NOTE by Mehdi: As I promised, the blog posts are resuming starting today. I'm going to use a different format than in the past, but I think this will be fun and useful for you. Blog comments are open, keep it cool.
So let me start by asking you a simple question: what do you think matters most to build lean muscle? I'm giving you 2 choices:
- Diet; or
- Training
One of the 2 is more important than the other one. My question to you is which one? Diet OR training? There's only 1 good answer.
Tell me what you think matters most and why in the blog comments section below. I'll give you the correct answer tomorrow.
Training is obviously the most important. You can eat normal food and train hard and gain results. It might not come fast and it might not get you past a certain point (based on your genetics) but you will gain muscle mass. If you never train you can diet all you want but you won’t really gain any muscle mass. I bet you will prove me wrong however …
Can a bad diet with a good training program bring good results? Yes.
Can a good diet with a bad training program bring good results? No.
Beginner gains are not taken into consideration in the above statements.
I’m going to go with training as being more important.
Diet is most important. You do need a solid training but without a proper diet the gains will be minimal
Depends what you mean by ‘success’, and your scales of bad to good in each case. Clearly eating terribly/being malnourished will be worst; clearly never doing exercise will be worst.
Success qua ‘beginner gains’ is possible in most circumstances; each level of progress after that requires a certain level of ‘good’ in diet and training to achieve. One or the other will be the limiting factor first, until it is improved, then the other will be. Other limiting factors could be genetics, age, hormonal environment, etc.
So saying ‘one or the other’ is not a very useful question. Asking how each can be improved, and identifying the priorities *on an individual basis* is a useful activity.
Diet
Training. You can’t build muscle without stimulus no matter how good you diet is.
Workout!
you can’t get the muscle without training.
but when you workout, diet helps you.
diet just support your training.
diet!
assume you never work out, but eat healthy; what you eat is FAR more important to your overall health.
assume you work out like crazy, but living off cheeseburgers and fries; you’re a muscular dead man.
75% diet, 25% excercise is the magic formula.
If given a choice between diet OR training I would lean toward training being more important because a clean diet without any kind of workout will just make you skinny and/or healthy.
Now if the question is a bad diet + good training vs a good diet + bad training then I would go with the diet being the most important factor. Even the worse workout program performed consistently with a high protein diet will produce results. You may pack on some fat as well but you still will increase lean muscle mass.
Oh, come on guys.. its obviously a trick question. There is no such thing as ONE MOST IMPORTANT thing. It is all ways combination of both. If your training sucks there will be no need for body to adopt hence no increase in muscle mass, on the another hand if your diet is crap your muscles will not have an access to required nutrients needed for recovery or/and muscle growth. Think of your body as house in construction, training as workers, food as pay/materials. You cant have optimal results if you are not doing both. On the another hand, you can just be a genetic freak
I agree with Hill.
Providing you have an active life (think outdoor work for example) and eat a high protein diet with good fats and quality vegetables, you’ll end up looking better than someone who eats crap but goes to the gym. In my opinion.
Hi all,
In my opinion, training is the most important. You mention building muscle here, and muscle is built through progressive overload and stress on the body. To lose fat, diet is the most important. You can certainly gain mass while eating fast food 3 times a day, and that would be muscle. The only factor that’s ever been determined as a precursor to muscle growth is a good heavy training programme. Even if you consume tonnes of protein, a limited amount will be used for muscle synthesis. More protein doesn’t mean more will be used to build new muscle. On the other hand, it is satiating and will help to make one full.
But the bottom line is that muscle growth can still occur in a caloric deficit. Recovery can be aided through proper sleep. Inflammation can be prevented through caloric restriction. Just look at how big Brad Pilon is. He eats small but is bigger, leaner and stronger than most of us!
The question is a “trick”
To gain lean muscle you truly have to train both, with exercise and nutrition! You will gain with exercise and a bad diet but I doubt you would gain with a good diet and zero exercise…
Hi , Diet as much as you want but the best way to build to build muscle and strength is ” iron ” pills , the ones that fit on the end of a barbell . Cheers
Diet.
