bulking has always been the most effective way to build muscle all the biggest bodybuilders in history have all gone through periods of looking like a fat mess in pursuit of even the most incremental gains in muscularity but recently there has been some slanderous claims made against eating in a calorie Surplus so before we go into the best way to structure your bulk to limit any excess fat gains let's start by fixing some of the misconceptions out there and I don't know why but this one this one bugged me the most hate to say I told
you so but bulking up and EA enough of a surplus to gain a noticeable amount of body fat cutting back down and then doing this over and over what the girl with the Heavies goes on to say is that eating in a surplus one increases insulin resistance and two even a small Surplus can induce osy hyperplasia meaning your body creates more fat cells I know even hearing that your butthole don't freak out relax your anus yes eating in a calorie Surplus has been shown to increase insulin resistance but what's interesting is when they've tracked people
over a 30-day period of eating in a surplus followed by a thir 30day deficit they found that their insulin resistance was actually lower than the starting point in reality it might actually be more linked to the overall macronutrient profile because they've seen the same adverse effects in healthy lean individuals on a low carb diet diet if you're that worried about it just increase your dietary fiber and all your blood markers related to insulin resistance will improve like mine did I'm not going to lie when I saw the research showing that even a relatively small Surplus
can increase the number of fat cells I had the same response that you did but when you take a step back and remember that OST tissue sole function isn't to slowly build a wall and keep you from ever seeing your junk again it actually plays a huge role in whole body energy and glucose homeostasis when adapost tissue expands through hyperplasia it can store excess energy in a more controlled Manner and improve insulin sensitivity which is good it's when fat cells become larger hypertrophy and they outgrow their blood supply become hypoxic and secrete inflammatory sakin which
is bad I don't know how this got all ass backwards because the lack of atpo Genesis is linked to type 2 diabetes and obesity and we can bring it all the way back to anecdotal experience because anybody who's had multiple bulks and cuts will tell you that it's actually easier to hold a lower body fat percentage with each successive offseason so no it's not harder to lose body fat when you've done a bulk easier unless you wake up one day and realize you're on my 600 lb life and they have to use a crane to
pull you out of your house then yes you've gone too far and no that's not that's not what that's for that's how I move equipment but if it happens I've already got it now that we're on the same page in the fact that a calorie Surplus isn't a bad thing it's also important to know that if you're trying to build muscle at maintenance level of calories or even crazy enough to do it in a deficit good [ __ ] luck to put it simply building muscle is a very energy intensive process to be more specific
we can get a rough estimate of the energy cost needed to build one pound of muscle just by looking at the calorie cost of each of its individual components we know that a muscle is basically just water protein fat glycogen and minerals and other [ __ ] if we break that down by the estimated percentages we can use that to calculate the calories of each of those individual components which ends up being around 545 calories but that's not even including the cost to synthesize the new protein which is anywhere from 2 to 400 calories so
let's just say 845 calories you should immediately see that and think oh that's why it's so hard to build muscle in a deficit caveat being that unless you're a fatty and you have more endogenous energy stores to pull from or you're a new lifter because they respond to everything here's a meta analysis that looked for lean mass gain studies that compared participants in a calorie deficit versus ones that weren't as you can see when you restricted calories and made it hard to build muscle when you didn't it was easy the main reason I highlighted that
study is because they also found that when calorie restriction reached 500 calories a day the estimated changes in lean mass were negative it's obviously important because most people when they start their cut they use a 500 calorie deficit because it equals 3,500 calories a week which is roughly a pound of fat so just know if you're going to do an aggressive bulk and to put on as much muscle as possible to get all fat and Sassy that you're going to have to take it off very slowly or add in some pharmacological intervention or you will
lose a lot of those precious gains the next obvious question is how aggressive should our bulk B and it goes without saying but with a great amount of calories comes a great amount of muscle but also double Gins here's a study that looked at body builders which is rare to find and they try to make it as Fair as possible by telling them during the study they couldn't take any of their anabolics and the way they ured that is by saying you better not so who knows if they actually did or not but they had
