Ah, cool. You (meaning Schuyler, not Priceguy who I’m going to respond to in the next paragraph ) do have a point. 3600 is a starting figure. Like all things fitness-related, you have to adjust to your circumstances. PG might find that 3000 is enough to keep adding a pound a week or so. Basically, you do have to strike a balance between adding too much weight too fast or not getting enough fuel to make good progress.
And back to PG…
From personal experience…bulking routines on a calorie deficit made me drop muscle mass like crazy. The only way I’ve consistently managed to hold onto muscle when dieting is to lift low rep, as heavy as possible with only 2 or 3 sets.
Having said that, it’s better than not doing anything at all. My main concern with traditional higher volume bulking routines on a calorie deficit is simply that it’ll wear you out and make you miserable if you don’t have the calories fueling it. I think the main reason I lost muscle was simply I was doing so much volume I didn’t have enough energy to put proper effort into any of the exercises.
Body would first start to breakdown your muscle before getting to the fat stores. You would work hard and if you weren’t eating right, you would just get weaker and smaller. Bulking up and weight gain just go together. If you want brad pitt, you have to bulk up, then trim down. He looks like that for a couple weeks, then starts eating pizzas again. The right course is balance. I usually go 10x my body weight. Which puts me at about 1900 calories. I’m not a professional, just a normal guy so I don’t need to go down anymore than that. During the winter (now) I’m about 25 lbs heavier than I was this summer eating about 3kish calories.
I’m going to give this a try, starting at 2500 calories and working my way up, using protein supplements (and consuming ungodly amounts of chicken, turkey and eggwhites), but it’s going to be a bit scary to start gaining weight after focusing on losing it for six months straight. I’m telling myself that if I start gaining the wrong kind of weight I can just diet it off (I just spent half a year proving that I could), no harm done.
Any particular foods I should avoid? Sugar and alcohol are no-nos, of course. Anything else?
No, not wasted, but not maximized. I find the single most important variables in how much weight I can lift (and consequently how much muscle I gain) are these: how much do I weigh, and am I currently gaining, losing or stable. The differences in these can have an enormous effect. The more gas you have in your tank, the more you can lift, and the more muscle you gain. You can always lose the fat. But you’ll keep most of the muscle mass if you kleep working hard, even if you lose reps or your max decreases.
I’ll give you an example. I’m a pretty big guy. Not NFL lineman big, or anything like that. About 6’2" or 3". A couple of years ago, I weighed about 275, way more than I should have. I started lifting weights (I had lifted years before) and eating better, and then I started cardio. Before the cardio, I started to move a lot of weight when I lifted. I could bench press 350, for example. But as I started to lose weight, I started to get weaker. Less gas in the tank. I’d lose reps in my heavy sets. Then after a while I’d have to just eliminate certain weights that I could lift easily before.
By the time I got down to around 240 pounds, I was struggling to lift anything. I couldn’t lift 300 lbs anymore, and only a couple at 275. But I kept working as hard as I could. I eventually got down to the low 230’s, my weight stabilized, and then I started regaining reps and I could lift the heavier weights again.
Well, my weight has fluctuated somewhat. During periods when I gained weight, suddenly I felt like the Hulk. When my weight spikes into the 240’s (like now), I feel like I can muscle anything up. Same weight as when I was on the way down from 275, only now I feel strong, then I felt weak. What’s the difference? I’m gaining, not losing. My body feels like it has all kinds of gas in the tank. I’m going for 400 bench press on Sunday. I weigh the same as I did when I was losing weight and I couldn’t lift 300.
You want to gain muscle mass? Eat, lots of protein. Lift heavy weights. Repeat.
Eat lean proteins and complex carbs. Keep it that simple. Remember, it is impossible to gain significant muscle mass without a LOT of protein. I drink a protein shake before and after every work-put, and believe me, I don’t need the additional weight. But you gots to have the protein.
According to books I have read on men building bulky muscle mass is short sets of just a few reps at the maximum you can correctly lift. Jerking weights only cheats yourself. something like three sets of three or five sets of five is good but you want to make sure you are fatiguing the muscle by the end of your sets. You should be thinking you arern’t goingt to make that last one. Rest that muscle group the next day. Muscle grows by getting minute little tears and then your body repairs the tears and adds a few more cells. It has to have adequate protein for this process. According to books abotu arnold Swatzenegger when he was competively body building he ws one of the best at working quickly to fatigue the muscle group he was working on and leaving to do other things. He clearly was quite sucessful at that with all of the Mr Universe titles that he won.