We all are active on some level, so we all use and workout to some degree. Diet is what allows muscles to grow. If you work out perfectly and consistently but don’t eat well or soon after your workout, all the work gets wasted, because your body will look for energy sources and if it doesn’t have the right nutrients it can literally eat your muscles. If you eat right and only kinda workout or do some sport half-assed, then you will develop lean muscle.
Diet
I would have said training.
Someone could eat a ‘perfect’ diet but it wouldn’t necessarily help them gain muscle.
Diet.
Everything starts with what you put in your body. Garbage in, Garbage out. No doubt, diet is the fundamental basis of any fitness program.
I’m going with diet; (as he states lean muscle). You can have muscle under your fat as well; a clean diet will help promote “lean” muscle. :)
Training. Without doubt! One can not gain muscles by only eating and not training. I am not saying that diet is not important, but really, you can gain muscles just by training and eating whatever you like. Just look at the prisoners, I don’t think they can eat when they want, I suppose in worst cases they only get 1 meal per day, and some of them are really strong. Diet is very overrated.
If we are taking in to account that the person wanting to build the lean muscle is following both a diet & training plan, Then I would say that the Eating/Diet is the most important, followed by a very good exercise/training plan.
Once you have trained past the initial ‘newbie’ gains where fat loss and muscle gain is quite natural to a point, if you are not eating enough (and of the right things) you will struggle to gain muscle.
Any one saying Training is more important must need to re think their objectives?
Diet: if you eat nothing you die.
Both diet and training are important, however we have been given an ultimatum to choose. To make an analogy, a vehicle without fuel is useless, and so are humans without food. Poor diet can’t yield positive results in training, the fuel is missing. Therefore, diet must be more important than training.
This is a trick question.
Both are equally important.
One without the other is pretty useless; together they work synergistically.
Depends on how you look at it.
Training is the most important. without training your body won’t be stimulated to build muscle. The only restriction is that you need enough calories (look at dave tate’s old diet). Putting health and minimal fat aside what you eat isn’t important for muscle building, it’s more like how much you eat.
I would say that this topic can not be resolved using an either-or question…. A well designed training targeting hypertrophy on top of an undernourished metabolism can (will) lead to protein breakdown (= contraproductive results). On the other hand a hypercaloric diet, even if consisting of high quality food, will not lead to the desired growth of lean body mass as long as the growth stimulus is not set properly (f.ex. via training)…
Well, most important does not infer the formula being deviod of the least important. So most important meaning if you did both, what should you concentrate more on, it would be diet. This is not only my answer but the logical choice, since studies have proven by controling what you eat humans can actually add lean muscle without excercise. (although very little and I am sure with BF gain) Eat nothing, and workout all the time, and you wont add any muscle.
Diet is more important
However I pay more attention to my training sadly
Diet is the most important factor, definitely!
I’ve seen hundreds of people working out daily who didn’t change a bit in years.
Simple : let’s assume that your testosterone levels would be very high, then your body would build muscle, even without working out. (this is actually what happens during puberty)
And testosterone levels (or any hormones that play a vital role in health/muscle building) cannot be optimal without good diet.
Now, the definition of good nutrition is a completely different story and might surprise many people.
But i’ll give you a tip : eating steamed brocolli with low fat chicken or tuna all the time, is not going to do it ;-)
Definitely TRAINING.
Yes a diet is important AS WELL, but I’ve seen non steroiders, drinking butt-loads of beer, feasting on cheese burgers and pizzas and ice creams and going to the gym 5-6x a week, and still gaining a very decent physique(absolutely nothing as compared to people who diet+train+rest properly), but for the average couch potato, something to marvel at… No matter how great your diet is if you do not give it the proper stimulus the body will not respond to anything, and your ‘perfect foods diet’ will also end up making you gain fat and not building muscle.
John summed it up for us all perfectly in just one sentence.
training
Training. Period.
Diet is part of training. “trick” question is right.
Diet, definitely.
Notice that the question is which is more “important” to building lean muscle – it’s not an either/or question. Both are required but if you need to choose between adding another workout to your week or shopping for good, clean food to fuel your growth then go to the shops!
“Abs are made in the kitchen, NOT in the gym!” ;)
Okay – so that quote isn’t to do with building muscle so much as losing the layer of fat covering your abs, but still, it’s an awesome quote!
