Regarding the topic of bulking, there are two questions I get commonly asked
- Should I bulk at this stage of my journey?
- How to bulk without gaining too much fat?
Both questions will be answered in this article, as well as the question:
How to determine my maintenance calories?
Let’s get to it.
Bulking
When to bulk depends on your starting point, namely your current body fat percentage.
Body fat percentage measurements are notoriously inaccurate, and most people are not able to afford a DEXA scan (a fancy and accurate way of measuring bodyfat percentage).
Therefore, I always think the best way to “measure” bodyfat is to use a picture chart, and guesstimate where you are based on that. That’s going to be just as accurate as most devices, and frankly much easier.
Use the charts below to determine where you roughly are. These charts were taken from ultimateperformance.com
Now for the continuation of this article, I am going to assume you aspire to have a relatively lean and muscular physique. If that is the case, what to do next depends on your current bodyfat percentage as based on these images.
You are in the leaner categories (males: 8-15% / females: 12-20%)
When you are in this category, and your goal is muscle gain, you’re best of eating above maintenance calories. The calorie surplus you should aim for is 0 – 20% above your maintenance calories, and you should aim for a weight gain of 0.25 – 1% of your bodyweight per week.
Now this is a quite large range, so to narrow it down take the following into account:
- The closer you are to the top end of this bodyfat percentage range, the lower your surplus can be. In fact, when you are right at the top end, you are probably able to build muscle without a surplus whatsoever.
- Beginner to intermediate lifters can get away with a larger surplus compared to advanced trainees, since the muscle becomes less and less sensitive to growth over time, but fat gain remains equal.
A good increase in bodyweight to aim for is 0.5%-1% per week for beginners, and 0.25-0.5% for advanced lifters.
In this great study, researchers review the best bulking recommendations for bodybuilders, their recommendations are summarized here:
Personally, I think the weight gain can be higher for beginners (up to 1% instead of up to 0.5%) and I think that if your goal is to be muscular AND lean at some point, you’re better off not to bulk at all when your bodyfat percentage is going above 20% for males and 25% for females.
The protein recommendation here is great, but I think the amount of fat and carbs is up for debate.
You are a male around 20% bodyfat, or a female around 25%
A surplus in calories will inevitably always come with fat gain. When you are this fat percentage, any additional fat gain is going to push you in a realm you probably don’t want to be in.
If you are here, I think it would be better to focus on fat loss, or, if you really want to focus on building muscle, try to maintain your weight while you focus on progressive overload in the gym.
With this bodyfat percentage, I think it is possible to build muscle and achieve a so-called recomposition, meaning that at the same bodyweight you simply slowly increase your muscle mass while simultaneously reducing fat mass.
The same protein recommendation applies here, which is 1.6-2.2 g/kg of bodyweight per day.
You are a male with 25+% bodyfat, or a female with 30+%
At this point, you are at unhealthy levels of bodyfat, and your primary goal should be to lose bodyfat, not to gain muscle. However, depending on your level of experience, it is possible to gain some muscle, and definitely strength, while losing weight.
So you can still implement a strength/hypertrophy program and gain results, but you should be in a caloric deficit, not in a surplus.
Why not dirty bulk?
Science has shown that indeed when increasing your caloric surplus even further, your muscle gain will also increase. However, your fat gain will increase even harder. Let’s review two studies.
In this study, group 1 (G1) had a significantly larger surplus compared to group 2 (G2). As you can see, the increase in muscle mass is almost 3X, but the increase in body fat almost 10X compared to G2. A person in G2 will gain 1 kg of fat for every 1 kg of muscle, while a person in G1 will gain 3 kg of fat for every 1 kg of muscle. Not ideal.
Another study showed a similar result. In this study, the NCG group had a much larger caloric surplus compared to the ALG group. Again, we see that the NCG group indeed has a larger increase in muscle mass, but the increase in body fat is disproportionally larger.
It should be noted that both studies were done in advanced athletes. Beginners typically gain much more muscle for the same amount of caloric surplus.
That being said, these results show that when you increase your caloric surplus by a lot, you start to gain way more fat compared to muscle. This is disadvantageous for many reasons.
