Bulking, cutting, and staying lean

There is probably no gym-goer that hasn’t heard about bulking and cutting (and if you didn’t: what rock have you been under?).

There is probably no gym-goer that hasn’t bulked or cut (or tried to).

But there is also probably no gym-goer that hasn’t made mistakes in this process.

Bulking too quickly and gaining fat, or cutting too quickly and losing muscle; those are the most common mistakes, though there is also the possibility that you bulk too slowly and thus leave progress untapped, or that you cut too slowly and you end up trapped in a food-prison for too long.

However, there is actually no right way to do this, and the path to take always depends on what your end-goal is.

Today, I will focus more on the approach to follow if you want to optimize health, leanness, long-term progress, and a gentler weight fluctuation. This will not be a magic guide or a list of hacks to take the easy way.

Who would want the easy way? The hard path is the only path that you can take forever.

While gaining weight may be easy (just eat a lot), what is actually way subtler is gaining muscle.

It should be clear at this point, but I’m going to remark it anyway: to gain weight, you must eat more calories than you burn. How many more? Well, depends on the goals you may have.

If you want to bulk up as quickly as possible (dirty bulking, which I don’t recommend, for health reasons), then eat as many over your maintenance as you can.

However, if you want to gain only muscle, or mostly muscle, with as little fat as possible, then the recommended amount is about 300 calories over maintenance.

For reference, that is about one glass of milk, one banana, and two slices of bread over you normal amount of food. So, it’s not that much!

You can calculate your maintenance online down below, given your physical activity level, your age, gender and weight.

So, with this little surplus, you’ll have enough spare energy to build up muscle, while remaining tight enough on your diet that you won’t get fat.

You want to maintain this regime for about 5-6 months, since the weight increase will not be too quick, and you still want to be able to put on a significant amount of mass before cutting.

If it’s any longer, you risk stagnating due to fat-gain; if it’s any shorter, you won’t be able to gain enough size so that you can cut back and have made progress.

The sweetspot is to gain about 1kg of mass every two weeks. Over 6 months, that amounts to 12kg! Of course, some of it will still be fat and water-retention, so the net muscle gain will probably be about 5kg (which is still amazing progress).

Now, you’ve out on a decent amount of size and weight, but also some fat; you now want to lose that excess to finally come back stronger, bigger, and lean.

But that is the catch: you want to lose only fat. And that is not as trivial as it may first seem. Though it is not too complicated, it is subtle, and worth explaining in more detail.

Clearly, conversely to bulking up, to lose weight, you need to eat less calories than you burn.

And here there is no shortcut: you can’t lose fat as quickly as you want, since if you’re in a big enough deficit, no amount of training will suffice to keep your muscle.

Also, it can’t be done too gradually: staying in a considerable deficit for well over than 6 months can lead to hormonal imbalances and stagnation in training.

Therefore, you want to find the balance between speed and gradual change. You want to stay in a defict of about 300-500 calories, for about 4-5 months.

Shedding the inital amount of fat is easier, and you also have the leverage of the change in metabolism (bulk to cut), where progress accelerates. The approach is thus: be in a bigger deficit for the first 2-3 months (about 500kcal), and then taper it off for the last 2-3 at around 200-300.

In this way, you are able to lose most of the extra fat on the first few months, where you still have a lot to spare, and still have the momentum and hormonal balance from the bulk. Then, when the fat-loss process gets more stubborn, you slow it down to make sure it does not eat away any muscle from the deficit being too big for too long.

Now, knowing how to gain muscle without too much fat, and how to lose that fat without losing any muscle, it remains to see how to connect these two periods of fitness, and how to exploit the dynamic between them to one’s benefit.

We all know at this point that you want to be at your peak for the summer, to be lean, big; to look good.

Given 5 months of bulking and 4 of cutting, that leaves us with 3 extra months. The three summer months!

Here, you want to maintain your weight; stay lean and put on some more muscle and strength.

And to do this, you want to eat just as many calories as you burn, on average. Some days you may eat a little bit more, some days a bit less.

And can you put on muscle while doing this? Yes, although not as quickly as when bulking. You still have a tiny amount of fat to lose, but you also have some days with a caloric surplus to replenish and rebuild.

And also, you can still gain strength without gaining much muscle, since strength does not depend solely on the amount of muscle, but also on how your body utilizes the fibres you already have, and on your technique and coordination.

Thus, once you master how to get lean, and how to build muscle, you can look great and feel great year-round; you oscillate between 8-15% bodyfat between different times of the year, sometimes prioritizing muscle-gain, sometimes prioritizing fat-loss and strength.

What this dynamic of constant change allows for is to exploit the ups and downs of caloric intake, body mass, and replenishment or shedding for your benefit, instead of swimming countercurrent.

And the good thing is that, as long as you don’t eat junk food and have a balanced diet with similar amounts of carbs, fats, and protein, you only have to get strict with it for about 4 months a year, since then you can relax on the bulk, and have days on and off while maintaining.

As a final addition, I’d remark that it is also a good idea to skip breakfast year-round, since it will really control your caloric intake. It will not allow you to go overboard on the bulk, and it will also make eating less much easier during the cut.

(Maybe it is dinner for you, or lunch, whatever suits your purposes. However, as long as you don’t eat big right before bed, having dinner is a good idea since it nourishes your body with much-needed protein for muscle-synthesis during the night.

Or maybe it is lunch; though if you work out in the morning it is a good idea to have a post-workout meal: lunch.)

Hope you enjoyed this post! Stay tuned for more every Sunday, and make sure to share and subscribe!