Mexican boxers have been training for years on poor diet, armed forces train for months on poor diet ,depending on the country they are from
If you eat and don’t train you are doing bugger all, you can train, eat maccy ds or anythin g and get stronger , what ever your diet is you can get stronger
As a 61 year old, 6′, 209 lbs, not very active person, I was able to “find” the correct answer, I believe, by clicking on the “About” tab at the top of the page. I signed up for Stronglifts last year after my shoulder surgery ( full volume tear in supraspinnatus). One thing led to another and I started the program this past Wednesday. It has taken me until today to be able to walk normally again. Man did my thighs hurt! Anyway, I plan to start over today and modify the squats to just body weight for a short time. As Mehdi says in the above referenced tab, it’s the one you stick with! I plan to stick to both. And will post my results to the site. Hope to talk to everyone again, SOON! Thanks Mehdi.
DIET…..from personal experience, diet is a clear winner of the two! I agree with other posters in that the perfect plan is when you couple the diet with a solid workout plan you will experience lean muscle gains.
I still think it’s 50/50. You could eat the best foods in the world, but without a training regime nothing will really happen. But having said that, you could have the greatest training regime but without proper diet you won’t get the results.
A. training
B. diet
C. both
I think C.
Can’t grow really without both with good established outcomes.
Ok so you do some training, hit the squat rack and get some minor muscle gains. Its only short term though.
In the long term, diet is what matters. You can retain a lot of muscle by eating right. You can’t gain much at all from just training and eventually, you will just lose what you gained plus what you initially had.
Training! But potatoes will help you on the way.
Diet: if you don’t eat enough you run the risk of eventually Muscle atrophy where your body will consume muscle, so actually at that point training will be counter productive.
Yes, the most obvious answer is both, but I’ll side with the nutrition camp.
As someone pointed out before, it’s certainly possible to lead an ACTIVE lifestyle accompanied with an amazing diet full of vitamins, minerals, and the right amount of macros and look great while doing it.
Medhi also asked which of the two are most important to build “lean” muscle? You can be a tub of lard with the ability to lift heavy weights after having McDonald’s all day, but why would you? I don’t think Medhi wants us to think in extremes either so this is just an extreme example.
I’d like to add that the relationship between your training regimen and your diet is one sided. What goes in to your body in terms of food can fully be utilized before your strength training, during your strength training and after your strength training. However, no amount of training can ever correct your dieting mistakes.
Just like you can’t build a house without materials, you can’t build muscle mass without nutrition. Training provides the stimulus, but the body must be able to recover and adapt.
There was a British TV program where they followed a nutritional study. A group of people agreed to eat in massive caloric excess while not performing any exercise. Most people just got fat, but one Asian guy actually looked similar to when he started because he gained a proportionate amount of muscular bodyweight. So… diet alone can drive hypertrophy (if you’re lucky).
building lean muscle can’t be done with diet alone. there has to be some stimulus, be it training, or hormones, or both.
To build lean muscle training is by far more important. Actually, training is all that matters. We are not talking about dropping body fat and looking like a magazine cover model. We are talking about building lean muscle. The average person in the Western world gets enough of each macro nutrient on a daily basis to build lean muscle. Nutrition or eating less plays a role in getting the cover model look but if we are talking about building lean muscle training is all that matters.
Hmm. A complicated question, but with no protein you build no muscle even if you train only curls, you’ll still build more muscle than if you only eat potatoes. Diet FTW.
Training. Training is a stimulus that stress the muscles, causing them to grow. Essentially, the more you train, the more your body adapts itself to the stresses of training. Newbie lifters can eat essentially anything they want and still grow. It is the training that causes muscle growth. Diet supports muscle growth but does not cause it.