Firstly, all the fat you gain you have to lose at some point, which is hard to do. When losing fat, you will inevitably lose muscle as well, and it is questionable whether in the end your netto gain in muscle is going to be higher compared to if you would have done a slower bulk. Moreover, gaining a lot of fat in a short period of time actually increase the number of fat cells in your body, which makes it easier for you to gain fat again later in life.
All in all, doing a slow bulk seems to be the more intelligent approach.
How To Determine Your Maintenance Calories / Food Intake
There are two ways to determine your maintenance calories. The first method requires calorie counting, and will actually yield a number of calories. The second method does not require calorie counting, and you will arrive at a maintenance food intake, which is of course theoretically equivalent to a number of calories. The second method is suitable for those who either can’t, or don’t want to measure calories.
Method 1: Using Calorie Counting
With this method, your starting point will be using the Harris-Benedict Equation. This equation will guess your maintenance calories based on a number of parameters, an online calculator using that equation can be found here (fill in your parameters, click +settings to choose the equation, and choose the right number on the right side depending on your activity level). While certainly not perfect, this will give a good target as a starting point.
Try to hit this target daily, using a free calorie counter tool such as Cronometer.com.
Measure your weight daily. The best time to do so is in the morning, right after waking, in your underwear or nude, after urination. Doing it like this will give you the most “reliable” data, as weight can fluctuate tremendously throughout the day and depending on many variables.
After a week you can assess the results. Did you lose weight, on average? Or gain weight, on average?
- If you see your weight going up and down quite randomly, you’re close to your maintenance calories.
- If you see your weight going down consistently, you’re below maintenance, and you should increase your calories by a 100 for the next week.
- If you see your weight going up consistently, you’re above maintenance, and you should decrease your calories by a 100 for the next week.
Repeat this process until you find a calorie amount at which your weight remains roughly stable.
This is your maintenance calories, congrats!
Method 2: Without Using Calorie Counting
The second method does not require calorie counting, but is therefore less accurate. You won’t actually arrive at a number (maintenance calories), but rather at a sort of maintenance food intake.
For this method to work, it is required to have a very regular eating pattern, meaning the same sort of portion sizes, number of meals, and ingredients on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.
If this is the case, you can simply proceed as follows.
Measure your weight daily. The best time to do so is in the morning, right after waking, in your underwear or nude, after urination. Doing it like this will give you the most “reliable” data, as weight can fluctuate tremendously throughout the day and depending on many variables.
After a week you can assess the results.
- If you see your weight going up and down quite randomly, you’re close to your maintenance calories.
- If you see your weight going down consistently, you’re below maintenance, and you should increase your calories, but if you see your weight going up consistently, you’re above maintenance, and you should decrease your calories.
The way to do this without counting calories is by adding or subtracting a (small) meal, or simply adjusting portion sizes up or down in your meal plan. In theory, this will just equate to an increase or decrease in calories.
Again, this only works if your meals are roughly the same day by day or week by week. If not, this method won’t work.
Repeat this process until you find a calorie amount at which your weight remains roughly stable.
This is your maintenance calories, congrats!
Stability & The Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal is to find a food intake/meal plan, or for the counters a caloric intake, which is just enough to sustain your weight. This can then be used as a starting point for a weight gain/loss phase, or simply as a daily target to make sure you sustain your current shape.
I’m sure there are many methods to figure that out, but one factor is going to make it increasingly easy: stability.
There are many factors at play that determine how many calories you burn in day, such as activity level, and the macronutrient composition of your food.
Moreover, some foods such as carb or salt rich foods will lead you to hold more body water, which will show up on the scale. Other foods play with your hunger hormones (e.g. junk food), making it much easier for you to overeat.
The more stability and routine you can bring into your nutrition and activity level, the easier it becomes to determine your maintenance calories, and to manipulate your weight (gain muscle / lose fat) or stay at the same bodyweight.
If your activity levels and food intake vary a lot over time, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain a certain shape, or move your bodyweight / composition in a direction you desire.
Admittedly, calorie counters can get away with more, because they have a number to hit, which can theoretically be done with any food you wish. Still, if you reach 2500 kcal with whole foods, you will see your body react very differently compared to eating 2500 kcal of cheesecake.
If you don’t want, or are not able to count calories, being consistent is extra important, because you need portion sizes, meal frequency, and food types to get the outcome you desire. These can only be manipulated reliably if there is a sort of foundational routine in your meal plan.