I need suggestions for putting on weight on muscle

[Brett]

I’m a muay thai kickboxer and running into problems I can’t seem to fix. I need to rethink my whole diet plan. I need a lot more calories and protein, and I can’t think of other ways to get them in there that is effective. Help me out.

 

Problems: After every training session I feel really exhausted the whole next day. This shouldn’t be happening. My body should be used to it. I’m not making the weight and muscle gains I need and my body seems to be eating away at my muscle rather than building it no matter how hard I train, so this must mean I need to be eating waay better. I’m also trying to get more sleep and drink more water.

 

Right now I’m at 142 lbs and my performance is awful. I’m trying to build up to fight at 155 and I feel like I should be able to make the gains with some thought, but it has been a long process. My primary forms of training are running/sprints in the morning and a ton of calisthenics.

 

Here is what my (uncreative) diet generally has been almost every day:

 

Breakfast: 1 cup of oatmeal in almond milk, walnuts and almonds, almond butter, cinnamon.

 

Lunch: stir fry with brown rice, veg, and tofu (I want to stop eating soy and use other forms of protein)

 

Snack 1 + 2: clif power bar/trail mix, or almond butter sandwich, or fruit

 

Dinner: brown rice or quinoa, broccoli, kale, herbs, a whole yam, with a whole can of beans or a whole cup of lentils (or tempeh but again I don't want to eat soy anymore it's not fulfilling for me and I've been eating so much of it for years).

 

Smoothie at night: whole can of coconut milk, vega/vegan proteins, frozen mangoes or mixed berries, bananas

 

A lot of this may sound fairly healthy, but for my goals it has been awful and holding me back. I need more.

[goob]

Your diet looks fine, no need to change it, you just need to eat more. People do not get bigger from lifting weights, they get bigger from eating. Keep track of every calorie you eat and up your intake a little at a time till you are consistently gaining weight every week. Lifting weights stimulates the muscles, but they will not grow without a caloric excess.

 

Look through chewybaws log on this forum and you will see how much food some people need to gain weight. A lot of what worked for me comes right out of his log. More blended meals makes it so much easier to get the calories down without being so full all the time. It's probably the one thing that helped me the most.

 

Also, there is nothing wrong with soy. Soy products are tasty high quality protein sources with many positive health effects. So many people are eliminating soy from their diet because they have been eating "too much of it for so long." That's just silly. Would you think of eliminating broccoli or kale from your diet? Or some other type of beans?

 

Removing soy from your diet will make your life so much harder than it needs to be.