If diet were more important to muscle growth we would see a dose response between food and muscle mass. That is, unlike when taking steroids and anabolic hormones, where your muscle gains are only limited by the amount of drugs you are willing to take, there is a maximum rate of muscle gain that can be reached by a natural. Simply eating more may increase LBM, but we are looking at true muscle mass. Just eating will increase your LBM as you get fatter, however the LBM gained is both connective tissue and muscle mass. Therefore once you diet down, the connective tissue is reduced and the LBM gained from ab libitum bulking methods will be reduced and time will have been wasted dieting back down. The manipulation of your diet cannot replace anabolic steroids, no matter what magic powder (or milk) you are drinking. Dietary manipulations includes carb cycling, intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, or whatever havoc you wish to unleash on your diet. These are mostly used to keep fat gains at bay while gaining the same muscle mass as the ab libitum intake. These spare muscle while limiting fat gains, they do not increase the rate at which you gain muscular mass. Meeting your daily caloric and protein requirements simply eliminates the rate limiting steps of muscle building. That is to say, your diet won’t be holding you back, but eating more or eating only X macronutrient more will not increase muscle mass gains.
Because so little is known about the exact reasons muscles grow many of the claims you see supplement companies touting, i.e. “Eat this and protein synthesis will increase,” have little real world application. In this case we cannot tell if the rate of protein catabolism increased as well, perhaps resulting in a net increase in protein of zero. When measuring muscle mass, terms like protein synthesis are called surrogate endpoints. They are not a true measure, but we think they can be a good estimate of what we are ultimately trying to measure. The problem with surrogate endpoints is that there are other confounding variables. We can see increases in these surrogate endpoints of muscle growth, and state with complete assurance that, say cottage cheese, increases protein synthesis. The problem is determining whether this increase in protein synthesis actually marked an increase in muscle growth. It is therefore hard to see the full picture because we cannot measure muscle growth directly. I’m getting tired of writing so….
If you have struggled through this post, I applaud you. If you take away anything from here, remember, training causes muscle growth and diet causes fat loss, not the other way around.
Obviously training.
It is NOT a trick question. He’s not saying which is needed to be healthy. He’s asking which is most impt for BUILDING MUSCLE. And hence stated b4, no matter how much f*** protein u take, if there’s no stimulus, it’s gonna turn to fat.
Again, even if you eat like s***, there’s bound to be at least some protein in your meals, and that’s gonna build at least a little muscle…even if its just 5% more muscle.
It’s repeated on every training site or book you read, ” You can’t out train a bad diet”
Training. You can out train bad eating.
Good question but for building muscle is requiered a good workout, good diet and good rest. So I cant give you just one answer on that question. But diet plays a good roll on working out. Without proper nutrition our body won’t grow up no matter how hard we workout, like when we were llittle, the more mommy milk we ate it, the more powerful we became lol :-)
The importance of training follows a logarithmic evolution. The importance of diet is exponential. So, when you are a beginner, training is the most important. No matter very much on your diet, you’ll have some tye of gain. But, the importance of training starts to slow down and is surpassed by diet, whose importance is grows faster.
Training. You cannot gain muscle by dieting alone, but you can by training alone. The results might not be optimum but there will be some results.
Training if fitness is the goal. You can get results while still eating crap as long as your training right in my opinion. On the other hand, if long term health is the issue, I think diet would be better.
Training! From my experience doesn’t matter too much what you eat so long as there is variety, balance and moderation. Training is the key.
Diet. Always. Without proper nutrition you can train until you get blue in your face, but you will never get anywhere. Remember – you are what you eat.
Obviously Training is more important for building muscle (alone). For losing fat, diet is more important.
Both are necessary for either.
To build muscle, training – withouth a doubt. You can eat as healthy as you wan’t, but you won’t get strong unless you do some sort of training. That dosent mean that you have to go to the gym; hard labour and many other activities can also make you strong.
And GREAT to se activity from you again, Mehdi!
This is a trick question. The one true answer is both since they feed off of eachother.
I believe that Diet + Training is the best way to gain muscels..
Cause Diet means eating healthy plus the correct training will conclude a great result..
they are both equally important. you should put as much effort into one as you do the other. your diet should be part of your training and vice versa.
Note: the question being asked is “what do you think matters MOST to build LEAN muscle?”
Assuming ones normal daily routine affords some sort of physical execration, and that the individual isn’t living a sedentary lift, I’d say the most important thing for building [lean] muscle is diet.
Of course, both are important.
Though both are essential for muscle building, diet is definitely more important than trainning, since muscle is made of matter. Training just helps tone the muscles.
