The ketogenic, or keto, diet has gained popularity as a very low-carb, high-fat dietary approach often used for weight loss and linked to various other health benefits. For decades, many athletes and bodybuilders assumed that eating adequate carbs was an essential part of putting on muscle mass and preventing muscle loss. However, studies have made it clear that only minimal carbs and glucose are actually needed to support muscle growth, not the typical amount of carbs that most people eat. This article explores the possibility of building muscle on a keto diet, providing a complete guide to achieving this goal.
Understanding the Keto Diet and Ketosis
The ketogenic diet involves drastically lowering your carb intake and consuming fat instead. This helps your body transition into a metabolic state known as ketosis. Ketosis occurs when your body has limited access to glucose or carbs, the body’s preferred source of fuel for many processes. To compensate, your body uses fat to make ketone bodies as an alternative fuel source. To transition into ketosis, people typically need to consume fewer than 50 grams of carbs per day, while getting the rest of their calories from a high-fat, moderate-protein diet. Generally, it takes 2-4 days to enter ketosis if your carb intake is 50 grams per day or less. Still, some people may find it takes a week or longer. Aside from weight loss, the keto diet has other benefits and can be used to aid people with epilepsy, control blood sugar levels, and help reduce your risk of various chronic conditions, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers.
The Possibility of Building Muscle on Keto
Studies show that it is possible to build muscle on the keto diet. For example, a study in 25 college-aged men compared a traditional Western diet against the ketogenic diet for muscle gain, strength, and performance, and found that both diets were equally effective. Other studies have shown that keto may provide similar strength and performance gains as a conventional high-carb diet while also helping shed body fat. Still, if you’re new to keto, you may initially experience a drop in strength and performance. It’s important to note that this drop is often temporary and happens because your body is adapting to relying on ketones.
Structuring a Keto Diet for Muscle Growth
The following recommendations can help you structure a keto diet to build muscle:
- Determine Your Calorie Intake: To optimally build muscle, you need to consistently eat more calories than you burn. The number of calories you need to eat per day to build muscle depends on several factors, such as your weight, height, lifestyle, sex, and activity levels. The first thing you need to do is determine your maintenance calories - the number of calories you need to consume per day to stay the same weight. When you’re trying to build muscle, it’s recommended to increase your calorie intake by 15% above your maintenance calories. As you build muscle, it’s a good idea to adjust your calorie intake around once per month to account for the changes in your weight. What’s more, it’s recommended to gain no more than 0.25-0.5% of your body weight per week to prevent accumulating too much fat. You need to be eating at a maintenance level, or at a surplus to promote muscle growth.
- Eat Plenty of Protein: Protein is the building block of muscles, which means that you need to consume more protein than your body breaks down through natural processes when trying to build muscle. Most studies suggest that eating 0.7-0.9 grams of protein per pound of body weight (1.6-2.0 grams per kg) is ideal for building muscle. There’s some concern among keto dieters about consuming too much protein because it could encourage your body to use gluconeogenesis - a process in which amino acids are converted from protein into sugar, which could stop your body from making ketones. However, studies have shown that people can safely consume around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight (2.1 grams per kg) and stay in ketosis. Although the average person requires just 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, researchers have found that doubling that to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of weight can help optimize muscle growth. And if you’re a competitive bodybuilder, they recommend up to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Alternatively, you need to aim for 25% of your calories to come from protein.
- Track Your Carb Intake: Traditionally, carbs make up the bulk of the calories on a muscle-building diet. However, if you’re trying to stay in ketosis, then you need to restrict carbs. To reach and stay in ketosis, most people need to eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs per day, although the exact value can vary. You may find that timing your carb intake around your workouts can be beneficial, especially if you believe your performance is affected. This strategy is known as a targeted keto diet, in which you consume your daily allowed carbs around your workouts to aid exercise performance. If you’re struggling to complete workouts, you could try a targeted keto approach. Otherwise, feel free to consume your carbs whenever it suits you best.
- Increase Your Fat Intake: Monitoring your fat intake is incredibly important on the keto diet. That’s because your body relies primarily on fat for fuel when you limit carb intake and are in a state of ketosis. After accounting for protein and carbs, fat should make up the rest of your diet. Both protein and carbs provide 4 calories per gram while fat provides 9 per gram. After subtracting your protein and carb needs from your daily calorie needs (see above), divide the final number by 9 to determine your daily fat requirements. These guidelines tend to align with standard keto recommendations for fat intake - 70-75% of your daily calories.
Maximizing Muscle Growth on Keto
Other than diet, there are several factors you should consider to help you build muscle on the keto diet.
Read also: Keto Diet and Muscle Mass
- Resistance Train Regularly: While nutrition is important, resistance training is also key to gaining muscle. Resistance training typically involves lifting weights or doing other strength-based exercises to build strength and gain muscle mass. According to a review of 10 studies, resistance training at least twice a week was more effective at promoting muscle growth than training once per week. Try incorporating exercises like squats, bench presses, pullups, and pushups into your weekly resistance training routine to encourage muscle growth. If you’re new to the gym, consider hiring a personal trainer to show you proper techniques to maximize your efforts and reduce your risk of injury. Strength training causes microscopic tears in your muscle tissue, and the healing process is what triggers new muscle growth. Strength training is only half of the equation. It starts the process.
