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Beware of the lovehandles!

© Matt Danielson

It's November, the beach season is definitely over and gymrats around the world are busy packing on a couple of extra pounds of muscle for next season. With satisfied grins they see the scale climbing by the week, and the guy who gains the most, wins. Great huh? Well, not quite. If bodybuilding was all about gaining bodyweight, I'd just lie in the couch eating donuts and cheese doodles every day of the week!

When we're taking credit for weight gain, it better be gains in muscle, not flab! It's so very easy to be deceived by a scale, especially if you're also gaining strength at the same time. What we get is simply a classic case of too much of a good thing, making it bad. Allow me to explain...
In order to build muscle, you have to fulfill two criterias:
1. Train hard so your muscles are forced to grow and,
2. Feed the muscles so they can rebuild and overcompensate. Ok, so you train hard and gain strength. Good, it's a sign that criteria 1 is working. You eat, and gain muscle and total bodyweight. That's criteria 2.

The creed of bodybuilding says train hard & eat plenty. And it works, so wouldn't an increase produce even better gains? Overtraining is a phenomenon that most bodybuilders know about today, but the majority is also surprisingly ignorant to overeating! Let's get it straight: It is almost impossible to gain muscle without gaining fat, simply because in order to have an anabolic environment in your body, you automatically get a fat-retaining environment as well. However, you are the one who decides how MUCH fat you're gaining along with the muscle!

Think of it as an unproportional calorie balance between muscle gain vs. fat gain. If your muscle-growth potential ranges from 1-5 where 5 is the ultimate, you have a scale for fat-gain that ranges from 1-eternity. They go hand in hand all the way up to 5 where muscle growth stays and waves bye-bye to fat-gain as it skyrockets. When you're starving, it's 1:1. When you're training hard but not eating quite enough you might be at 3:3, and the ultimate should be about 5:5. Add 500 unnecessary kcal when you've hit the ceiling muscle-wise, and those 500 kcal tilt the balance to, say 5:8. No positive gains made. The scale only knows that SOMETHING has been gained, and as the final link in the chain your ego wants to believe that the extra gains are pure muscle.

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