You don't need to be in a surplus to gain muscle

[az1]

one myth I keep seeing is that you have to be in a surplus or bulk to gain muscle, some people say it is only possible for beginners and/or that its extremely difficult to gain muscle otherwise. I now believe that all of these things are completely incorrect. Also, I don't think it is difficult to gain a significant amount of muscle in a deficit or at maintenance, it is merely just sub-optimal. When I start looking at the research for this there are so many studies with trained people doing this I wonder how this rumor even got started. If its the case that I am correct and that my understanding that it is only sub-optimal to a degree of about 20% then this seems pretty harmful that we are advocating that people bulk because most people would be perfectly happy with 80% of the gains and especially if they don't have to cut fat. This is some research I went through tonight looking for evidence of this:

Athletes in a deficit(19%) gaining lean body mass while losing 0.7% body weight per week: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21558571/

trained athletes were able to gain muscle while losing fat over a 9 week cutting period: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21558571

Trained individuals gaining muscle yet keeping fat the same: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-015-0100-0

Healthy Males below 15% bodyfat gaining muscle and losing fat in a defecit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817506/

Overweight beginners: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9309627

Older Men and Women: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17413099

Trained men: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/10.1152/jappl.1998.85.2.695

Active and trained young women: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19997019

Athletes gaining muscle and strength but not fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29405780/

 

[atigreg]

@az1 Not that I want to advocate that guy, but just to show that there are popular fitness youtuber out there who think the same: Athlethean X.

He is totally against all that bulk/cut-cycle stuff.

Dunno, in the end its probably different for each individual and you just gotta try it out what works for you

 

[dochoitinhduc]

@atigreg

Not that I want to advocate that guy

What’s wrong with advocating AthleanX?

 

[atigreg]

@dochoitinhduc Tbh I am too lazy to provide evidence for my claims, so take it as just my experience and with a grain of salt, but basically he is into this "do THIS ONE trick to boost your gym perfomance by 9.000.000%" stuff and that is just super clickbaity and makes it all look overly complicated.

Plus he often advocated doing different exercises each week or even day (some programs that he sells were designed that way) which is just weird, especially for beginners, who need to get a sense of progress and routine.

No horrible stuff of course, i just dont like it, so i wont advocate it

 

[xaydungsongnam]

@az1 Agreed. Bulking and cutting is not a useful concept for most of us not on juice. Unless you wanna fat fuck yourself and go full Paul Anderson blob mode. Or maybe if you're one of those naturally alien-like skinny people who can't gain weight.