Building muscle without gaining fat mass is not the easiest task in bodybuilding, but it can definitely be done.

There are several factors that can influence this process:

Level of education

Diet

Cardio

age

Level of education

People who are beginners in training tend to have the ability to build muscles easier than accumulate fat mass. This is because when you are a beginner your body needs to make many adaptations to be able to face future workouts. So it will take a lot of energy to make these adaptations.

These adaptations are usually things like: increasing the size of the muscles, strengthening the tendons, strengthening the ligaments, strengthening the bones, and improving some functions. All of these things will require calories that the body will take from fat stores.

On the other hand, a person who has advanced training, for example 3-4 years, will generally develop muscle mass and fat tissue at the same rate, if diet and training are not adjusted accordingly.

Calories

In order for someone to build muscle without gaining fat, it is important to know their maintenance calories.

Maintenance calories are basically the amount of calories someone can eat without gaining weight. One method by which you can find your maintenance calories is to eat the same number of calories every day and see if you gain, lose, or lose weight. If you gain weight you reduce them with 200-500 calories, if you lose weight you have to increase them with 200-500, but if you stop you have found your maintenance weight.

Keep in mind that you need to eat the same amount of calories for 1 week to draw conclusions.

Diet composition

To build muscle without gaining fat, you also have to have a diet based on foods rich in protein and low in other macronutrients.

The composition of the diet can look like this: 25-30% protein, 20-30 carbohydrates and the rest percentages of fat.

One trick you can do to avoid fat accumulation is to eat carbohydrates as in the previous example on training days and on days off to reduce them to about 100-150 grams maximum per day.

Cardio

Cardio is a tool that can help you burn a few extra calories so you can reach your maintenance levels. Depending on how you use it, cardiovascular exercise can have a good or bad impact on your muscle gains.

The best thing to do if you need to burn some calories is to do low intensity cardio, mainly a brisk walk.

The duration of the cardio will depend on your needs, for example with 10 minutes of low intensity cardio you can burn around 100 calories. So if you need to burn 500 calories in a day, you will need to do 40-50 minutes of cardio.

Typically, if you do cardio on a treadmill, it will show you how many calories you have burned.

age

This last factor can have an important impact when it comes to building muscles without gaining fat, mainly because over the years the body’s metabolism decreases its activity, normally by 10% every 10 years.

A younger person will build lean muscles more easily than a person who is, say, 40 years old. At this age you must be very careful with all the factors that can influence fat gain.

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