What is Bulking
Bulking is the name given to the process of consuming excess calories in order to build muscle. When training you should either be bulking or cutting, cutting is dieting to shed body fat while retaining as much muscle mass as possible.
Getting stronger doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to get bigger, in fact its possible to consistently get stronger while not gaining any weight. However, it isn’t possible to gain muscle without physically getting stronger.
The reason bodybuilder’s use 2 separate processes is because this is the most efficient way. Even if you don’t want to be a bodybuilder, if you train like one then you will no doubt reach your goals a lot faster.
There are 2 ways to bulk, a clean bulk or a dirty bulk. These will be explained shortly; first you need to decide if you are ok with adding a little bit of fat along with the muscle while training. If you want to stay lean while gaining muscle mass then you should look to ‘clean bulk’.
Clean Bulking
This method is about gaining the most amount of muscle with the least amount fat gain. This can be much slower than conventional bulking but will allow you to stay in good shape and condition while you gain more muscle mass. There is a fine line between getting your food intake right so that you’re enough over maintenance to grow but not too much so you gain fat. This is probably one for the more experienced trainers out there as you really need to know what your calorific maintenance is before you can do this.
For example if you know your maintenance calories are 2600 then you should look to consume an extra 250 calories each day until you stop gaining weight, then you up the amount by another 250. This should help keep the fat gain to a minimum while still giving yourself enough to gain muscle.
Dirty Bulking
This is basically the exact opposite of a clean bulk, you eat a fair excess of calories (still from nutritious foods obviously) so that your body always has enough nutrients to grow and repair muscle meaning you should gain a lot faster than a clean bulk but you will also gain an amount of fat. The whole idea of a bulk is to give your body a surplus of what it needs to add muscle and this will be the best and easiest thing for a novice trainer to do and see some good gains from it.
Dirty bulking does sound like you can eat as much of whatever you like but you still need to be sensible, healthy nutritious foods are the key to growing but with that said there’s more scope for the odd takeaway or two when dirty bulking.
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