How to Build Muscle on the Carnivore Diet

Before discussing “How to Build Muscle on the Carnivore Diet” I should answer the frequent question: “Can you build muscle on the Carnivore Diet?”

Yes. Yes you can.

But you need to take an intelligent approach.

If you have a chance to listen, I discussed this in a podcast episode on Kevin Stock Radio.

How to Build Muscle on the Carnivore Diet

What’s your goal?

There are a lot of ways of training to build muscle. Strength training, olympic lifting, crossfit all work. They all can build muscle. But all can give different results as well.

What kind of training you do depends on your goals.

For example, I’ve trained for over two decades with a primary motivator of body composition – i.e. bodybuilding. The vanity side of fitness 🙂

Others care more about how much weight they put on the bar. Neither is right or wrong – but the training styles are quite different.

Yes, I incorporate some aspects of strength and some explosive and some metabolic training but hypertrophy is the main target of my gym sessions. It’s important to know what your goal is.

But whether your goal is to look good (bodybuilding) or put as much weight as possible on the bar (strength training), the nutrition approach with the Carnivore Diet is fairly similar regardless.

And that’s what we’re going to focus on here.

But you need to know your goal. Often people say “I want to build muscle and lose fat.” That’s great. And it’s possible. But ideally you should have a primary driver – either fat loss or muscle building.

An easy way to decide:

1. If you are overweight – focus on losing body fat while also training in the gym – this is a great time to master execution (more on this later…)
2. If you are lean – focus on building muscle – the rest of this article is for you.

But before any of this – First Things First…

First Things First – Adapting to the Carnivore Diet – Homeostasis

The first thing you have to do is get adapted to the Carnivore Diet. Without this, none of the rest matters. Tinkering with the Carnivore Diet too early causes more harm than good. Trust me.

Read about John and Sally.

They are very different, but they both have one thing in common – they have to get adapted. Often people come to the Carnivore diet for fat loss. And when they gain weight they are shocked, upset, confused. They didn’t understand that they were a “Sally.” You may be a “John” and everything is smooth sailing. But whether your goal is fat loss, muscle building, mental performance, or disease reversal the FIRST STEP is adapting to the diet.

You need to reach a new homeostatic setpoint.

During adaptation there are myriad of changes. Hormones are flying and fluids are re-balancing. The body is healing.

You have to let the healing and balancing process happen first.

Adapting to Training

Training tends to suffer when starting the Carnivore Diet.

Generally speaking, the more glycolytic the activity the longer it takes to adapt.

For example, long distance running isn’t super glycolytic and people tend to adapt quick to this highly aerobic activity. Crossfit, however, is quite glycolytic which takes more time to adapt to.

An example from the gym: People tend to adapt quite quickly to strength training because it mainly uses the creatine-phosphate energy system. Whereas, something like bodybuilding, where time under tension of a particular set may be 1 minute or longer, takes more time to adapt to.

It took me at least 8 weeks, probably closer to 12, to regain my training capacity.

For many, perhaps most people, the following is unnecessary.

Just following the Carnivore Diet often results in muscle building without any tinkering needed. People seamlessly achieve a body composition that makes them happy (generally beyond what they even thought possible). The following is for people who want to build muscle beyond that which the body would naturally want to carry. It is for people where the muscle achieved during their adaptation period has stalled.

So with that caveat (that most people don’t need to do this to achieve their muscle building goals! Just follow the diet!) here’s how you can tinker with it to add on some more muscle.

How to Build Muscle on The Carnivore Diet

Assuming you have given your body the necessary time to adapt to the Carnivore Diet and reach a homeostatic set point, lets go through how to build muscle on the carnivore diet.

#1: Daily Baseline

You should have a “ballpark” feel for how much you eat on a daily basis. Once adapted to the Carnivore Diet, appetite regulates. You have a daily “normal.” You should have a good feel for how much this is.

Let’s say, for example, you eat 3lbs of meat per day. And this meat is mainly fatty cuts. And your macros are around ketogenic ratios (70:30 fat:protein calories or 1:1 fat:protein grams). No need to count or worry about exactitudes. Just ballpark it. And if yours isn’t keto ratios that’s fine, just know what it is.

Also if you eat “Level 1” foods (cheese for example), know how much on average. The whole point is to know what your daily average consumption is. If you don’t know, than you probably haven’t done the Carnivore Diet long enough to even be messing with this. First things first.

#2: Increase Over Baseline

Once you know your baseline food consumption, you want to increase this. Add a bit more food.

Now I recommend this food contain at least some protein. Don’t just add butter. Add meat. Add eggs. It doesn’t have to be a significant. In fact, you just want to add in maybe 200-300 calories. Don’t worry about counting. Just ballpark it. Add a bit on top of your baseline.

#3: Progressive Increase

Then every month (or every 6 weeks or whatever you feel is a good pace) increase consumption again.

How many weeks you go in between increases is not as important as the idea of progression. You want to add in a little more. Another 200 calories or so.

Continue this month after month.

What you don’t want to do is go from eating 3lbs meat/day to 5lbs/day in one month. Because progressing on top of 5lbs/day is not going to be easy. You’ll be too full to continue to progressively eat more. Plus a big jump like this will likely result in more fat gain than you want. Then you have to eat to maintain body fat levels plus the extra on top of that to fuel new muscle growth.

Slow progression is the key.

