Intermediate/Advanced Bulks

[vakf]

Assuming that you’re only going to build .5lb of muscle per month or so, is a 1lb per month bulk the most you’d recommend to someone on their 3rd/4th year lifting? I don’t feel like cutting or being stagnant but don’t feel like bulking 15 pounds in the next 8 months is worth it.

Whats your take?

Hopefully this won’t get flagged as it’s not a beginner question….here we go

 

[torraine]

@vakf 1lb a month equates to a 125 calorie surplus which is basically a rounding error. if you can actually consistently track and hit then no harm in trying it. personally I wont bulk on anything less than 250 calorie surplus simply because it's more practical. not to mention the calorie surplus is also meant to serve as fuel for harder training and on 125 cals i wonder if you might lose some of that. only one way to find out!

 

[pinetowntree]

@vakf It's one of those "between Scylla and Charybdis" situations.

Bulk too fast, you have to stop bulking sooner and start dieting. Bulk too slowly, you might spend most of your time in maintenance or a deficit and gain less muscle because the statistical noise of weighing yourself exceeds your intended weekly gain rate.

My experience is that if you're intermediate to advanced, it's better to bulk too slowly than too bulk too fast. Prolonging your bulk gives you more area under the curve of productive training where you're in a productive training zone. Being at maintenance for a few weeks doesn't stop you building muscle during those weeks. Being in a serious caloric deficit for weeks and weeks is more of a negative trade off.

So, ultimately, my advice is that your intended surplus/gain rate will be very hard to actually hit, but it's fine if you're imprecise. Just monitor your weight and your gym performance and make changes as you go. Don't beat yourself up if you gain too much one week and then lose weight the next week. If your numbers in the gym are going up, you feel good, you look good, and the general trend is where you want, you're golden.

 

[leena2016]

@vakf Slightly tough question because we have to draw lines somewhere.

I'd say in most cases you don't want to aim for less than a 1:1 muscle to fat gain ratio. If you can only gain 8lb of muscle in a year, I wouldn't intentionally seek to gain more than 16lb over the course of that year, (even though that's only 1.3lb a month & thus hard to track).

However in extreme cases I'd go a little differently. If you can only gain 2lb of muscle in a year, are we really talking about only gaining 4lb a year? I'd allow a greater fat to muscle gain ratio in that instance because of tracking reasons & also because of the relative ease of losing the fat considering we're only talking a handful of pounds over a whole year.

Final note, lets not forget you can also be wrong about how much muscle you can gain in a year, both by overestimating & also by UNDER-estimating. Imagine expecting 2lb of muscle a year, but you still gain 10lb that year because you don't wanna screw around with meticulous impossible tracking, & you end up gaining 4.5lb of muscle out of it because your training was more optimized to your own recovery. I gained more muscle in year 5 than year 4 because I better optimized my training, these things can happen.

 

[asperd]

@vakf I'm going to try to aim for +1lb/month on my second bulk. Because my faster first bulk, which was +0.46 lbs/week, didn't work out as well as I hoped. But the drawback, like loosh63 has brought up, is that this is essentially a rounding error. In fact a +1lb/month bulk is actually less than 125 calories. Because one pound of muscle only requires a 2,500-2,800 calorie surplus. It's one pound of fat that requires 3,500. It's more like a +82-92 calorie surplus.

When you are gunning for a +82-92 calorie surplus, there is a high likelihood you'll accidentally be in maintenance or a deficit on many days.

Also when you first start eating more calories, especially carbs, you're going to retain more water weight. Making tracking potentially difficult for you for the first couple/few months if you are bulking at +1lb/month. As Mike Mentzer pointed out, hydrate is in the word carbohydrate for a reason. And if you are going to bulk, carbs are essential. Glucose and glycogen help you push hard in the gym. And what's your body's preferred source of making glucose? Carbs. And you need to draw water into your muscles. So carbs. And creatine monohydrate helps with that too. And if you happen to eat sodium heavy food eating out and such, you retain even more water weight.

This is why its common suggested to eat at 200-300 calorie surpluses. So that you ensure you're always in a surplus essentially. The down side is that you are going to gain significantly more fat and you're going to have to spend a lot of time cutting. But not as much time as the traditional 500 calorie surplus. Or the infamous dirty bulks you've seen on YouTube. Frank Yang, Hodge Twins and recently Sam Sulek. Sam also blasts gear. Frank Yang claims natty and even he will tell you that he regrets dirty bulking. Even though his 12 year old dirty bulking video has the most views.

Because I don't like the yo-yo dieting that is involved in bulk and cut cycles, the super lean bulk (Greg Doucette calls it maingaining) is something I want to try. I've been cutting for the last 9 1/2 weeks and I lost 9.1 lbs and I'm still not lean (and this is after a 25 lb bulk I did). Depending on whether you put my smart scale in athlete mode or normal mode, I range anywhere from 14.4-21.2% body fat at 167cm 143.5 lbs (I think I'm somewhere in between. Since I think 21.2% would be pretty fat). This isn't something I enjoy doing.

Nor did I enjoy the process of force feeding myself every day when I was bulking. I'm also not rich like Frank Yang. Going on a nice big bulk is either expensive or very time consuming. Bulking on cheap low prep, even processed food from the supermarket isn't very interesting. I'm a foodie that likes to go out to eat and enjoy myself like once a fortnight or whatever. But I can't afford to order UberEats every day. Day-to-day I mostly rely on what I can buy at the supermarket or Amazon for food. And even pickup is expensive and you're paying with your time as well driving to and from the location to pick up your food. The nearest legit bakery from me is a 17 minute walk from me, which isn't too much effort. I'm sure they have yummy food but its probably significantly more expensive than the mid supermarket baked goods.

 

[vinayakc]

@asperd Great perspective however you say it takes a lot of time to cut some fat. I will disagree, at a 200-300ish surplus you will gain some fat however not that much. It’s a lot easier and shorter to cut that fat at a later time at a 500 calorie deficit. With a proper meal plan hitting adequate protein intake while on a cut, you shouldn’t lose too much muscle and shed that fat.

 

[asperd]

@vinayakc Cutting is taking awhile for me because my TDEE isn't very high. Like I lost 9.1 lbs in 67 days (9 weeks + 4 days). Just shy of -1lb/week. And that took a lot of sacrifice to get there. I'm not eating a whole lot of calories. As such, I'd rather spend as little time having to cut in the future as possible and go for a slower bulk in the future. It's that and my worry that constantly going up and down in weight is not so good for my skin.

 

[moelilian]

@asperd Thanks for this comment - very insightful!

 

[nnnnnjor]

@vakf Imo, once you get more advanced, you’ll need to bulk harder. I used to bulk 2 lbs a month as a beginner and it worked great.

Now I have to bulk about 3-4 lbs a month to keep making progress and gains. Yea you will gain more fat but you will also gain more muscle than you would just bulking 1-2lbs a month as an intermediate+ lifter.

 

[needheaven]

@vakf How much do you weigh? Usually these rules are based on body weight % so after rounding to the nearest pound/month the average guy is close to 2lb/month but the numbers might change if you are on one of the extreme ends.

Rather than gaining 15lbs cap the bulk to around 5-6 months. 10lbs is enough to make some progress and also easier to cut.