Mass gainers for fighters: the arithmetic nobody does

A fighter decides to move up a division, or comes back from injury lighter than he left, or gets told he is too small for the weight he fights at. He buys a mass gainer, because that is what the product is called and that is what he wants to do.

Then he does the arithmetic, usually months later, standing on a scale before a cut that is larger than the last one.

The number that decides this

Servings vary more than the category's reputation suggests. Lean gainers start around 500 to 700 kcal. The mainstream products sit between roughly 800 and 1,300.

Some go past 2,000, and the serving is frequently two to four scoops that nobody measures properly.

The daily surplus a trained athlete should be running to add lean mass is 200 to 300 kcal.

Why 200 to 300, and not the figure everywhere else

Most sources say 300 to 500 kcal a day, producing around half a kilogram a week of mostly lean tissue. Two problems with that, and both matter here.

It has not been properly tested. A critical review of weight gain recommendations for athletes found that neither the surplus estimate nor the maximum weekly rate of lean mass gain, 0.23 to 0.45 kg, has been validated in athletes doing serious resistance training, and that half a kilogram a week as lean tissue is likely beyond what many can achieve.

And for trained athletes the larger surplus builds the wrong tissue. In a trial on elite athletes, the group on the higher intake gained substantially more fat.

Read the right-hand column. The lean mass gain did not differ between the groups. The extra calories bought fat and nothing else, which is why the researchers concluded that 200 to 300 kcal a day suits a highly trained athlete better than 500.

For most people that is a cosmetic problem. For a fighter it is a mechanical one, because the fat has to come off again before the next weigh-in.

You pay for those calories twice: once at the shop, and once in the heat.

What is actually in the tub

Read the panel rather than the front.

The bulk of a mass gainer is carbohydrate, and the carbohydrate is usually maltodextrin. Cheap, highly refined, and the reason a scoop can carry so much energy at so little cost to the manufacturer.

The protein is generally the same whey you could buy on its own, in a smaller proportion than the marketing implies. Work out the price per gram of protein and compare it against a plain protein powder plus food.

The gainer is usually worse by a factor of one and a half to two.

Nothing sinister about maltodextrin itself. It is a fast carbohydrate, and there is a moment in a fighter's week when a fast carbohydrate is exactly right: the hour after the scale. The problem is the quantity: buying 1,000 calories of it when what you needed was 250.

A risk worth thinking about

This next point is my reasoning from what is known about the category rather than a published finding about mass gainers specifically, and I am labelling it as such.

Muscle-building and weight-gain products are consistently among the higher-risk categories for contamination, alongside pre-workouts and fat burners. The commercial shape of mass gainers pushes in the same direction: high volume, low margin, large containers, frequently blended on shared equipment.

What I see in practice is that the fighter who would never touch a testosterone booster, because he knows that category is risky, will drink a kilogram a week of an unbranded gainer without once checking who manufactured it or whether the batch was tested.

The question is the same as for anything else entering the camp: is this batch on a certifier's register. If it is not, the product is not certified, whatever the front of the tub says.

The gut problem nobody mentions

A thousand calories delivered as liquid, mostly as refined carbohydrate, in one sitting, is a large ask of a digestive system. Bloating, gas and loose stools are common, driven by the volume, the osmotic load, the speed of absorption and often a lactose component as well.

They arrive at the worst time. A fighter in camp is already carrying training load, often already eating more than he is used to, and now has an additional reason to feel heavy in the morning.

Worse, it teaches the wrong lesson. He concludes that gaining weight makes him sluggish, when what made him sluggish was drinking a litre of maltodextrin in 15 minutes.

What to do instead

If the honest obstacle is getting the calories in, the strategies that work are unglamorous and well established.

• Larger portions of what you already eat, before adding anything new
• Energy-dense foods that are not bulky: nuts, nut butters, oils, dried fruit, full-fat dairy where it is tolerated
• More feeds rather than larger ones, which is also the better pattern for protein across the day
• Liquid calories of a composition you chose

On that last one, a correction to something I nearly wrote. A homemade shake is not automatically smaller. Milk, oats, a banana, nut butter and a scoop of protein in ordinary quantities lands somewhere between 600 and 900 kcal, which is a commercial gainer by another name.

The one case where I would not argue

There is a reasonable version of this, and it belongs here so the page does not read as a blanket refusal.

An athlete genuinely below his healthy walking weight, coming back from injury or illness, eating properly and still unable to close the gap, using a fraction of a serving as one component of a plan rather than as the plan: fine.

Half a scoop, a batch-tested product, alongside food rather than instead of it.

That is a long way from what the category is marketed for, and a long way from how it gets used.

What follows from all of this

Adding weight is slower than anybody wants it to be. A quarter to a half of 1 percent of body mass a week is 175 to 350 grams on a 70 kg fighter.

Slow enough that most people conclude it is not working and eat more.

That conclusion, and the eating more that follows it, is what this category sells to. The product delivers calories perfectly well; it fails because calories were never the limiting factor.