Best Bulking Strategies for Maximum Muscle Gain

Summary

In the video, Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization delves into the intricacies of effective muscle bulking strategies. He provides a comprehensive eight-point guide on how to optimally gain muscle mass while managing body fat. Dr. Mike discusses the importance of intentional weight gain, outlines who should and should not bulk, and gives advice on the optimal pace and duration of bulking phases. Additionally, he talks about the balance between clean and dirty bulking, when to pursue fat loss phases, and how to approach dietary challenges during bulking. The video aims to clear up common misconceptions and provide a practical framework for anyone looking to bulk up effectively.

Highlights

• Dr. Mike unveils a comprehensive guide to solve muscle gaining mysteries! 💪
• Learn how intentional weight gain can fast-track your fitness goals. 🚀
• Find out why beginners might want to avoid bulking initially. 😊
• Discover the ideal pace for gaining mass while avoiding excess fat. 🏃
• Clean vs. dirty bulking - find the healthy balance! 🍎🍔
• Why and when you should incorporate fat loss phases during bulking. 🔄
• Uncover the truth about mass gainer shakes - are they necessary? 🥤
• Tips on overcoming lack of appetite during bulking phases. 🍽️

Key Takeaways

• Intentional weight gain is more effective than just maintaining for muscle mass. 🏋️
• Bulking isn't for everyone; beginners benefit from staying at a stable weight initially. 🌱
• Aim for a gradual gain of half a pound to a pound per week to minimize fat gain. ⚖️
• The best bulking plans incorporate mostly clean eating with occasional treats. 🍏🍟
• Regular fat loss phases help maintain leanness while bulking. ➖
• Mass gainers can be helpful post-workout, but they're not magical. ✨
• Address appetite issues with tasty foods, higher dietary fats, and cheat meals. 🍲

Overview

In the first part of this mini-series, Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization dives deep into the science and art of bulking. He emphasizes the need for intentional weight gain to truly see muscle growth, explaining that simply maintaining one's weight does not harness the full potential of muscle-building. Through his eight esteemed tips, he breaks down the myths surrounding mass gaining and highlights the dynamic strategies needed to achieve an impressive physique.

One crucial piece of advice Dr. Mike offers is the balance between clean and dirty bulking. While it's tempting to eat anything and everything, he humorously sheds light on why primarily clean foods with the occasional indulgence will yield the best results. He also touches on the importance of pacing your bulking phase to avoid unnecessary fat gain and the need for periodic fat loss phases to stay lean and mean.

