If you haven't know already, getting to the gym and hitting workouts 6 times a week is pointless if you do not get this right. Easy to guess, it is diet. Yes, building muscle, getting bigger and lifting heavier is heavily affected by your diet and what you put into your body to fuel your workouts and recovery.

Let's face it, if you want to optimise your body for maximum muscle growth, you need to provide your body with the diet that is optimised for BUILDING MUSCLE. Constantly consuming pizza and junk food 3 meals a day is going to put you far from building muscle, and more towards building fat.

Today, we are going to look at how you should build your diet or meal plans that is the most effective for muscle growth.

If you want to maximise muscle growth and minimise excess fat gain, you want to be consuming sufficient calories but not to the point where you go overboard and it becomes a dirty bulk.

Since there is a limit to the amount of muscle your body can build in a month, this will cause the excess calories which are "unused" during the muscle building process to be converted into fat (Yes, our greatest horror).

Thus, you should be aiming for a slight increase in weight over month, which we recommend to be at 2 - 4lbs (0.9kg - 1.8kg) per month. Beginners can afford to aim at the higher end of the range, while advanced lifters should aim at the lower end of the range.

So specifically, how much calories should you consume? While everyone is a different amount of maintenance calories due to various factors such as age, gender, lifestyle, etc. One good way to start is to use our free maintenance calories calculator here.

After calculating your maintenance calories, you can go on to add 200-400 calories to that amount. This final amount of calories should be the amount you should aim to consume in order to maximise muscle growth while minimising fat gain aka lean bulking.

Again for beginners you can aim for the higher range of +400 calories while intermediate and advanced lifters should aim towards the lower end of the range (+200 calories).

Almost everyone knows that protein is a MUST when it comes to building muscle. But the misconception is that "more protein means more muscle growth". Similar to calories, there is a limit to how much protein your body needs before it gets ejected by the body as waste.

Getting to the specifics, you should be aiming to consume 0.8 - 1lbs per pound of bodyweight (1.6 - 2.2g per kilograms of bodyweight) would be the most optimal for muscle growth.

Do note that if you go over the range of the protein intake, it is completely safe as long as you have a healthy kidney function.

Many people believe that "Carbs is Evil" and should avoid at all costs in order to minimise fat gain.

This is far from the truth because carbs provide you with the energy you need to actually get work done in the gym. Imagine you were to consume enough protein for muscle growth but the lack of carbs leads you to having the lack of energy to even lift weights and sustain through the gym session, then what's the point of the protein?

On the other hand for fats, you want to be consuming sufficient amount of fat for healthy functions of your entire body as well as hormonal functions

We want to be more specific to define "Fat" as "Healthy Fat". So when we say you should consume sufficient amount of fat, this is not an excuse for you to stuff yourself with fried chicken, pizza and other junk food.

You should be aiming for healthy fats from avocados, nut butters and almonds, etc. Look for healthy fat sources.

For fats, aim for 0.25 - 0.5g per pound of bodyweight (0.55 - 1.1g per kilogram of bodyweight).

The remaining calories that you have can go to carbs.

All in all, before you even start to hit the gym you should extremely clear of your diet in terms of planning out your macros (Calories, Protein, Carbs & Fats) so that every session you spend at the gym is in hand with your optimised diet. This will allow you to gain more muscle and see quicker progress both in the gym as well as in front of the mirror.

If you're looking for a more detailed plan to set up your macros as well as a ready made training routine that it optimised for muscle growth, be sure to check out our fitness guide The Gainz Manual. To take a step even further, we have also created a 30 Day Meal Plan that is optimised for muscle gain so that you do not need to stress out eating the same foods over and over again. Feel free to check out the fitness guide as well as well as the meal plan, and see how it has benefited others. Click here to view it.