Macronutrient Recommendations / Hypertrophy on Maintenance Calories

Nutrition Q&A [Moderated]
1

I recently finished a 4 month calorie deficit on the Hypertrophy 2 program, and lost 23lbs. I would now like to switch my training focus to one of both hypertrophy and strength, so I purchased the Powerbuilding Template.

Specs:
Male, 29 y/o
BW 183lbs
Waist 33"
Height 6’

I have two questions:

1 - Should I jump right into a modest calorie surplus, or is there any benefit to eating maintenance calories for a period first? Can you increase muscle cross sectional diameter in maintenance calories?

2 - I’ve heard the macro-nutrient recommendations from TBAB are a little out of date, or is that only the protein recommendation? As I move forward with maintenance and surplus “blocks”, can I still use the TBAB numbers? Or is there a more up to date source somewhere?

Thanks very much for the quality programming and knowledge. It has changed my life immensely.

1 Like
2

Mitchell,

I really enjoyed the part of this post where you refer to your anthropometry as “specs” LOL. I needed that this morning :slight_smile:

To your questions:

  1. I would hold tight for ~4 weeks or so at maintenance level.

  2. I think they’re fine, though there’s a bigger range to the protein intake that’ll work- 1.6 - 3.1 g/kg/day. I’d probably stick to 1.8-2 for someone gaining weight.

-Jordan

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3

We don’t really know for sure. That being said, I don’t think most trained folks can gain a significant amount of LBM without gaining weight.