Dr. Mike's engaging and informative narrative not only addresses muscle food myths but also offers practical solutions to common challenges like lack of appetite. With truths about mass gainer shakes and when to push the pause button on gaining, he provides a well-rounded guide emphasizing patience and strategy for muscle gain success.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Overview Dr. Mike introduces a mini-series on mass gaining, humorously claiming to have solved all mysteries related to the topic. He mentions that the series will provide eight tips across its installments and aims to answer common questions about intentional weight gain and mass building.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Intentional Weight Gain vs. Main Gaining The chapter compares the concepts of intentional weight gain and 'main gaining'—a method by which one maintains their current weight while aiming to change their body composition through muscle gain and fat loss. It suggests that although one can achieve a desired physique by remaining at the same weight through a healthy diet and training, this approach takes a considerably long time. Intentional weight gain, in contrast, might expedite the process by utilizing more aggressive strategies to alter body composition.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Zigzag Approach to Gaining Muscle The chapter discusses the zigzag approach to gaining muscle, which involves alternating between hypocaloric and hypercaloric diets. A hypocaloric diet is used to intentionally eat less and burn fat faster, while a hypercaloric diet is used to gain weight and build muscle more quickly. By zigzagging between these two nutritional approaches, individuals can achieve a lean physique at 150 lbs more efficiently than allowing body recomposition to occur naturally over time without intentional dietary adjustments.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Reaching Higher Weight Goals Intentional weight gain is essential for reaching higher weight goals beyond your natural appetite limits. If your natural appetite and dietary habits enable you to reach a weight of 170 pounds but not more, additional strategies are needed to achieve a weight of 180 pounds while maintaining muscle mass. It's impossible to weigh more without intentional effort beyond natural eating and exercise habits.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Who Should Bulk and Who Shouldn't The chapter discusses the concept of bulking, which involves intentional weight gain to achieve a more muscular or fuller appearance. It suggests that being at a higher weight, such as 180 pounds, can sometimes look more impressive than a lower weight, like 170 pounds. The chapter emphasizes that to reach this higher weight, one must intentionally consume more food and gain a little weight each week, as regular eating and training may not be sufficient. Additionally, the chapter aims to address who should consider bulking and who should not, likely based on individual fitness goals and circumstances.
• 05:30 - 07:30: Optimal Gaining Speed The chapter titled 'Optimal Gaining Speed' discusses strategies for individuals who are relatively lean and aim to gain muscle mass over the long term. It suggests that such individuals should pursue occasional periods of bulking for muscle gain. However, the chapter also advises against bulking for certain groups: those who are uncomfortable with the idea of gaining weight and prefer to maintain or lose fat, and beginners who are new to training. It emphasizes the importance of psychological readiness and tailored approaches based on individual comfort and experience levels.
• 07:30 - 10:30: Bulking Duration and Training Fatigue This chapter discusses the concept of bulking duration and managing training fatigue, particularly for beginners. It explains that newcomers to dieting and training can gain significant muscle without intentionally trying to bulk or gain weight. Once they become muscular, they can focus on getting lean. After training for several years, they may consider their first intentional bulk, although it's not mandatory to bulk intentionally if it's not suitable for them.
• 10:30 - 14:30: Clean vs. Dirty Bulking The chapter highlights the differences between clean and dirty bulking. It advises against rushing into a bulking phase right after starting training and dieting, especially if the individual's body fat is already around 15%. The recommendation is to maintain a normal high-protein diet and focus on training, aiming to reduce body fat percentage before considering bulking. This approach allows for building muscle while keeping body fat under control, achieving a leaner bulk without the downsides of becoming too fat.
• 14:30 - 17:30: When to Cut Fat This chapter discusses the pitfalls of gaining weight too quickly, emphasizing that rapid weight gain often leads to an increased body fat ratio, which can be undesirable for both health and appearance reasons. The recommendation is to aim for a slower, more controlled weight gain, suggesting a target of half a pound to a more manageable rate. This approach helps in minimizing excessive body fat accumulation, thus reducing the need for intensive dieting later.
• 17:30 - 19:30: Mass Gainer Shakes In this chapter, the discussion focuses on mass gainer shakes and the rate at which individuals can gain weight during a typical mass gaining phase. Depending on one's physique and preferences towards gaining fat, the expected weight gain can vary. A smaller individual, like a 130-pound girl, might aim for half a pound a week. In contrast, a larger individual who is comfortable gaining some extra fat while building muscle might aim for up to a pound a week. For those who measure in kilograms, this translates to a target of 0.25 to 0.5 kilograms per week. The chapter also notes the common concern among females about gaining weight, emphasizing balance and personal comfort levels with fat gain.
• 19:30 - 22:00: Dealing With Lack of Hunger The chapter titled 'Dealing With Lack of Hunger' discusses a 12-week massing phase focused on intentional weight gain. It emphasizes gaining muscle at a rate of half a pound per week, resulting in a total of six pounds gained by the end of the phase. The narrator suggests that this amount of weight can be easily lost in a short period of two to three weeks through fat loss dieting, making it manageable in terms of body fat perception. Additionally, the option to increase the rate to one pound per week is mentioned as acceptable in most cases. The chapter begins to address considerations on the duration of a massing phase.
• 22:00 - 23:00: Conclusion and Preview for Part 2 This chapter discusses the concept of bulking in bodybuilding, emphasizing that the primary factor determining the length of a bulking phase is not the amount of body fat gained but rather the accumulated training fatigue. It suggests that after approximately 12 to 16 weeks of intense training cycles during a bulking phase, one may encounter problems related to fatigue.

