October 27, 2015
Using Weight Gainer Powder to Meet Daily Calorie Requirements
When you're trying to gain weight, whether to move up a weight class in your sport or simply to pack on muscle, it can be frustratingly difficult to meet your daily calorie requirements. After all, you'd think that this sort of “license to eat” approach would be easy. Sometimes, though, it’s not. For one thing, there is a significant investment of time and money in getting, preparing and eating all the food necessary to hit your numbers.
Second, just because you're trying to eat tons of calories this doesn't mean that you can devour everything in sight. In fact, it's even more important that you watch the quality of your calories while trying to gain muscular bulk – unless you're also willing to gain a significant amount of fat.
For this reason, weight gainer powders can be an incredibly useful tool. Let's take a closer look at what's going on in the tubs of this stuff and see how you can make the best use of it.
Figure Out Your Numbers
The first thing you need to do is understand how many calories you need to reach your goals and how many grams of each macronutrient you can have. Typically, during bulking phases, people will follow a high-protein diet in order to make sure that their muscles grow more than their waists.
To do this, you need to know how many calories your body burns when you're doing absolutely nothing – known as your Resting Metabolic Rate. The formula looks like this:
Male: 9.99 x weight + 6.25 x height – 4.92 x age + 5
Female: 9.99 x weight + 6.25 x height – 4.92 x age – 161
weight in kilograms, height in centimeters, age in years
But you aren't just sitting around doing nothing. Hopefully. So, now you have to figure out how many calories you burn on the average day – referred to as your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). Here's the formula for that:
RMR x Activity Factor
- Sedentary —desk job and little to no exercise (multiply by 1.2)
- Lightly Active — light exercise/sports 1–3 days/week (multiply by 1.375)
- Moderately Active — moderate exercise/sports 3–5 days/week (multiply by 1.55)
- Very Active — hard exercise/sports 6–7 days/week (multiply by 1.725)
- Extremely Active — hard daily exercise/sports and physical job or training (multiply by 1.9)