one large Surplus group and one moderate the higher calorie group obviously put on more muscle but they almost put on three times the amount of fat than muscle the moderate group put on less muscle but also more muscle than fat so I I would probably take that one I think the general recommendation of an extra 2 to 300 calories a week for experience lifters and 500 for newbies is a good starting point hard gainers you can disregard that completely but again that's just the starting point it's not going to be how you adjust your calories
moving forward the scale will be your guide on how to adjust your calories from week to week if you want to do a fairly moderate safe bulk then I would aim for a half pound per week if you want to get a little bit more aggressive aim for a pound anything past that you're pushing to the point of gaining a lot of excess fat which is fine you can do a bulk like that but remember take it off very very slow and enjoy those man titties while you have them so let's use my fat ass
as an example and show you where and how I would integrate these additional calories just keep in mind I'm currently in a bulk so if the numbers look weird it's because I'm already kind of fat the first step is to figure out your maintenance level of calories now you can use whatever online calculator you like but it's been my experience that no matter what formula you use the activity multipliers always overestimate your maintenance level of calories so what I did is made an Excel spreadsheet used the Harris Benedict formula but instead of using these activity
multipliers I use my own I'll leave a link in the description if you want to use this Excel spreadsheet just understand no I will not approve you as an editor because it'll screw up the spreadsheet for everybody else click file make a copy and then you can do whatever the [ __ ] you want after we have our maintenance level of calories we're going to choose a surplus for me it was 110% which is roughly around 300 extra calories and don't forget every morning after you wake up and take your piss or if you're a
morning [ __ ] write down your weight I also do evening weigh-ins as well just to see how my body's responding to water sodium all that you don't have to get that OCD but track your morning weights what macronutrients should those extra calories be from the obvious easy answer would be carbohydrates but if you're somebody that wants to limit the amount of excess fat gain as much as possible then it might make sense to increase carbohydrates as well as protein because the more we learn about protein it tends to be like everything else like volume
and your mom it has a diminishing returns curve the interesting thing is that if we look back on that study comparing bodybuilders with different surpluses you're going to notice that the moderate group also had higher protein and I think there's something to that because protein has a higher dit diet induced thermogenesis than other macronutrients you might think well doesn't it just bring you back closer to maintenance and that's not really doing much no what it allows for is a higher net protein availability so in my scenario going from 1 gam per pound to 1.1 G
per pound adds an additional 25 G protein or 100 calories and when you have extra protein it's always best to spread it out between the three places you need it the most first thing in the morning so you switch from catabolism to anabolism right around your workout so pre- inra poost and before bed so you have a steady supply of amino acids and I get the remaining 200 calories from my intended 300 calorie Surplus from carbohydrates with the same logic of putting it around my workout and if the scale doesn't move in the direction I
want I just increase it by 100 calories each week with the same 1 to2 ratio of protein and carbohydrates it's pretty hard to become a fat mess when you do it like this I mean I'm not I don't look amazing but less bad than I have and if this is at all confusing in that spreadsheet I have linked it'll have a separate tab that shows you how I break down the macros of each and it makes it easier less of a chance that you [ __ ] it up on your own the last thing I'll
say on this is if you're a true hard Gainer and you have a higher than average total daily energy expenditure neat dit and you just burn through everything you eat and I would still go through this entire process set everything up and understand your meal of macros frequency all that good [ __ ] that we just did but I would just eat calorie dense [ __ ] between every meal as well and then use the scale to guide you going forward I've also had several people ask me what's the best way to train to put
on Mas I made a whole video about this but what it comes down to as long as you're training with enough intensity and hit a sufficient amount of volume you're going to see results personally I've been doing an upper lower split and I just released it in a new program that I'll link below in the description so if you don't have anything concrete to follow I would buy that it's 6 weeks it's horrible in all the right ways and it's only 20s so if you can't afford it [ __ ] that sucks
