Bodybuilding and Weight Gain

Everywhere a person turns these days there is a news article about how fat the people of the U.S. have become. Many diet strategies have been formulated to help people lose weight. The problem is, not everyone needs to lose weight. Bodybuilders are some of the healthiest people in the world, yet they often outweigh many other people of the same height and seek to gain weight.

The BMI (body mass index) is a system of determining if a person is at a healthy weight based on how tall that person is and how much he/she weighs. People who weigh more than a certain amount for their height are said to be obese. One of the most common arguments against the use of the BMI to rate people is the claim that "Muscle weighs more than fat." While this is not technically true, a pound of muscle and a pound of fat both weigh a pound, the fact is that muscle is much denser than fat.

For this reason, it is a common goal of bodybuilders to gain weight to 1.5 to 2 times the "ideal" weight for someone their height. The key difference is that bodybuilders work to minimize their body fat and make all of the weight they gain be in the form of muscle. If someone were to perform BMI calculations on any bodybuilder, they would conclude that bodybuilders are morbidly obese, yet anyone can tell by looking that this is far from the case.

Weight gain is a key element of the body building process. As workouts and rest cycles progress, the goal is to add muscle mass to the body, and that muscle is going to weigh something. Bodybuilders require from 500 calories more per day than the average person all the way up to 5 times the calories required to keep the average body operating at peak efficiency. This is partially because the metabolism of bodybuilders is much faster than the average person's. The rest of these extra calories are for the specific purpose of gaining weight in the form of muscle.

Competitive bodybuilders spend the majority of the year working on "bulking up". This means that their workouts and diets are specifically geared toward producing micro tears in their muscles that will be filled in by new muscle tissues, resulting in larger, more defined muscles and a heavier body because of this additional muscle. Only for a short period right before the beginning of the competition season, do bodybuilders work out to lose weight. Then, the goal is specifically to cut fat and reduce their body fat percentage to a bare minimum so that all muscle groups are clearly defined and visible when they pose for the judges in these competitions.

While the rest of us are being told that we are a bunch of fat slobs who need to lose from 10 pounds and up, depending on height and current weight, bodybuilders may outweigh all but the most obese of us and still need to gain weight to meet their goals for their perfect bodies.

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