#4: Supplements

I wouldn’t even think about supplements until you get to the point of saying “I really can’t eat any more.”

This should be 6, 9, 12+ months down the road. In the podcast I talk about how this may be a good time to do a short “cut” before continuing with a progressive muscle building focus.

I rarely advise supplementing on the Carnivore Diet. When it comes to achieving health and the attainment of most people’s goals, supplements do more harm than good. Bodybuilding can be an exception.

Carrying around a lot of muscle isn’t something the body necessarily “wants” to do. Muscle is energetically expensive to maintain. So if you’re goal is to keep building muscle and you’re hitting a wall, some supplements can help.

Whey Protein

Not until you get to the point of not being able to eat more whole food would I recommend adding in whey protein. But it can be advantageous for a couple reasons. First, it helps increase total consumption without getting overly full. In addition, it is quite insulinogenic. For most people this is a bad thing, but for bodybuilders its beneficial. Insulin is one of the most anabolic hormones we have. It can also stimulate appetite. A win-win for muscle building.

What I’d do is add 50 grams of whey protein post workout. Then, maybe an hour so so later, eat your normal post workout meal.

More Protein

If you added in whey for several months and need to increase consumption further, and you can’t do it with more whole food, then I’d try adding in some more protein powder.

I would use a combination of beef collagen peptides and whey. And I’d probably add it before bed. The collagen will provide a more diverse amino acid profile while the whey keeps a high concentration of branched chain amino acids.

Creatine Monohydrate

Red meat is really your best source of creatine. But if your creatine stores aren’t “topped off” then supplementing with creatine can be a cheap and easy way to help the muscle building process along.

More Supplements

Besides whey protein and creatine, I don’t think you need anything else. In the podcast I mention a few things like beta alanine and caffeine which can enhance some performance. But I really don’t think these are needed.

What about Carbs?

I often get asked “don’t I need carbohydrates to maximize muscle gains?” My answer is always vague because it’s extremely complex “Maybe, but probably not.”

Research by Stuart Phillips, one of the world experts on protein, shows that protein and carbohydrates combined don’t provide any additional benefit than protein alone when it comes to rates of muscle protein synthesis or decreasing muscle protein breakdown. Where carbohydrates may provide a benefit is in speed of glycogen replenishing and perhaps recovery. (r) So for crossfit athletes or people who train the same muscles twice a day, carbohydrates may benefit them. In most training scenarios, muscle glycogen and recovery without carbs is not a problem.

Also an amazing thing happens when you get fat-adapted. Dr. Voltek showed in his research that athletes replenish glycogen at the same rate as high carb athletes once fat-adapted. They also showed that they had glycogen stores comparable to high carb athletes. (r)

How to Build Muscle on the Carnivore Diet – What to AVOID

The Scale

The biggest mistake I see people make is using a scale to try and gauge progress. Muscle building is a marathon, not a sprint.

Putting on even a few pounds of muscle in a year is GREAT. Measuring this by a scale is impossible/pointless.

If you’re goal is just to get the number on the scale to go up, I’d argue that’s not a good goal (unless you are trying to hit a certain weight class for a competition or something).

If the scale is moving up quickly it’s more likely a sign of fat gain than muscle. And, for most people, the goal would be to limit putting on fat while maximizing muscle gains.

Now some fat gain is ok and should be expected. If you don’t gain any fat you are either under-eating or not maximizing muscle gains that could be had.

Ditch the scale. Trust the process. Commit to the marathon.

Cardio

Broadly speaking, too much cardio is going to interfere with maximizing your muscle gains. Some cardio can be good, and actually help stimulate appetite. So keeping in some cardio is fine, but I wouldn’t recommend progressively increasing it.

How to Build Muscle on the Carnivore Diet: Workouts

Workouts

Addressing a workout plan is way outside the scope of this post. Like I mentioned, there are many ways to train. If I were still personally training, every single person would be on a different plan. So it’s impossible for me to try and standardize something here.

But one concept that you should take with you is progression. There are many factors to manipulate progression in workouts. You can increase the weight on the bar, the time under tension, the reps, the density, etc…

My best recommendation is to find a trainer (or invest in education) that understands 2 things:

1. Execution
2. Progression (and the variables)

It’s not easy to find a trainer that really understands both of these. But it’s so important. I’ve spent decades in the gym, and I did things wrong for a long time, and have had to pay the price.

Getting a good trainer is worth their weight in gold.

If you’re consistent in the gym, but doing things wrong, it’s not a question if you’ll get hurt, it’s when.

So whatever modality of training you employ, execution should come first.

Recommendations:

I’m not affiliated with either of these, but for training advice, I have 2 “go-to” places I turn to:

Bodybuilding

Ben Pakulski’s program Hypertrophy Execution Mastery is fantastic. His partner in it Joe Bennett is also phenomenal. You are in good hands with these two guys. Both focus on actually understanding the role of a muscle, how it contracts, and how you can set up and execute properly to maximize muscle growth, and perhaps more important, avoid injury.

Functional (Strength, Power, Olympic)

One of my best friends, Dr. Aaron Horschig, is a physical therapist and runs Squat University. He has a great book on squatting and just overall great stuff on biomechanics. If you want to do things right, check out Squat University.

If you’d like to learn more about how to create health and fitness (including building more muscle and losing fat), I’d highly recommend watching the Meat Health Masterclass: