27/02/2025
How much fat is necessary to gain as a natural bodybuilder?
As much that’s needed to gain as much muscle as possible.
Gaining whilst shredded naturally is unrealistic, but it also doesn’t excuse piling on body fat via chasing scale weight.
It’s hard to gauge progress as a natural bodybuilder, which is why the scale weight often mistaken as an absolute for progress.
Remember
- You can only gain so much muscle, anything past that is going to likely be body fat
- If performance is consistently climbing ( via form, reps and/or load) despite weight barely budging. You’re likely to be growing
- Holding weight doesn’t mean you’re not growing but it can mean you can gain for longer in comparison to piling on weight
- If you were to gain 0.5lbs a week over a year, you’ll put on 21lbs. Most of that still is likely to not be muscle. 21lbs of muscle in a year is very ambitious for an assisted competitor.
Lucas has smashed this, he’s still feeling fit and healthy. Training like a beast and recovering hard which is yielding substantial progress, but not to the extent where we have to diet the earned muscle off to get lean due to gaining excessive body fat.