Best Bulking Strategies for Maximum Muscle Gain Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey folks Dr Mike here forance periodization and today I have solved every single Mass gaining mystery you could ever wonder about just kidding but I do have oh how many eight tips in part one of this minseries of mass gaining Mysteries solved you want to put on mass you want to get jacked you want to get huge but you have a few questions don't you worry I have a few answers we're going to take the step by step first is the question of what does intentional weight gain actually help can't you main gain your way or gain ttain your way to
• 00:30 - 01:00 whatever jacked physique you want kind of but there's two things to say about that if you weigh 150 lbs and you're a little bit on the fatter side and you want to be 150 lbs fucking chiseled lean that means you have to drop quite a bit of fat but also gain quite a bit of muscle you could do this just by staying at 150 eating healthy and training and slowly over time your body is going to become more muscular and less fat but that'll be a very long time because you're not using the most powerful two
• 01:00 - 01:30 weapons that you have at your disposal nutritionally a hypocaloric diet intentionally eating less in order to burn fat faster and a hypercaloric Diet gaining in order to put on muscle much faster so instead of just staying at 150 and letting recomposition take its course which it will you can zigzag go cut off some fat gain some muscle and fat cut off some fat gain some muscle and fat the zigzag will get you to that lean physique at 150 lbs faster much faster
• 01:30 - 02:00 than it will just to maintain the other thing that intentional gaining helps is it'll get you to a place where you couldn't have gotten because you just straight up weren't big enough and your appetite couldn't get you there if your appetite and you eating lots of food whatever you want as long as it's got protein in it training weights really hard if your appetite gets you up to 170 lounds but won't budge you anymore how the fuck are you supposed to weigh 180 and be 180 lbs jacked there's nobody on this Earth that weighs 170 lb but is 180
• 02:00 - 02:30 jacked it's a contradiction in terms and at some point being 180 just looks a lot more impressive than being 170 and that might be something you want how do you get there well if you can't maintain there you've got to intentionally bulk to get there an intentional weight gain gaining a little bit of weight each week stuffing yourself a little bit with food will get you to a place where just eating and training won't big deal huge deal has to be something we say now who should not b bu who should bulk people
• 02:30 - 03:00 that are well Tred that are relatively lean or lean enough for them and want to put on as much muscle mass as possible over the long term should do occasional periods of bulking to put on that muscle who should not bulk I can think of at least a few people one if you're not comfortable with the idea of gaining weight yet psychologically Namaste no big deal chill out go through periods of Maintenance and fat loss until you're good with it and then maybe you can bulk or you can never bulk the other people are beginners people new to training and
• 03:00 - 03:30 new to dieting they're so fresh they can benefit hugely from just staying at the same body weight roughly thereabouts not intentionally trying to gain weight because they're so n to training and so n to dieting they're going to gain a ton of muscle not even trying and then well not even trying to bulk intentionally once they have gotten very muscular they can take a little bit of time to get lean and once they're very lean and muscular training for two or three years then they can do their first intentional bulk you can always do an intentional bulk sooner but you don't have to so that intentional bulk may not be for you
• 03:30 - 04:00 give that some thought a lot of times people start training and dieting and a week later they're like time to bulk and I'm like man you started at 15% fat you could bulk to where you're 18% fat and very muscular in a few months what you could have just done is just contined eating normal high protein diet really training over the couple months you would have come down to 12 or 11% fat then when you bulked up you'd just be bulked to 15 still quite lean all of the benefits none of the downsides of getting too fat so don't rush into bulking if you are in in that position
• 04:00 - 04:30 next how fast should you gain it's tempting to try to gain as fast as possible the problem is and something most people know is that the fraction of body fat you gain if you go really quick is really gnarly it's gaining fast is a good ticket to just get really really fat which sucks because you have to diet off the fat it's not healthy for you it makes you look like shit etc etc etc so what do you do instead I think that you should gain at somewhere between half a pound to a
