Here’s a simple question for both male and female competitors in the body sports: Why are you 40-plus pounds over your contest weight? Even if you blame your coach, you’re the one who has to diet off all that chub.
Wouldn’t you rather diet off 10 or 15? It’s absolutely ridiculous to me that in the 21st century people still believe you have to rival Jelly Roll in the off-season to build any muscle. I hate to burst your bubble, but past a certain point, more food does not equate to more muscle. If anything, it equates to more fat — which you’ve totally proven by being 40-plus pounds over your contest weight.
Why do you get so fat? Because you believe rumor No. 1: If you gain 50 pounds in the off-season, some of it is going to be muscle. Diet off the fat and keep the muscle. Yeah… no. The problem with that is the newly gained 50 pounds is comprised mostly of fat. Very little — maybe three to five pounds — is going to be muscle.
Six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, known to be huge in the off-season, once told me during an interview that when I asked him how much weight he thought he could gain between the Olympia he just won and the next one, he replied, “Maybe three to five pounds.” Shawn Ray was 213 pounds for 13 Olympias in a row. How can you bust your ass all year, eat thousands of dollars’ worth of food, gain a ton of weight, and only make minimal gains contest to contest? Because muscle is far more exercise-dependent than food-dependent. With enough stimulus, you can literally grow muscle with no food. You won’t grow any muscle without stimulus.
For decades, gym dogma preached that muscle wouldn’t grow without mountains of protein — but the truth is simpler, and older than any supplement ad: mechanical stress is king. You break a muscle down under load, the body signals hypertrophy. Period. That signal happens whether you’re feasting on steak or scraping by on stale rice cakes.
Studies (Hornberger 2004, Goldspink 2002, Bodine 2001) show that progressive tension activates muscle growth pathways — mTOR, IGF-1 — before nutrition even enters the conversation. And in a fasted state, the body can tap autophagy (Mizushima 2007) to salvage aminos and rebuild from its own cellular junk. Muscle is built with stress first, resources second.
Of course, without proper nutrition you’ll never maximize that growth. But the survival mechanism is hardwired: You either adapt to the load or break. That’s how you explain soldiers, laborers, and even prisoners getting jacked on minimal calories — stress forces adaptation.
Hypertrophy isn’t about spoon-feeding muscle. What you’re doing — or have to do — is telling your body that if it doesn’t get stronger, its survival is in peril. When faced with that kind of threat, your body adapts. That’s why muscle grows. And that’s only why muscle grows.
Now that you understand why the body builds muscle, how you do it is based on stimulus, nutrition, and recovery. Stimulus and recovery should be self-explanatory; nutrition is the great nebulous factor because there’s no shortage of gurus, coaches, and nutritionists (licensed or not) proclaiming one thing or another and selling a program or their service to prove it to you. What most — not all — have in common is that they regard protein as the core element of the program and base all their calculations on the amount of protein you ingest each day. This is precisely the point where science gets hatched by the bros.
Anyone who’s even remotely looked into the acquisition of added muscle mass has run into the declaration that you must consume 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight every day to grow. While that may or may not be a good starting point, the reality is that this is one of bodybuilding’s biggest unchallenged myths. It’s been repeated so many times, by so many people, for so many years, that nobody ever even stops to ask: Where the hell did that number come from?
If you actually go looking for it — and I mean digging through real, peer-reviewed journals — you’ll find nothing that backs it up. Zero. Nada. The clinical research on protein requirements for hypertrophy never set that number in stone. It was bro science handed down from the Venice Beach sandbox, stuck in magazine articles, and repeated by supplement companies until it sounded like gospel.
Think about it. In the 1970s, Arnold and the boys were practically making this stuff up as they went along. There was no PubMed, no sophisticated sports nutrition, no gurus. There were just guys getting huge on eggs, beef, and bologna sandwiches, and when asked how much protein they were eating, they threw out “a gram per pound” because it sounded about right. Maybe it was — for them, in that moment. But no one ever ran a controlled study on it.
