How big should your surplus be?

How big should your surplus be?

It’s possible to gain muscle while losing weight, especially if you are overweight and untrained. But it’s much less likely in lean people with training experience.

I think it’s more effective in the long term to have dedicated phases of bulking up, followed by fat loss phases.

Gaining some body fat is inevitable if you do this, but the good news is that maintaining new muscle is pretty easy, so you can keep the muscle you built and cut down the fat later if you want to.

Since we want to minimise fat gains, Slater et al (2019) suggest an increase of ~360 – 480 kcal per day as a general guideline.

But this figure won’t be ideal for everyone.

Changes in NEAT are the wildcard.

For example, Levine et al overfed 16 subjects in free living conditions by 1000kcal per day. They saw an average increase in daily energy output of 554 kcal.

But the most interesting finding was the variation between individuals.

The range of NEAT-related changes in calorie expenditure was between -98 kcal to +692 kcal per day!

This means changes in NEAT reduced the surplus significantly in some people, while others actually moved less. The NEAT response directly predicted bodyweight gain in this study.

I’ve found some of my clients need a really large surplus above their ‘maintenance’ intake to consistently gain bodyweight. One guy I coached needed about 900 kcal above his original maintenance!

I recommend starting with a conservative surplus and tracking changes in bodyweight. Take your weight regularly and work out the weekly and monthly averages.

On average, you want to gain about 1-3% of your total bodyweight per month. Bear in mind that this might not be a linear increase.

Do you find it easy to gain weight or do you have to eat way more?