- Consider Supplements: While not required, supplements may help you build muscle. If you’re struggling to reach your daily protein needs, you could use a protein powder supplement, such as whey, casein, pea, or hemp protein. However, it’s important to note that many protein powders contain carbs, so you’ll need to account for these carbs in your daily carb allowance to stay in ketosis. You could also try using a creatine monohydrate supplement, as studies show that it can aid gym performance, leading to more muscle gain. Remember that your body’s levels of sodium, potassium, and magnesium may drop while on keto. Thus, it’s best to eat foods rich in these minerals, such as dark leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and avocados. Alternatively, you can take a supplement. Add bone broth to your daily regimen, which can help restore electrolytes that are lost during ketosis. For the best results, avoid eating ultra-processed foods like refined oils, cold cuts/processed meats (especially pork) or cured meats, bacon, and processed cheeses.
- Additional Tips: Stay patient. If you’re new to keto, you may experience an initial drop in strength and performance. It’s important to note that this drop is temporary, occurring as your body adapts - so be patient and don’t quit early. Track your carb intake. This helps ensure that you eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs per day to stay in ketosis. Prepare for initial side effects. When some people start this diet, they may experience the keto flu - a collection of symptoms, such as fatigue, nausea, irritability, and insomnia, that occur as your body adapts to its new regimen. Beware of hidden carbs. Beverages and condiments typically contain carbs that many people are unaware of, so it’s important to not overlook them. Test your ketone levels regularly. You can use keto strips or a keto breath test to determine if you’re in ketosis or if you need to adjust your diet accordingly. Get plenty of sleep. Proper sleep is very important for muscle gain and exercise performance.
The Science Behind Keto and Muscle Building
- Muscle Protein Synthesis: Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) is the process that our body uses to build new proteins; it’s essential if we want to gain muscle mass or make our muscles larger-a process known as muscle hypertrophy. Overloading the muscle using resistance exercise is essential to increase muscle protein synthesis and ultimately, size and strength.
- mTOR and Muscle Building: mTOR is a nutrient sensor-meaning that it can sense whether the body is in a “fed” or “fasted” state. mTOR can also sense mechanical forces. This is where its involvement in hypertrophy comes from. When we overload a muscle by lifting heavy weights, mTOR is activated. Activation of mTOR has two functions-stimulating muscle protein synthesis and preventing protein breakdown. This has a dual effect on helping to increase muscle mass.
- Amino Acids are Essential: All proteins (in the body and in food) are made up of amino acids. That’s why they’re often referred to as the “building blocks” of proteins. Without amino acids, we couldn’t build muscle. Ingestion of BCAAs, especially the BCAA leucine, stimulates muscle protein synthesis through mTOR and other processes. Amino acids are the reason for the recommendation to consume protein after a hard workout; since this will maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis and help you recover from your effort.
Addressing Common Concerns
- Do You Need Carbs to Build Muscle? Studies compare protein ingestion alone to a combination of protein and carbs after resistance exercise, and there is no difference in muscle protein synthesis. The carbs don’t seem to be adding anything extra.
- Glycogen Levels: Keto-adapted athletes who were compared to athletes consuming around 600 grams of carbohydrates per day actually had similar levels of stored muscle glycogen. After exercise, the keto-adapted athletes were also able to replenish their levels of stored glycogen just as well as the carbohydrate-consuming athletes-despite consuming about 75% less carbohydrates during that period. Maintenance of glucose and glycogen levels in the body in the absence of carbohydrate consumption can occur through a process known as gluconeogenesis, or GNG for short. GNG is a process that our body uses to create glucose out of non-carbohydrate sources-mainly amino acids and glycerol from fatty acids.
- Protein Intake: Research shows that the ketogenic diet actually prevents muscle from being broken down. When an equal number of calories are consumed on diets containing the same amount of protein but differing levels of carbs, the lower-carb diets actually maintain lean muscle mass to the greatest extent. Ketosis might actually improve our ability to utilize proteins. This could be due to the fact that the body no longer needs to breakdown protein for gluconeogenesis-instead utilizing ketones, sparing the protein we have.
Keto-Adaptation and Potential Drawbacks
After an initial period on the ketogenic diet, you become what’s called “keto-adapted,” which means your body uses your stored body fat and the fat from your diet for energy. During this time the men were told to consume adequate calories (dietary energy) to maintain their body mass.
Ketogenic diets, however, do have a number of potential downsides: They’re very restrictive, and you have to monitor your carb intake very carefully. When you know you can’t have something, it’s human nature to want it all the more. So if you’re “not allowed” to eat carbs, carbs are exactly what you’re going to want. What’s more, the low carb approach does tend to leave some people struggling in the gym with low energy levels. They feel tired and mentally fuzzy. If you do a lot of intense exercise, the quality of your workouts may decline.
The Role of Research and Meta-Analysis
Reviews focused on the ketogenic diet (KD) based on the increase in fat-free mass (FFM) have been carried out with pathological populations or, failing that, without population differentiation. A review and meta-analysis was conducted to verify whether a ketogenic diet without programmed energy restriction generates increases in fat-free mass (FFM) in resistance-trained participants. The effect of the ketogenic diet, in conjunction with resistance training, on fat-free mass in trained participants was evaluated. Boolean algorithms from various databases (PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) were used, and a total of five studies were located that related to both ketogenic diets and resistance-trained participants. In all, 111 athletes or resistance-trained participants (87 male and 24 female) were evaluated in the studies analyzed. The results of the meta-analysis did not show significant differences between the control group and the experimental group in the FFM variable, although the differences between means were favorable to the experimental group.
Key Takeaways
Though it involves carefully watching your protein, carb, and fat intake, the keto diet may be as effective as traditional higher carb diets for building muscle. Simply following the above guidelines can help you plan an effective keto strategy for building muscle. However, it’s unclear whether the keto diet offers more benefits for building muscle than a traditional higher carb diet.
Read also: Medical Spa Guide
Read also: Relationship with Food