Your body is very adaptable. Thats why weightlifting works, your body gets stressed by the lifting and realizes that it must get stronger in order to survive this rigorous exercise. Your body then must decide what the most efficient way to adapt to this activity is. If you regularly consume a lot of food then your body will likely decide that the best course of action to take is to create more muscles because more muscles will allow it to more easily handle this lifting.
When you first start lifting your central nervous system will likely keep you from lifting to your full strength because your tendons aren't strong enough to handle this much force. This is why people that are pumped up on adrenaline or some drugs can perform super human feats of strength, they aren't instantly creating more muscles, they are just using their full muscle potential. But under normal circumstances their body's limits this so that you don't tear a tendon or rip yourself apart under your full strength. This is part of the reason that many people see very immediate strength gains in the gym, they start lifting and within a few weeks they have made huge strides in strength. The more they lift the slower those gains come. They aren't building muscles that fast, they probably don't look bigger at all, their central nervous system and probably their muscle memory are just allowing them to use the muscular strength they already have.
But after these initial gains the easiest way to get stronger is to add more muscle. This may sound kind of obvious to someone that doesn't understand strength very well but in actuality you can get stronger with out adding more muscle mass, and this is exactly what many people like competitive weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers and mixed martial artists want. They have to make a certain weight class. They want to be as strong as possible without getting bigger. However if you want to get bigger then this isn't what you are looking for.
It takes more calories to sustain a bigger body, especially a more muscular one. Two people that are the same height and weight but with one being much more muscular and the other one carrying more bodyfat will use differing amounts of calories (well this will differ from person to person but it they were identical twins). The muscular one will require more calories just to get up and around. As I have said the body is very adaptable and is looking for the best way to survive. If you are eating a lot then your body decides the best way to handle this weightlifting is to create more muscle. But if you aren't getting enough calories then it decides that this isn't the way to go because if there is a food shortage you will starve to death quicker if you are more muscular.
So if you are trying to gain muscle mass then you need to be lifting hard but also eating a lot. You should be grazing, that is eating all of the time and not just gorging on a few meals a day. I believe that whether you are trying to lose weight or gain the best way of eating is to eat continually throughout the day. Difference being a person trying to lose weight would eat small meals throughout the day and someone trying to gain would eat medium or possible even large meals, continually through the day.
You see when the body isn't getting a regular feeding then it doesn't add muscle as I have stated above because it figures if you never know where your next meal is then you had better not get to muscled up because it might be awhile before you get another one. What it does do is add fat because it wants to store something up for hard times.
You have probably heard fat people say the line “if this was caveman times I would be a survivor and the skinny people would starve to death” while this is an annoying line there is some truth to it. Their bodies are storing fat for starvation times, So you must eat on a regular basis so that your body realizes that it doesn't need to worry about when your next meal is coming and therefore doesn't need to store fat. If you are lifting weights then it will concern its self with how to better handle these weights and will add more muscle. Not eating and it will store fat whenever you do eat because your body thinks the reason you aren't eating much is because you don't have steady access to food and it wants to store for the day when you don't have any food.
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