Joyce Vedral has written numerous books on weight lifting and wrote one with Joe Weider for men. I think her books for women are excellant and easy to follow, I woudl guess that one is good as well.
If you could lose weight and tone up by reading about it I would be fantastic.
What about rest periods? Someone said you should only weight train three weeks out of four, and while that sounds excessive I don’t doubt you should let your body rest sometimes. I’ve been lifting for six months now, would it be reasonable to take a break for a couple of weeks?
A lot of the exercise stuff written by Joe Weider is, well, crap. A lot of the weightlifting advice written by Arnold Schwartzanegger and his ghost writers applies only to a very small percentage of mesomorphic freaks.
Current weightlifting dogma advises taking a week rest break every few months. However, the benefits of this apply most strongly to those who lift very intensely and especially hard in the week before the rest break. It would be reasonable to take one week off if you have been lifting hard for six months. I have to take weeks off from time to time due to work and vacations… one week off makes no difference, after two weeks the differences are definitely there.
Many people with a goal of lifting heavy weights eat a great deal, trying to choose their calories wisely so they put on more muscle than fat. You can’t bulk without putting on some fat. If this prospect appals you, consider why you wish to be bulkier. While the prospect of gaining muscle slowly without putting on fat has its appeal, most bodybuilders consider it more efficient to alternate between bulking cycles and cutting cycles – putting on the muscle and fat then losing the fat separately – yo-yo dieting.
Hey, slortar, Stratocaster, and others - thanks for the perspective and education on the relationship between your muscle gain, weight loss, and workout intensity. That was very illuminating.
Like I said, I don’t really belong in this discussion, so I appreciate that I’ve been able to learn some things from the various posts. I’ve always figured that I could gain about 1 lb. of muscle per month, but I’m definitely ectomorphic and haven’t really experimented a lot. The calorie consumption and muscle gain that you guys are talking about are definitely not sustainable by my body physiology.
This also gives me a wake-up call for why some of my workouts (running for me) are low quality - I’m trying to drop a couple of pounds, so my calorie consumption can be kind of erratic day-to-day. (I’m well below 10% body fat, but want to experiment with going a bit leaner - and I have a hard time being dilligent on a weight loss program, when there aren’t deadlines built in.) Sounds like what I should accept is a low-quality week or two while I reduce calories, then increase excersize intensity as I go back up to normal eating. Cheers.
This is what I’m planning on doing, using the small goals slortar suggests. I’ll gain 2-2½ kg, then cut down the volume and go on a cutting cycle, then start bulking again. How should I regulate the cutting cycle? Should I keep cutting until I’ve lost all or a portion of the weight I’ve gained? Should I go by waist measurement or some other method?
Your goal is to be bulkier by gaining muscle and not fat. You could try to gain a small amount of weight (2-2.5 kg seems reasonable) or just eat heavily for a certain small interval of time (do it for two weeks and reevaluate how you are doing every two weeks).
The idea with cutting is to keep most of the muscle you have gained while losing the fat. Since muscle is heavier than fat, you might not lose lots of weight while cutting, depending on how much fat vs. muscle you’ve put on, and how much original fat you’ve lost through exercising. Waist size (especially if you are like me and put on fat mainly around the stomach) or other body measurements would therefore be more useful than weight alone, which can be very imprecise.
Yep.
Chinups = primarily lats and biceps, some upper body stabilizer work.
Pick a grip that’s comfortable for you. It really doesn’t matter if you go wide or not. I use a shoulder-width grip as anything wider really messes with my shoulders.
Pronated (palms out, also known as pullups), lats are worked a little bit harder, biceps a bit less. Supinated (palms facing you, commonly called chins), biceps are worked a bit more. There are also a ton of other grips you can experiment with, but those are the two most common. Personally, I do supinated, with more weight.
) do have a point. 3600 is a starting figure. Like all things fitness-related, you have to adjust to your circumstances. PG might find that 3000 is enough to keep adding a pound a week or so. Basically, you do have to strike a balance between adding too much weight too fast or not getting enough fuel to make good progress.