• 04:30 - 05:00 pound per week in the typical Mass gaining phase half a pound to a pound per week half a pound if you're on the more fat phobic side if you're on the smaller side if you're 130 PB girl half a pound per week is great if you're on the larger side you are okay with putting on a bit of extra fat if he means a little bit more muscle gaining up to a pound a week is totally cool for you kilo folks out in the rest of the world 25 to.5 kilos a week here's the thing just as a thought experiment a lot of females have trouble with gaining wait they say I don't want to get fat
• 05:00 - 05:30 hold on a sec let's say it's a 12-week massing phase that's three months of of of intentional weight gain that's a lot you're going to gain a lot of muscle but you're only doing half a pound per week that's six lbs gained six lb you can lose in two or three weeks of fat loss dieting right after if you don't want to and it's barely notable body fat wise on your physique half a pound per week is a Great Clip and if you want to go a bit faster up to a pound per week is totally cool in most cases Point number four how long should
• 05:30 - 06:00 you bulk for bulking for a long time is not so determined by how much fat you gain because you can actually bulk successfully into a relatively high body fat and everything goes well the number one determinant of how to cap your bulking phase your massing phase your muscle gain phase is how much training fatigue you accumulate after roughly 12 to 16 weeks of multiple Messa cycles of hard training with bulking you're going to run into a problem
• 06:00 - 06:30 the problem is your body is so desensitized to training and so fucking beat up that you can't train at your hardest anymore reliably week on week on week and if you can't train very hard anymore week on week on week why are you bulking that's like you know sending a rocket up to space you're like yeah I think half the fuel is in there we should get the rocket out of orbit uh are we sure about that so what you want to do is make sure that you bulk for as long as you can or as long as you have planned if it's 16 weeks if it's 20
• 06:30 - 07:00 weeks if it's 24 wherever your training starts to fall apart take an active rest phase take a maintenance phase reduce your body's desensitization to hypertrophy potentially do a fat loss phase we'll talk about that in just a bit and then start bulking again but people say like oh I'm bulking for a year straight no you're not you're not going to train hard for a year straight and if you are you're not training hard enough week on week anyway number five clean versus dirty
• 07:00 - 07:30 bulk this is a situation that is partly mythical and won't die and just Bros on Reddit keep talking about it food composition is important to health it's not so important to your body composition you can eat exclusively dirty Foods potato chips Etc and you'll still gain roughly the same amount of muscle and fat roughly the problem is it's really hard to hit good macros you'll have too many fat fat not enough
• 07:30 - 08:00 carbs your training will be shed if you eat mostly junk Foods so the core of every good muscle gaining plan should be mostly healthy foods to give you really really good macros lots of protein tons of carbs and enough fats to keep you going but not so much so much fat to overwhelm digestion and and and reduce the number of carbs and your pumps get worse and all that other crap so clean bulking is the core of every plan but is it okay a few times a week to have a few little goodies and junk food and some cheat meals if it's going to help you get to your weight gain goal and it's not making you a fat slobbery mess 100%
• 08:00 - 08:30 so what I would say is if you say clean bulking is over here dirty bulking is over here somewhere right in this area between clean and dirty bulking or actually sorry dirty bulking is over here right in this area closer to clean bulking but a couple dirty stuff uh things every now and again a couple times a week is totally cool and probably for most people the best way to go so I would say this is not one of those clean versus dirty it's mostly clean but a little bit of dirty it's like the bedroom H I've never been in the bedroom before in that respect so hypothetically
• 08:30 - 09:00 that analogy holds number six when do you cut the fat off as you bulk almost inevitably in most cases you will gain some measure of muscle and some measure of fat when is it time to start cutting the fat off I'll tell you when it's not time when it's been like 3 weeks and you first start to notice you're a little bit fatter and you're like fuck it I need to cut you need to gain for at least four weeks for most of that muscle to stick around ideally more like eight or 12 or 16 weeks as soon as you hit that point where your
