How to Build Muscle Without Carbs

While carbohydrate consumption can certainly help with mass gain efforts by allowing additional food choices and making it easier to meet daily caloric goals, carbs are not strictly necessary for weight gain or building mass. It is possible to build muscle while on a low-carb diet--it will just take more work and dedication on your part to fuel the body with sufficient calories for growth while consuming nothing more than low-carb food.

Instructions

• 1

  Keep a food log in a notebook or on a computer to help track your total daily caloric consumption. At a basic level, gaining weight is nothing more than a function of creating a caloric surplus, so you must constantly strive to eat more calories than you are burning in order to gain muscle. Start with a 3,000-calorie diet, and aim to eat that number of calories each day from low-carb foods to stimulate muscle growth.

• 2

  Assess progress weekly by weighing yourself on a digital scale. Aim for weight gain of roughly a pound or two per week, adjusting your daily calories upward or downward as needed to meet your goal. Remember that a 300-calorie adjustment will result in a 2,100 calorie surplus or deficit over a week, so make small adjustments for a big effect to your weight-gain efforts.

• 3

  Employ calorie-dense low-carb foods to help you meet your daily caloric goal. Nuts, nut butters and oils are all fairly low-carb foods that contain a large number of calories per serving. For example, just two tablespoons of olive oil contain 240 calories, so consider drizzling olive oil over your green vegetable servings to help add additional calories to your diet. Likewise, consider stirring in scoops of natural peanut butter into protein shakes, as this can easily add several hundred calories over the course of a day, making it easier to hit your goal.

• 4

  Train hard in the gym. Remember that training provides your body with the stimulus to develop extra muscle, so regardless of how spot-on your diet may be, you will gain fat instead of muscle if you are not providing a sufficient stimulus for growth. Aim to train at least three or four days per week, remembering to eat 300 to 400 extra calories on those days to offset the amount burnt through working out.