Best foods to gain muscle mass

Americans are experts on gaining size. Sadly, with over a third of our population classified as obese, that's not the kind of "mass" you're after. Yet that's exactly what indiscriminate eating and a lack of exercise can do for you.

If you're committed to a resistance-training program, you can instead pack on muscle by following a number of key nutrition and supplementation tips. But first you'll have to toss out any remnants of how most Americans eat.

To gain the right kind of mass, we enlisted two captains of the Muscle Militia, Twinlab athletes Ronnie Milo and Jason Wheat, to help us compile the 24 tips presented below.

Sure, eating clean and healthful foods is more difficult than eating whatever you want, but we're pretty sure you don't want to look like that other 33 percent.

Whether you're just trying to add some off-season size, or you're a hard-gainer who has trouble adding mass, growing muscle means consuming more calories—assuming you're already training hard. While you can log your meals over the course of a week to compute your average daily calories, perhaps the simplest step is to consume one additional mini-meal during your day that adds calories over and above what you normally eat.

Whether you're just trying to add some off-season size, or you're a hard-gainer who has trouble adding mass, growing muscle means consuming more calories—assuming you're already training hard.

By ensuring you have a caloric surplus, you provide your muscles with the raw materials to repair tissue damage brought on by heavy training to support growth.

A mini-meal of about 300 calories can be inserted anywhere during your day, preferably during your longest stretch between whole-food meals.

If, after two weeks, the scale still isn't budging, and you're not seeing gains in strength with the addition of a single mini-meal, add another. (The scale can't be your sole determinant, because you may be dropping body fat while you're adding muscle, in which case the scale may not budge.)

By increasing your daily calories slowly, any gains you make are less likely to be ones that ring your midsection. The extra meal will have to become part of your daily routine as well. This is especially true for hard-gainers and individuals with a fast metabolism who have difficulty adding muscle.