Both are important, there depending on each other as it comes to build muscle. But if I have to choose, I choose for training.
The diet is the most important thing for gaining muscle because of it’s anabolic effect. Train and don’t eat and you will destroy your muscle mass.
people need to read the question – he isn’t asking which makes you healthier, he’s asking what’s better for building lean muscle. he says one is more important than the other, implying both are important, but one is more necessary. that’s training, because no matter what you eat, if you don’t train you won’t grow muscle. he is NOT asking about health.
Of course both are important, but if I had to pick one then diet would win.
Simply because, even if your training is spot on, if your not getting in enough calories, enough protien etc you just won’t grow.
Diet.
Training is important, but you need to feed your muscles after work out. You need carbs to get energy and protein to feed the muscles.
This is really timely Mehdi as I’m encountering this very question right now. My training is coming along really well and my strength is really increasing. But I’m not gaining any size on my legs. It’s time I follow my own advice and start eating more.
Training is second to eating well. The program you chose isn’t really important. It’s the consistency that counts whether you’re doing SL, SS, Madcow, 5/31 or any other program. Showing up and putting forth the effort is the most important piece of training. But none of that matters if you don’t eat enough to sustain your training. If you don’t get the calories that you need then it’s impossible for your body to create the muscle and eventually you won’t be able to create any more strength.
james
The question was, “What is more importnat to BUILD MUSCLE”. Obvously training is more imortant in building muscle. However, in gettng fit or loosing fat, diet is more improtant. You need both, but DIET is the prime determinant for fat loss (calorie intake minus calorie expendature equals caloric (fat) accumulation/depletion).
You can’t have one without the other. No matter how you define “success,” the old axiom garbage in, garbage out holds true. train as hard as you want, if you’re eating crap, you’ll stall and fail. eat as well as you can, but if you’re not lifting the weights, you won’t progress.
my two cents.
I believe both are very important. But if you want me to choose just one of them that is: Trainning! You can have a perfect diet and if you don’t train there’s no way you can develop any muscle mass. On the other side you can have no such good diet but very intense and hard trainning and you will see results.. Of course not the results you will have combing both: hard trainning with a proper diet.
One cannot go without the other.
Training while eating like an anorexic 12-year old girl will only bring you closer to death whereas eating completely perfect but without a stimulus from training will cause little muscle growth.
Someone once explained that you could see lifting as a triangle with progress in the middle.
The 3 sides of the triangle represent training, eating and resting and if you are missing one of them you won’t see much progress. You may not put much thought into any of them and just eat whatever you like and train randomly, but they all need to be taken care of.
Training more important for muscle-gain.
Diet more important for fat-loss.
Training because when you sit behind your computer all day just to play WOW you will only be able to gain any strength.
On the other side if you only eat things like french fries etc. you will never succeed in your training.
Hard one. (I’ll keep it to training)
Greetz
For a new trainee, training is more important. The 3 core lifts in the beginning will give you gains no matter what your diet is since you’re doing something completely new for your body.
After your newb gains, diet becomes more important. I would go as far to say that diet can be 70% of what really matters, you need to enough nutrients to recover.
I think diet matters most in building lean muscle. Because no matter how hard you train if you are not properly nutrition-ed your body will not show the results for it.
diet: if your diet is insufficient your body can atrophy.. that is the base of your muscle building regimen diet and then exercise/training. you can gain and loose muscle without training based on your diet.
Working out will bring results even with a careless diet,especially for beginers.An excellent diet will bring none in terms of muscle gains if you sit in a couch all day…
to answer this, i believe you can’t over think it.
we all can agree diet provides the building blocks while training makes use of them. reversing this equation simply doesn’t work. with that said, it would seem that diet has the slight importance.
Training!
You cannot gain weight without taking in more calories than you burn. There are no exceptions to this. However, in terms of quality of those calories you take in, it is not as important as quality of training.
DIET: No doubt. Most people I know spend all their time trying to change, optimize, foucus, and or adjust their way of training. Be it cardio or strength, it does not matter. I’m talking about people who have been training for 10 plus years, they barely look any different as a result of their efforts. Everyone knows people like this because they are in the majority. After 10 years shouldn’t a person look like a semi pro bodybuilder, but they don’t do they? No, they look soft, smooth and or just barely slightly fit.
