Nutrition and Supplementation
The importance of food and a solid eating plan or approach can’t be understated. Hard training much be backed by quality nutrition and proper intake. Without the proper nutrients or calories, you will limit your body’s ability to repair and strength muscle and connection tissue.

Weak eating creates a weak athlete. Strong, structure eating helps to maximize strength gains.

Strength Building Nutritional Basics
To maximize performance you need to monitor your food intake just as much, if not more so, than your training. It is not good enough to “just eat healthy.” While healthy eating is a good thing, a muscle building eating plan has specific requirements that must be met:

Calories. You must be eating a consistent amount of daily calories. This intake should be substantial enough to allow the body to build muscle. Undereating is one of the major contributors to lack of gains.
Protein. You must be monitoring your protein intake. Increasing your daily protein intake while on a resistance training program helps to increase lean muscle mass. The human body is in a constant state of “protein turnover.” Muscle tissue is continuously being repaired and replaced. To maximize this repair, you must maintain a protein positive nitrogen balance.
Carbohydrates. Carbohydrates play two key roles in muscle building. The first is energy. Your body needs maximum energy to perform at maximum level. Second, insulin spike post workout. Insulin is the most anabolic hormone in the human body and drives nutrients from the bloodstream into muscle cells. When you finish your workout your muscles are desperately trying to repair and rebuild and are crying out for energy and nutrients. This is the only time when simple carbohydrates will benefit you for muscle building.
Healthy Fats. A low fat diet is not a healthy diet. The body requires healthy fats for a myriad of reasons. Undereating healthy fats can compromise sleep, lower cardiovascular function, slow recovery and increase the likelihood of overtraining. You must be monitoring your fat intake to some degree so that you are certain it is at a productive level.
How Many Calories do You Need?
To help you determine your daily calorie requirement, you will first need to calculate your BMR, or basal metabolic rate. The basal metabolic rate (BMR) is a excellent tool for working out how many calories your body needs on a daily basis depending on the amount and intensity of the exercise you do. This tool works on a proven formula and is very accurate. The calculator uses two formulas to calculate your body's daily calorie requirements.

To figure out your BMR: Online BMR Calculator.
Understand that your BMR is merely a guideline. You will need to make adjustments if you are losing weight, gaining weight too rapidly, or if you find you are not recovery quickly or adding strength.

Strength training is not the same as muscle building. While you will need to add some muscle over time to maximize your efforts, especially if you begin with less than perfect genetics, there is no off season and bulking cycles.

How much you eat is up to you and your goals. If you are trying to gain strength for a sport but not gain much weight, it is best to eat using what bodybuilders refer to as a “lean bulk” method. If you need to rapidly gain strength and size, there are several aggressive eating places notated below.

When it comes to raw strength, size is an important variable. Heavier athletes lift more than lighter athletes. If you doubt this, research reputable natural powerlifting records.

As a beginner rapid size gain can help maximize strength gains...IF you are training hard. If your training isn’t 100%, then extra calories are just a fast track to fat gains.

Experienced lifters will rarely benefit from radio weight gain. Building strength is an extended process. If you are an experienced athlete attempting to add 20 pounds of bodyweight, do so in a controlled manner.

Clean Bulk. A tight bulk is generally recommended for individuals who consider themselves to be at an average, or healthy weight. Use the following formula to determine your daily calorie needs for a tight bulk:

BMR + 300 calories.
Aggressive Eating. If you consider yourself underweight, or a hardgainer, it will be beneficial to eat more aggressively. Use the following formula to determine your daily calorie needs for an aggressive bulk:

BMR + 500 calories
Underweight individuals may need to add more than 500 calories to their BMR calculation if they find they are not gaining weight. If this is the case, add an additional 300 calories per day and monitor your weight for the next month.

Remember that all calculations are only starting points. If you are training hard and aren’t seeing results, add more calories to your daily eating plan. It is best to bump caloric intake by no more than 300 calories at a time.

For more great information on strength and muscle building nutrition check out the following articles:

How to Create a Bodybuilding Diet
Next Level Nutrition: How to Supercharge Muscle Growth with Workout Nutrition
Post-Workout Nutrition: The Window of Opportunity
Get Big, Not Fat: A Better Approach to Bulk and Build Muscle
Meal Timing: Set Your watch to More Growth!
Your Go-To-Guide to Gaining Muscle while Minimizing Fat Gains
How Much Protein do You Need?
There are many other protein recommendations and formulas used in the weight training realm. Instead of relying on ratios or on grams per pound of bodyweight, it is easier to use this simple guideline:

Men - Eat 35 to 40 grams of protein every 2.5 to 3 hours.
Women - Eat 20 to 25 grams of protein every 2.5 to 3 hours.
Using this method, the least amount of protein men would eat on a daily basis would be 175 grams, and the most 240 grams. In general, 180 to 200 grams is sufficient for most natural lifters – unless you are 6’6″ and pencil thin.

Please don’t panic at the site of 240 grams of protein. It is at the high end of the spectrum, and may only be required by hardgainers with a fast metabolism. But it is surely not needed for most of us.

Determining Fat Intake
Fat intake should comprise about 20-30% of your daily calories. The more daily calories you need, the closer this percentage should be to 30. Again, fat contains 9 calories per gram, compared to protein and carbohydrates which contain 4 calories per gram, making fats more calorie dense.

If you need more calories, the easiest way to eat more is by increasing your daily fat intake.

Determining Carbohydrate Intake
Determining daily carbohydrate intake is rather simple. Since you have already calculated your BMR, you only need to subtract the calories derived from fat and protein intake to arrive at how many calories you need from carbohydrates.

Divide this number by 4 to arrive at the number of carbohydrate grams you need per day. For example:

Step 1 – BMR. You calculate that your daily calorie requirement to build muscle is 3000 calories.
Step 2 – Protein. You structure an eating plan based around 180 grams of protein, which works out to a total of 720 calories.
Step 3 – Fat. You structure an eating plan with 25% of your daily calories coming from healthy fats. This is 750 calories, or 83.33 grams of fat.
Step 4 – Carbohydrates – Subtract the 750 calories from fat and 720 calories from protein to arrive at 1530 calories needed from carbohydrates. This works out to 382.5 grams per day.
How to Structure a Meal Plan
A strength training meal plan does not have to be complicated. The easiest way to approach eating is to structure your eating around breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between meals, or later in the evening, you will add snacks. These snacks will allow you to intake more protein and nutrients, helping you to recover and grow.

An effective meal plan will look something like this:

Breakfast
Snack
Lunch
Snack
Dinner
Snack

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