Can you increase lean muscle size without sacrificing muscle definition?

A common misconception I hear at my health club on a regular basis is that you can’t add quality muscle size and stay lean at the same time. In actuality this goal is quite possible just somewhat difficult and takes precise meal timing and consistency in every aspect of your program.

Adding 10 pounds of lean mass..

About a year ago, I got to a point where I felt like the main objective of my training was to maintain where I was. This is never a state of mind you want to be in because that’s when you start dreading your workouts and losing your motivation. So I decided that I wanted to add a little more size to my frame (go from 175 to about 185) not necessarily because I was unhappy with my size but more because I like to set challenges for myself to keep me motivated and my workouts exciting. But at the same time I had no intentions of sacrificing any of my muscle definition because that’s always been what’s most important to me. So, I knew this was going to leave me very little room for error in my modified dieting approach, one false move and my abs could start to disappear!

Nutrition Strategy

The key to me having success with this new program was the timing. I had to increase my carbohydrate intake but make sure I wasn’t giving my body any chance to store the extra carbs I was taking in. So it was a matter of increasing my carbs at certain times of the day but not others. What I did was started adding more carbs with breakfast (increasing my serving of oatmeal from ¾  a cup to 1 cup and adding reduced sugar orange juice or some fruit. Meanwhile, adding the largest carbohydrate spike to my post workout meal. Going from about 60 post workout carbs to 150-200.(consuming a little over a cup of whole wheat pasta or brown rice along with my usual 50 carb shake). This is the time of day our muscles need the most carbs for muscle building and also will be using all 200 carbs and wont be storing any. However the rest of the day (particularly at night) I had to make sure to limit my carbohydrate intake. It was also critical that on the day of the week that I didn’t strength train to keep my carb intake very light (under my bodyweight). This is probably the biggest downfall to most people trying to accomplish this goal, not following this step.

Training Tactics

As for my training approach, besides obviously lifting a little heavier weights, I started pre-exhausting my muscles by working the isolation exercises (ie: when training shoulders working my delt raises before any of my overhead presses) this makes the muscle group feel like it’s doing more work when you get to your presses, which are the exercises that are really going to add the quality size. For cardio, I didn’t want to eliminate it all together because I didn’t want to lose any definition. So for cardio I did mostly the stationary bike because that’s the one cardio machine that you won’t be burning any muscle, not to mention if you add a decent amount of resistance can help add size to your legs.

I followed this routine from November through February and the final result of my challenge: I went from 172 lbs to 182 lbs (adding 10 lbs of muscle) in just a few months!!
 

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