These people refuse to address their diet to any serious degree however. That’s the difference in someone who looks extremely fit and a person who is fit.
DIET because Eating is Training. I don’t make a distinction. This is somewhat of a trick question.
You can’t build muscle without sufficient calories and protein. You sure can try though!
Example: Occasionally, especially after a short layoff, I’ll be far too sore to train on schedule. So sore that I cannot execute the full range of motion. On those days I go to the kitchen as if it were the gym and eat as much high quality food as possible. When I can’t lift to recover, I eat to recover. Because eating is training.
The answer is clearly training is more important. It’s a simple deduction really. Eat perfect and don’t train. How much lean mass are you going to gain? None. Now eat horribly and train. How much are you going to gain then? More than nothing, that’s for sure.
We all understand that both are important and if you want maximum results you do them both right. But the answer is beyond doubt, training is more important.
People turn into huge ripped beasts even when eating junk all day while training hard. Nobody gets big and strong by eating right and not training.
The correct answer is training. As long as you are on a maintenance or surplus caloric diet, if you follow an appropriate training program you’ll develop lean muscle. To maximize the results of your training program you should follow certain diet rules as Brad Pilon and others have suggested
To those who are saying “depends on the goal…”, the question states the goal. TO BUILD LEAN MASS, which is more important? Not health, or fitness, or whatever else, we are talking about building additional lean tissue in the body.
Many are really getting too deep with it though. Some are distilling diet down to the concept of eating in general. If you do that, then of course eating wins hands down because you will die if you don’t do it. That’s clearly not the context of the question (unless Medhi is pulling a prank on us).
I think the heart of it is the specifics of your diet versus the specifics of your training. So for example, someone doing a BB split routine but doing it wrong, not pushing themselves, not training hard and consistently, but eating perfectly clean. Compare that to someone eating pure fast food and junk but doing a strong program with the big compound lifts and training it hard and consistent. Which will BUILD MORE LEAN MASS, the one who emphasizes the diet or the one who emphasizes the training?
The answer is clear: Training is more important. And that does not mean diet is NOT important.
Without any question, training is most important.
diet
I don’t know if my first post will go through or not, but the more I think about this the more I want to say that it can’t be answered. There are critical components of both aspects. If you are missing any of these then you fail.
You can’t say that good training, combined with ANY diet, will produce lean mass gains. Because the critical component of diet is calories. Without enough calories you will not grow.
We have to make a lot of assumptions and definitions before we can compare the “good training bad diet” to the “bad training good diet”. We don’t know what is acceptable in the “bad” definitions. In other words, eating enough calories may be considered “too good” for the “bad diet”. And therefore, the good training but bad diet setup will fail due to lack of building materials. But if that’s the case then the other side will fail as well because you could say that the necessary training to stimulate growth is “too good” for the “bad training” label.
Over analyzing? Hell yeah. But what I’m saying is valid. We don’t have enough information. This feels more like a brain teaser than a legit simple question. It seems to be about guessing the definitions of the parameters that Medhi is thinking. It could also be a trick question in that you don’t build any muscle from training. The muscle is built during rest from the food.
Tom rode into town on Sunday, he stayed three days and left on Sunday. That’s what it feels like. It’s about knowing the perspective of the question.
Diet is more important because without it you will die. Training is more important because without it your body will not grow. Both are of critical importance, and without either you fail. This can only imply one thing. The critical components of both aspects must be present in both scenarios. And this is a question about which is more important to REFINE. All else is just silliness and a waste of time. I don’t think Medhi is trying to trick us or be clever. It’s not April first.
If the critical aspect of the diet is there in all cases (enough calories) and the critical aspect of training is there (consistent lifting – putting in good effort) then training is more important. Because the refinement of what lifts you do and how many sets, etc. is more important that what you specifically eat, as long as the goal is merely lean mass gains and all else (fat) is irrelevant.
Diet. If you eat healthy and don’t work out but do manual labor in your occupation you will build muscle naturally. Training allows you to exercise the muscles you may not use in your daily routine along with the ones you do. If you’re not eating healthy, you’re not feeding your muscles and more than likely out of shape.
