Ok, so I’m kicking off a new program AND doing a massing phase? How much do I get to eat?!? Let’s figure it out!

Friday’s workout finished off a deload week, ending my current macrocycle. In my case, deloads are a preplanned week of lower volume and intensity. The first half of the week sees at a 50% drop in volume compared to the first week of the mesocycle. In the second half of the week, the intensity, or the weight on the bar, also drops by 50%. So by the end of the week you are just doing a few reps at what might be considered a warmup weight. The goal of all this is to allow you to recover from the increasing stress of you training and prepare you for the next part of your program.

When I was cycling more seriously I found the same pattern of training. Volume and/or intensity would increase over a period of 3 or 4 weeks and then you’d have a recovery week where volume and intensity were cut. It was always surprisingly hard to actually keep the intensity low out on the road because it felt so slow.

Next week I’ll be starting Renaissance Periodization’s Chest and Back focus Male Physique template. I’ve only been consistently training in the gym for about 15 months so a specialization program wouldn’t normally be the best choice but I’ve been having a bit of nagging pain in my left leg so I want a program that has a relatively low leg volume. This program has the lowest leg volume of the three RP programs I own. Also, my chest and back are arguably my weakest body part. So win-win.

You can check out the program HERE.

For the last 3 months I’ve been doing a full body program with exercises for each body part five days a week. Due to time constraints, I kept the volume consistent at 8-10 sets per body part per week and just 13 sets per day. This gave me a one hour workout, 5 days a week.

The Chest/Back program starts with between 7 and 13 sets per week per body part. The volume autoregulates up or down depending on how you react to and recover from the training. If it feels too easy, the volume goes up. If it feels too hard, the volume comes down. Intensity goes up about 2% each week.

Between having set up a home gym and the COVID-19 related business shutdowns, I have lots of time now so my workouts can be more than an hour long. Based on the last time I ran the program, some workouts will easily hit the 90 minute mark, especially day 5.

With this new program I am also starting a massing phase so I need to figure out how much I need to eat. The first step to this is figuring out how many calories I need to maintain my weight. If I were just starting out I could use use any of the online calorie calculators to get a very rough estimate of my maintenance calories.  I have been tracking what I eat and weigh every day for almost two years, so I have a better method.

You probably know the rule of thumb that says that a pound of body weight equals about 3500 calories. This is most commonly put as something like “to lose a pound of body fat you need to eat 3500 calories less than you burn.” It holds true for gaining weight as well.

So if you know how many calories you are consuming and your change in body weight, you can pretty easily calculate how many calories you burned. Subtract 3500 times the change in weight from calories consumed and you get the amount of calories burned. Then just divide down to the period of time you need to work with, usually days.

[Calories consumed – (3500 * Change in body weight) = calories burned]

With this in mind, I can select a period of time (and this can be a bit tricky) and average out the calories I’ve eaten each day. In the current case, my average calories eaten has been 2580 calories per day over the last 8 weeks.

I also need to check the change in my rolling 7-day body weight average over the same period. I’ve lost about 3 pounds in this period, which works out to loss of about .05 pounds per day.

This works out my having been in a deficit of about 180 calories per day, giving me actual calories burned of around 2760. If I ate this many calories on average, my weight should stay pretty stable.

Since my goal is to gain weight, I know I need to eat more than this, but how much? Well, we follow a similar process.

I’m an older trainee so I likely won’t gain muscle fast and have been obese so I would likely gain fat pretty easily. I’ll want to go pretty slow. So I’ve picked my minimum gain, which is 0.25% of my bodyweight per week or about half a pound per week. Using the same formula as above, I know that 250 calories per day added to my maintenance level should get me pretty close to my target rate of weight gain. So I’ll shoot for 3010 calories per day.

I have a spreadsheet that makes this whole process almost automatic. I just need to use some critical thinking and make adjustments if necessary.

Maintaining your rate of weight gain becomes something of a moving target during a training block. Setting aside the challenges involved in tracking calories to begin with you have the fact that your training is likely getting longer and more intense over time, which means you will likely burn more calories than before. You will need to repeat this process periodically during you massing phase. In my case, I’ll likely update my calories every couple weeks, adjusting my calories up if I’m not gaining fast enough or down if I am gaining too fast.

I hope all that makes sense.

Let me know in the comments what you think.

Until next week, keep up the pursuit.