day or about 252 calories every 3 hours. Now remember this is just to sustain your bodyweight as it is with no activity at all.
To figure out your total caloric needs you would have to factor in the activates you perform during the day and how long you perform them and then add the calories burned to your calculated BMR. This is not difficult and only requires a chart that lists calories burned during specific activities for your bodyweight.
If you are a moderately active person I have found that to structure a caloric level for gaining muscle mass you take the BMR formula above and substitute BMR Variable .65 for .42. If you weigh 200 pounds your caloric level you want to set would be 200 x .65 x 24 = 3120. That’s 3120 calories per day or about 390 calories every 3 hours.
