Straight Talk about Bulking

Posted at 12:14 on Jun 16, 2011 by Muscle Blog

Most people would agree that to build muscle, you have to eat.

A diet that lacks adequate nutrients will mean a rate of muscle growth that’s less than optimal.

However, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is eating far more than you actually need in the hope of stimulating more muscle growth.

Your body has a limited ability to build muscle, which is largely dependent on your body’s capacity to create new muscle tissue from the amino acids (protein) in your diet.

You can eat all the food you want, but you can’t change the rate at which your body synthesises new muscle protein. Taking in more nutrients than you can use won’t force your body to add muscle more quickly. What happens instead is that you get fat.

Think of it like this...

Let’s use the example of a factory that makes widgets.

If you don't give the workers enough of the raw materials (i.e. protein) they need to make the widgets as fast as they could, the rate of widget production will drop. So in that sense, an insufficient intake of nutrients will put the brakes on muscle growth.

Now, what happens if you start to send more raw materials to the workers?

The rate of production will increase, but only up to a point. That’s because the workers can only perform so much work in a given amount of time. As soon as they’re working as fast as they can, sending more and more raw materials is just a waste.

In much the same way, you can't force your body to grow simply by eating more. Adding nutrients to your diet will have a positive effect on muscle growth only until you reach nutrient saturation point. After that, any additional calories will be stored as fat.

It's true that the more you eat the bigger you'll get. But the additional weight will be in the form of fat, rather than muscle.

This leads to a number of problems:

1. Firstly, if you spend half your time bulking and the other half cutting, the half of your training time spent cutting won’t lead to a significant amount of muscle growth. In other words, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to build extra muscle.

2. The more fat you gain, the more fat cells you’re adding to your body. Fat cells (known as adipocytes) are like little bags. The more fat you put in those bags, the bigger they get. However, they only hold a limited amount of fat. And when those bags get full, extra fat cells are created.

The bad news is that the more fat cells you have, the easier it is for your body to store fat. In other words, adding new fat cells to your body will make it easier to gain fat and harder to lose it in future.

3. Most guys want to look both muscular and lean. But when you add 10 or 20 pounds of fat to your body then you’re actually moving further away from this goal.

If you’re carrying around a significant amount of muscle, adding a layer of fat can create the illusion of size, especially when you’re wearing clothes. People may tell you that you’re looking bigger, which is always nice to hear. But what’s the point if you’re just getting fat?

If you spend half the year bulking up and a few months cutting, there will only be a few weeks in the year where you actually LOOK like you train.

A lot of people who bulk up for months on end spend most of the time looking like they’ve never seen the inside of a gym, let alone spent any time in one.

4. All that stored fat will need to be lost at some point, which will take a lot longer than gaining it. What often happens during a cutting phase is that you end up losing all the muscle mass you built, putting you right back at square one.

So how many calories do you need each day if you want to build muscle without gaining large amounts of fat?

1. Firstly, calculate your lean bodyweight. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds at 15% body fat, you have 30 pounds of fat and a lean bodyweight of 170 pounds.

2. Multiply your lean bodyweight by 20. Using a lean bodyweight of 170 pounds, that gives you 3,400 calories per day.

This level of calorie intake should allow you to gain 2-3 pounds per month, most of it in the form of muscle. This represents good progress for anyone with a year or more of serious training under their belts (i.e. an intermediate). For advanced trainers, gaining 1 pound per month is a good rate of growth if you want to maintain a low level of fat.

If you find that you’re not gaining any weight, increase your calorie intake by around 250 calories per day until you reach that rate of growth. But whatever you do, don’t resort to one of those crazy 10,000 calories a day diets. You can’t force your body to gain muscle faster than your genetics will allow simply by stuffing yourself with food. It won’t work.

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