Here’s what you need to know:
Eating a surplus of calories in complete excess and beyond your current metabolic capacity will ultimately always yield increases in body fat
Excess body fat creates a perpetual cycle and cascade of hormonal events, which both make the accumulation of fat easier and harder to lose gained body fat
If you’re “natty” you’re going to lose some muscle mass in a prep regardless of how perfect your prep is. The more fat mass you add to your frame the longer your prep will be and thus greater time spent in a caloric deficit which will likely increase the amount of lean mass lost. This holds especially true for those who rush their preps and aim for higher rates of loss.
Bulking seems like a rite of passage in the bodybuilding community. Every bodybuilder has done the “dirty bulk” at least once in their career, I know I have. Are there any benefits to “bulking”? And if so do the benefits outweigh the consequences?Before we can answer these questions we need to define “Bulking”. It is an old-school approach to what I would consider these days as a “metabolic building phase”. The major difference between the two being is that one is a systemic approach which takes into account the individuals adaptation to increasing calories via methods of quantification (ie. Scale weight readings, body composition testing), while the other takes an all out approach with the goal of making the scale weight increase as fast possible. Bulking is obviously being the latter. The idea behind bulking is that as long as you eat big, sleep big and train big, (the old bodybuilding mantra), then most of the weight you gain will be muscle with some fat added to your frame as well as an invariable consequence. “Bulkers” take a “see – food (Not sea-food)” approach to dieting. You see food and you proceed to eat it. Basically your goal is to eat as much food as you can get in per day with no regard to its nutritional profile. A calorie is a calorie approach if you will. The approach is guided by the premise that the extreme surplus of calories will reduce protein catabolism, and if you’re training hard, the excess surplus of calories will help to fuel your workouts and promote anabolism. The excess carbs will both fuel your workouts and will spare muscle protein breakdown, and the excess protein will support muscle growth via the increased levels of protein synthesis you will be experiencing from the additional training frequency.
Since you’re in a surplus, most people increase both volume and frequency with the notion that the increased macronutrient surplus will provide the body with an excess of substrates needed for increased recovery rates. All sounds good and dandy doesn’t it? Train extra hard to compensate for all the extra food coming in and shovel as much food as you can consume on a daily basis as you can handle. What it all comes down to is “bulking” is pretty much an excuse for eating like shit, plain and simple. How can I make this claim? Because I have been there and done that. Now I feel old saying this but back in my day coming up the biggest source of research (not the only source but definitely the most readily available source) were magazines. All of these preached the importance of bulking as a means of putting on size in the offseason. I did just that my freshman year of college. For one whole semester I “bulked” and here’s how I did it.
A little background before delving into my 1st and only “dirty” bulk plan
I started my bulk at a weight of 198lbs
I tracked macros religiously at this time as well FYI.I followed the “clean eating” approach
Following nutritional information at that time from nutrition text books I could find, I was consuming 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight, 1.5g of carbs per pound of bodyweight. Fats comprised 35% of my total calories
With a starting weight of 198lbs my macros would have been: 198g protein/ 297g carbs/approx 77g fat
When I was aiming to cut for shows prior to this time, I would keep protein to 1g and cut carbs back to 1g per pound of bodyweight and drop fats to 30% of my total caloric intake for the day Cardio sessions would be implemented when I hit weight plateaus along with further adjustments to carbs as needed. (Oh how young and naïve I was – to be able to go back with what I know now…)
When aiming to bulk I bumped protein up to 1.5g per pound of bodyweight and carbs to 2g per pound of bodyweight and kept adjusting fat to stay within 35% of my total calories
Enter my “dirty bulking” plan:
I set a goal weight of 220lbs. So nutritionally I began eating 1.5g of protein per pound of bodyweight and 3-6g of carbs per pound of bodyweight, all while keeping fats at 35% of my total daily caloric intake. I did the math as though I was already weighing 220lbs.
Again to begin my bulk I calculated macros based off of my goal weight so I adjusted them to meet my needs as though I weighed 220lbs, so my macros jumped from those listed above to: 330g of protein/ 660 carbs / 154g fat.
Once I hit that goal weight. I set another goal weight and readjusted the numbers if I had hit a weight plateau.
I ate my normal “clean” foods and added the rest from whatever I wanted.I also cut out all cardio and slept and trained like it was my only daily duty and followed this for 6 months.
My rule of thumb during this process was to hit those macro numbers per day, but since I was “bulking” any extra additional calories per day were acceptable – you best believe I took advantage of this.
Towards the end I honestly was rarely tracking macros and basically just binge eating at every single meal. I remember eating deep dish pizza’s by myself followed by a late night run to DQ for a couple of XL blizzards or a couple dozen doughnuts from Dunkin Donuts, which was right next door.
So how successful was my bulk? Pretty damn successful seeing as though I jumped from 198lbs to my peak highest weight of 290lbs. Yes, and it was not pretty. I far from looked like a bodybuilder and looked more like a competitive strong man lifter. My waist circumference grew from 26in to around a 39in. I was still training hard, so I made some awesome strength gains, but was it worth it? Hell No! Maybe? Yes…No. Okay let me explain. Plain and simple bulking is an excuse to eat like shit. I tried to justify the weight gain with telling myself a lot is fat, but I’m also probably building a ton of muscle along with it since my strength levels are high and I’m progressing from every workout. That may have been true I may have added some extra muscle to my frame but at what cost? For one thing it’s not cheap to eat this much food. Secondly I felt like shit from a cardiovascular endurance standpoint. Try adding all that weight and walking up flights of stairs and going through grueling workouts. I always looked like I had been hit with a garden hose and was sweating like a monster non-stop.
