If you’re anything at all like most bodybuilders, your ultimate desire is a simple one: To have an impressive, muscular physique with razor-sharp definition and the envy of everyone around you. You want to be huge, and you want to be shredded.

Everyone wants a great body, but for those people who strive for nothing less than an ideal body, they don’t just want to be huge: They want to be shredded. In pursuit of this goal, many plunge into their programs headfirst, eager to get started and gain muscle. Bulking up might be the motivation, but everyone is worried about gaining excess body fat at the same time.

If you’re going for a significant muscle gain as quickly as possible, you’re always going to end up gaining body fat to go along with it.

This is simply the nature of the entire process and if you really want to travel a significant way in the “bulking” direction, you have to be willing to accept this.

In order to gain muscle size, you must consume a surplus of calories in order to support protein synthesis. However, there is no way to divert 100% of this caloric surplus towards muscle growth. A certain amount of it will always end up as stored body fat.

You first goal is for the most dramatic gain in the shortest time. To that end it’s always better to focus first on muscle gain over a set period of time, followed by another period of time concentrating on losing the unwanted body fat.

Considering this information, it’s clear that the goal of the bulking phase is to gain muscle size, to build up as much as possible while doing what you can to minimize gaining extra body fat. However, it’s important to remember that during the bulking phase, your goal is not to lose body fat, merely to gain as little as possible.

This can be accomplished in 3 main ways:

1) Make sure that your caloric surplus is limited to a precise amount. Because this surplus is what fuels muscle growth, it’s tempting to eat too much in the mistaken belief that this will help you gain muscle tissue, but actually the only thing you’ll gain with haphazard eating is body fat.

The general rule of thumb for muscle gain is to take 15-20% more calories than you need to keep your weight. If you are already within this range, there’s no need for you to add more.

2) Pay attention to your food choices. The vast majority of your food intake should be coming from lean, high quality proteins, natural/high fiber carbohydrates and healthy/unsaturated fats.

Rather than aimlessly chowing down on every food item in sight, make sure that you’re sticking to lean protein sources, keeping blood sugar levels stable through proper carbohydrate choices, and avoiding high amounts of saturated fats.

3) Implement cardio sessions. There’s no need to go overboard here, but implementing 2-3 cardio sessions throughout the week is another way to cut down on fat gains during a bulking cycle.

Keep these sessions no more than 10-20 minutes long, sticking to high intensity/low duration forms, as these kinds of session have the advantage of not causing the same amount of muscle loss as longer duration forms.

Once you’ve achieved the amount of muscle size that you want, a goal which is completely up to you as an individual, it’s time to move into a fat loss cycle. In this way, you can focus on stripping off the excess body fat gained during the bulking cycle, while still maintaining muscle size.

The trick is to minimize it rather than try to totally avoid it, and you can do this with a reasonable diet and sensible exercise.

Tags: Nutrition

Share This