Three square meals a day...breakfast, lunch and dinner. Can a person achieve great muscle-building results with just three meals a day?

Absolutely...and I'll tell you how.

It's all about meal timing and quantity....not about how frequently you eat. That "small, frequent meals" idea is NOT gospel and is NOT necessary to get great results. It's your total caloric intake over a 24 hour period that sets the stage for growth.

Here's my strategy for getting big on 3 meals a day...

1. Plan to train in the late afternoon/early evening, if you can. For our meal timing, this will be the best option.

2. Have a moderately large breakfast...eggs, oatmeal, broccoli...whatever else you normally eat. Breakfast is the second most important meal of the day (for our purposes here, at least) and it's not going to be your biggest.

3. Have a medium-sized lunch...at this point, you're looking to not overload your digestive system with food (you already did that with breakfast) because you'll be training fairly soon.

4. Do your workout and have your post-workout shake.

5. DINNER is going to be your biggest meal of the day. Because your body is primed to take full advantage of whatever you eat after training THIS is the time to load up. You should get at least half your days calories or more in this meal...overloading calories like this is extremely anabolic and your body will thrive on it.

6. Next day, repeat.

That's the plan. It's nothing complicated, of course, but I've been using this type of eating and training schedule for a long time and it's been extremely effective for me.

If you can squeeze in a few small snacks during the day, go for it. If you don't have time for 5 or 6 meals a day, don't stress about it. Your body can cope and you can definitely still make great progress.

Learn some easy muscle-building recipes for lazy cooks here.

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