As a bodybuilder the biggest detriment was the fact that I no longer looked like a bodybuilder. I looked like a fat guy that lifts, fat –strong if you will, or slightly jacked dad-bod, okay, okay all dad-bod. The only perk here is that I treated every day as though it were Thanksgiving and enjoyed eating what I wanted, when I wanted, with no concern for moderation. In the end was being able to eat whatever I wanted and how much ever I wanted worth it? I’d like to sit here and tell you definitively yes, as I surely enjoyed eating that much food, but the truth is my answer is still no. As much as I love food, my overall health, physique and daily exercise performance are far more valuable to me. Plus any extra muscle I would have gained from this massive surplus of calories was probably lost in the extremely arduous task of dieting all of the excess weight off, and with goal rate loss of 0.8-1.5lbs per week you better believe it took me a long ass time to diet all of that weight off.
Weight Gain Economics
So what makes “bulking” so inefficient? It all has to do with the economics of being in an overfeed state. A future article will cover this more in depth, but overall protein, fats and carbohydrates each have unique biological functions. While our bodies are not efficient at storage of protein and carbs as fat, nor is it preferred believe it or not, when eaten in excess, all of the energy yielding macronutrients can be stored and create more adipose tissue. Proteins and carbohydrates are used by our cells for varying functions and as for fuel (the macronutrients yield energy). Consumption and quantity of each of these two macronutrients influences energy metabolism. Protein is not just for building muscle, it has a ton of functions, so when adequate amounts of carbohydrates are consumed in the diet, only a relatively small portion of protein is utilized for energy metabolism. Protein must initially tend to its laundry list of biological functions before it can be stored as fat, which as previously mentioned is a rather inefficient process.
When over consumed an increase in protein oxidation can be seen, similarly to the overconsumption of carbohydrates. Once carbohydrates have fully filled glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, the excess remainder is stored in adipose tissue. So while storing these two macronutrients can be stored as fat, it is both of low priority and inefficient for our bodies to do so. What makes the process so inefficient? It requires additional metabolic steps which in turn require more energy (ie. Kcals). Fat on the opposite end of the spectrum is never ideal to really overeat. Overeating fat directly leads to more fat storage, as it is both a direct and efficient process, requiring minimal amounts of energy to do so and requiring few metabolic steps. For excess fat in our diet to be converted and stored into adipose tissue, our body will separate the glycerol backbone from two fatty acids, assimilate, and store them. An oversimplification of the process, but in a nutshell this is how it goes down. The process is simple and uses as little as 5% of the ingested intake when over consumed. Let’s delve into this a little bit further to give you a better idea of this process.
Storing excess carbohydrates in adipose tissue requires as high as 25%, and this number grows slightly further for protein when it comes to overconsumption and the cost of storage in fat. Let’s use carbohydrates for simplicity sake to compare. Fat is stored in adipose tissue through a small number of steps making it direct and efficient. When you over consume carbohydrates they must be broken down to their simplest forms before they can be stored. So if you’re over consuming starches, they must first be broken down to disaccharides and then to monosaccharide’s and then they can be absorbed. Following their absorption, they are disassembled to CoA and pyruvate before the CoA molecules can be reassembled into fatty acid chains. The fatty acid chains then attach to a glycerol backbone to make a triglyceride which is how our body stores fat. Such a long process, see what I mean? It’s not efficient and costs more for our body to do. But your body will do it when these nutrients are over consumed is the point I am trying to get across here.
Here’s the worst part, hormonally we set ourselves up for disaster. As mounting levels of body fat increase, we can develop insensitivity to both the insulin and leptin hormones. Not a good thing seeing as though our Leptin levels regulate satiety and functions in energy metabolism and insulin regulates our metabolisms through the use and storage of both glucose and fat. Lose of sensitivity to overly stimulating both hormone levels by overeating causes a down regulation of their respective receptors via having elevated leptin and insulin levels for sustained periods of time. The fun doesn’t stop here guys, keep reading. An increase in the number and size of fat cells means that more of your own circulating testosterone levels will be aromatized and converted to estrogen. Higher circulating levels of estrogen then signal your hypothalamus to reduce LH production, which is responsible for signaling the male testis to produce testosterone. So not only now is more of your testosterone being converted to estrogen, but your higher estrogen levels are consequently lowering further testosterone output. To compound matters and make them worse, if you have zero regard for the macronutrient sources, you may be further wreaking havoc on your endocrine system as the nutritional composition of certain foods can have a dramatic effect on our hormonal profiles, as is seen for example with high levels of simple sugars and it’s negative effects on testosterone, LH and GH secretion levels for example. Basically what I am getting at here is that All of these factors create a perpetual loop which will make you fatter in the long run and alter your hormonal profile in negative way. So in conclusion, bulking has many different effects on our physiology, so take my advise as someone who “bulked” to the extreme, its not necessary, there is a better way.
Disclaimer
All programs and articles provided are intellectual property of James Shmagranoff. No copies or redistribution of these is allowed without express permission from James Shmagranoff. James Shmagranoff is not a doctor and nothing contained within this article is to be taken as medical advice. Always follow the directions of your medical practitioner.
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