This is about what matters most for building lean muscle. If you’re thinking exclusively about diet and training in a vacuum, then training is obviously more important as you won’t gain muscle without lifting weights: so the answer would be training.
Now, as others have obviously pointed out, these two things do not exist in a vacuum and attempting to optimize both of them is going to really help you build lean muscle fast. Still, training is the major key – performing a heavy weight training program will net you muscle increases as long as you aren’t a complete fool about your diet.
Training, Dave Tate proved you could gain off junk food. But now that he has his diet in order looks alot more muscular.
Training.
They are consubstantial. Both play an essential part in building muscle healthily and strongly.
I’d have to say diet. Bad diet + good training = pointless, it’s a downhill path. Good diet + bad training = also pointless, but at least it wont be downhill. Diet is major factor in either muscle growth and fat loss, it all comes down to the kitchen.
He said “most”, which means they both matter. But he also said “lean”, which can be accomplished with diet.
Both, It’s a lifestyle. You cant train well with bad fuel and when you train well it makes you want to eat well to get better gainsl
Train can’t go anywhere without the tracks, both.
Diet!!!!
Diet
You need a positive caloric surplus
Then training matters.
Quality of extra cals and training methods next.
1. – “You need quality training to build lean muscles, then quality diet to show them.”
2. – “You need quality diet to build lean muscles, then quality training to show them.”
1. shows better for me …
Both! You can’t have one without the other. Especially after 40 years of age, you can’t outwork a bad diet.
training….. without training,a good diet wont be any good…. but diet’s important too…. u can’t expect to be lean by eating crap!!!!
I say diet, without proper nutrition you may get strong but you won’t reach your true potential. Your body needs nutrients to feed your muscle and it needs a proper balance in order to burn fat, rather than store fat.
Diet.
training. train hard. eat smart.
I’m leaving the extreme cases out of the question (bad diet, no exercise).
Then I consider two cases:
1) Average diet, great workouts
2) Amazing diet, medium training
In the first case, the results will be moderate muscle gains.
The second – lean body, no muscles.
Now the answer is obvious: training is more important.
For building muscle the training is more important, obviously. While reading through the other posts I think many people have misunderstood the question. Even with an unhealthy diet you can pack muscle on your frame. Just eating a great diet with an extremely lax workout isnt going to get you anywhere in terms of muscle growth.
Ever hear of a dirty bulk?
There has to be damage, or there will be nothing to repair.
So training is more important.
A lot of beginners make good gains, while their diets are crap. You can build muscle without a good diet, but you will sooner reach a “saturation point” (much sooner).
I guess its training, but lean mass needs both training and a proper diet combined for the optimal results…
Reply to wsuw :
This is exaclty my point!
You are correct and this is what most people don’t realize and might misinterpret my previous post.
The question is what is most important for building muscle? Training OR diet.
When people hear diet, they immediately think about chicken, tuna, rice, etc.
But what about the definition of a good diet to build muscle is a totally different question than what works best.
And this is where i see things different…
A dirty bulk without working out will build much more muscle than training with weights and eating sub-maintenance calories ever can.
I’m not saying sub-maint. calories with workout cannot build muscle, i’m saying a (dirty) bulk will build much more and faster even without workout.
Did you know that if you would not work out and start eating lots of calories every day and gain 20 pounds, at least 4 pounds of them are actually muscle!
You would not want to do that, because you gained 16 pounds of fat, but it shows how anabolic food can be.
Caloric intake can be much more anabolic than training ever can be.
If you clean your bulk, it’s even more anabolic and combined with workouts even more.
Just make sure the bulks are short-cycled, but believe me, nutrition has much more impact than many people here like to think.
It’s a very good question and one that is set to make us think hard, is was told in my younger days its 60% training and 40% diet, the thing is that you have to be focused towards both training and diet to achieve the results you are looking for, another important factor is rest. Both go hand in hand but if I had to choose I’d prob lean towards Training.
Food is needed to “build muscle”, Training is a stimulus that persuades muscles to grow larger.
Thanks for your input everybody. Comments are now closed. Read my answer here: http://stronglifts.com/fast-muscle-gains-real-secret/