To Bulk or Not To Bulk

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This Week’s Healthy Discussion

1. To Bulk or Not to Bulk

2. How to Find Maintenance Calories

3. Staying Full

To Bulk or Not ot Bulk

Out of thin are, bulking was the hot topic in the fitness community on social media. It all started with a few well known coaches talking about how bulking is useless. 

Safe to say, this caused a lot of talk.

However, if we actually look into what their point is, it makes sense.

Calories are the energy that we need to live. We have a certain number of calories that we burn, that if we eat that exact amount, we won’t gain nor lose weight.

This is called your maintenance calories.

The point trying to be made is that you can gain the same amount of muscle in maintenance, then you can in a bulk.

I somewhat agree, but there are always exceptions so let me explain.

You need calories to have energy to train hard. Typically those with very high volume programs need much more energy to recover because they aren’t focusing on their recovery and fatigue management.

If you have your training dialled in and you have a low volume program that you train with high intensity and your recovery is perfect, then you would be able to gain as much muscle as if you were on a bulk.

The whole point is that calories don’t lead to muscle growth. Perfect training, perfect protein intake, and perfect fatigue management do. That’s why you can gain muscle on a cut.

However, bulking is useful for those who don’t have all these little things nailed down.

The excess amount of energy can help with recovery and help with your training.

Also, if you don’t have that much body fat on you, then it would be smart to do a slight bulk to gain some fat on you for the best performance.

All in all, if you feel like you need more energy to keep up with your training, then keep bulking.

But, if you have everything placed correctly, stay at maintenance and slowing increase your calories because your maintenance will go up, due to you gaining new muscle.

How to Find your Maintenance Calories

Finding your maintenance calories is simple 🙂 

All you need to do is look up a calorie calculator like this one linked here.

Type in your age, weight, height, and activity levels (be honest). From there you will get a number like this:

This is the number you need to be eating around to stay at the exact same weight you currently are at.

This isn’t going to be exact as it’s going to vary from day to day from the amount you move around and whether or not you trained that day. However, it’s a solid guess.

Staying Full

Hunger is tough. We have it every day and at times… get cranky if we get hungry.

How can we fix it.

Protein, Water and Fibre are going to be our best chance. Especially if we’re in a deficit.

If you focus on these three things and eating enough for what is recommended for you, then you will notice how less hungry you are throughout the day.

This is another big reason why spreading your protein throughout the day is handy.

I appreciate you reading this far and hope you have gotten at least some value from it.

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