Fast forward a few decades, and the lab coats finally caught up. What do they say? Most research reviews today, including heavyweight names like Morton and Phillips, peg the optimal protein intake for maximizing hypertrophy at around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of lean mass. Do the math, and that works out to about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of lean tissue — not bodyweight.
You read that right: lean mass, not total weight.
And this is where I see the second problem. Nobody ever clarifies which weight they’re talking about. Is it your off-season, bloated, water-logged, 40-pounds-above-contest weight? Or your lean body mass? Because if you’re calculating protein off your total bodyweight when you’re 25 pounds of beer-gut fatter than you should be, you’re overshooting your needs by a mile.
Protein is needed to build and maintain lean tissue, not your fat mass. Fat doesn’t need protein. It needs a diet. And most bodybuilders, let’s be honest, carry way too much fat in the off-season. That’s how you get guys eating 400 grams of protein per day when they really only need 200. Even on a ton of gear, your actual protein needs are not that high. The excess isn’t building more muscle — you’re just making expensive urine.
Now, don’t get me wrong: more protein is usually harmless if you can digest it, and there are enhanced athletes who can process higher intake because of ramped-up protein turnover. But there is a limit. There’s a point where more doesn’t do jack.
The Stakes for Keeping the Myth Alive
So why do we keep hearing the same stale story about 1 to 1.5 grams per pound? Because it’s easy. Because no one questions it. Because supplement companies have a vested interest in keeping you chugging more powder. And because somewhere in a Gold’s Gym locker room, a 260-pound monster once said it worked for him. And that, my friend, is how a myth is born.
If you ask me, I’m going to tell you to calculate your protein intake off your lean mass. One gram per pound of lean mass is more than enough for most lifters — even the big ones. Want to get fancier? Cycle your protein down slightly in the off-season when you’re fatter, and back up when you’re getting peeled. That way you actually feed the tissue that matters, not the chub you plan on sweating off anyway. Either way, cut it back — you’re eating too much!
If you build your diet around a lower amount of protein, you’ll end up with less food overall, and you’ll probably stop overeating and carrying around so much needless body fat. You’ll be starving all the time and cranky, but you’ll be leaner, tighter, and just as strong — not to mention healthier, and you’ll have an easier time of it, pre-contest. But you will be smaller… oh boy. Therein, my friends, lies the rub and the route to sabotage. Smaller? But I wanna be HUGE!!! And you probably don’t want to lift heavy weights either.
We should first take a look at sharing the perception of “huge.” To me, huge is over six feet, over 275, and ripped — that’s huge. So is 5’9’’ and 195, peeled to the bone. Regardless of the poundage, it’s the condition that counts. Because “huge” can also be either of those examples, but replace “ripped” and “peeled” with 30% body fat.
Remaining Big While Being ‘Smaller’
The biggest reality a competitive bodybuilder must face is that as they get leaner, they are concomitantly going to get smaller. Because bodybuilders are programmed to believe more is more, this is difficult to swallow; they believe they are losing muscle because they’re not eating enough. Ughhhh… Here’s the reality: I always use prime rib as an example. Next time you’re food shopping, head over to the meat section and look for a nice big three- or four-bone prime rib roast. Look at its cross-section. See that giant glob of fat between the cap and the eye? Imagine peeling the roast apart and removing that giant glob of fat and rolling the roast back up. You’ll notice it’s smaller, right? BECAUSE YOU TOOK OUT THE FAT! Not because you lost muscle.
Now, imagine if you could just diet off the subcutaneous fat and leave the intramuscular fat. Wouldn’t that be nice? Sure would. So would finding the keys to a brand-spanking-new Porsche Turbo S in my Christmas stocking. Both are a fallacy. When the body stimulates lipolysis, the fat stores are converted to fatty acids and enter the bloodstream systemically. You can’t differentiate between sub-Q and intramuscular — it either comes from all over or not at all. So, yes, if you lower your body fat percentage, you will get smaller. If you’re either getting stronger or maintaining your strength, you’re not losing muscle.
And that right there is your best metric — strength. Maintaining or increasing strength directly correlates to muscle mass. You’ll be surprised at how few calories you need to do that. Even on juice.
Don’t believe me? Try it. What do you have to lose?