• 09:00 - 09:30 training isn't good anymore and you can't push your massing phase any harder because your body is desensitized to training or you're too beat up at all of your joints to keep going then you take an active rest phase which is two weeks of really easy training or no no training at all you might take another two to four weeks of Maintenance which is training in sets of 5 to 10 very low maintenance volumes about a third of the volume third of the number of sets you typically do maybe you typically train six days a week you train Four really cool the body off let it really really settle really get sensitive to in again
• 09:30 - 10:00 then what you can do after is a fat loss phase to get rid of pretty much all of the fat you gain during the last massing phase and that should take somewhere between four and eight weeks in most cases like if you did a 16we bulk an 8we fat loss diet should absolutely take all the fat off that you put on once you're finished with that diet take a week of active rest or something like that and get right back into bulking no problem it'll be really awesome if you take fat loss phases more sparingly that's okay
• 10:00 - 10:30 you'll get great results but you'll get fatter and fatter and fatter over time that just means you'll have to do a really gnarly series of fat loss phases one really long one later and that's no fun so I'd recommend yeah every 12 to 16 weeks after massing phase is over if you're interested in it another after active rest and a little bit of Maintenance training four to eight week fat loss phase can really get you going typically we call that a minic cut especially if it's 3 to 6 weeks long that's totally cool as well but some fat loss pH to get the fat off to get you going again is a really good idea you
• 10:30 - 11:00 don't just want to become the Michelin mat eventually Point number seven do you need Mass Gainer shakes no but you could be in a position where a mass gainer Shake is an easy way for you to get a high carb high protein amount of calories it's an excellent thing to take after a really hard training session you finish your training shake or you don't have a training shake you get a mass gain of shake going you take a shower you relax you do whatever you work a little bit then you get hungry you have your first Whole Food meal a masc Shake is also great because it's easy on the
• 11:00 - 11:30 stomach a lot of times after really hard training you're not so hungry and if you eat a ton of food you start wanting to throw it up mask a shake can be great if that describes you absolutely consider a Mas g a shake but the idea that Mas g a shake is Magic and that it somehow if you added into your plan you're going to just explode with new muscle that's not the case it's not made of steroids or some shit it's just food Blended and refined down to be really easy to eat that's the only magic it has for you lastly what happens when you're just not hungry enough to continue to gain you
• 11:30 - 12:00 can't eat the food I have a couple suggestions one is to try to make your food tastier flavor it better there's tons of flavorings at the store tons of recipes online you can do a good job if your food is tastier you can generally eat more of it another thing is to raise your dietary fats a little bit if you're trying to eat super clean you have 30 grams of fat per day and you're bulking that's tough go up to 60 70 80 90 100 grams of fat per day and all of a sudden your calories are way higher you're gaining a ton that extra fat is getting your sex drive up and your training
• 12:00 - 12:30 motivation through the roof and all of a sudden it's really great and it boosts your calories a ton another thing is to have a couple of weekly fun cheat meals to help you get going Mas Gainer shakes are another option and at the end of the day if all of those things run their course and eventually they will you won't be hungry enough to hit your Surplus then it's time for fat loss phase generally speaking if you plan things out right if you start nice and lean the beginning of a muscle gain phase that phase takes 12 to 16 weeks and no more you'll get nice and full at the end you do your recovery period your active rest and your maintenance and
• 12:30 - 13:00 then when you drop down into your fat loss phase at the end of that fat loss phase at the beginning you're not hungry at all it's the easiest fat loss phase ever at the end of that fat loss phase seven or eight weeks later you're going to be pretty fucking lean and pretty fucking hungry which potentiates you for another 12 to 16 weeks of massing Circle of Life Simba rasa scar them hyenas all the motherfuckers are there and speaking of there I'll see you guys in a little bit with part two of this series thank you so much for tuning in see you then