This bulking diet plan covers everything you need to know about eating for muscle growth. This is how bodybuilders have traditionally bulked up, how athletes gain lean mass, and what modern science shows is the most effective way to fuel muscle growth.
I’ve personally used this diet to gain 65 pounds at 11% body fat. Marco has used them to gain over 70 pounds at an even lower body fat percentage. This is the diet plan Marco used with the college, professional, and Olympic athletes he trained. And since creating Bony to Beastly, it’s the advice we’ve given to our millions of readers and the 10,000 naturally skinny members who’ve done our bulking program.
There are three parts to this guide:
Don’t expect to be shocked or thrilled. There’s nothing edgy or controversial here. This isn’t the one and only True way to eat for muscle growth. These are well-known and well-studied principles with decades of tradition behind them. The best results come from applying them properly.
The goal of this guide is to give you the best default bulking diet, the best foundation to build upon. From there, you can adjust it as you see fit.
When a revolutionary new diet is proposed, it can appear to have limitless potential. It could be a way to get better results than anyone ever has before. It’s thrilling to think that we’ve finally found the solution. But almost all of these new methods eventually wind up proving to be at least slightly less effective than a more traditional bulking diet.
There are a few reasons for this.
It’s possible someone has come up with a way to improve on these methods. Muscle-building diets have improved gradually over the years. All of those improvements were brand new at some point. However, these tend to be incremental improvements. A small tweak results in an improvement that’s barely noticeable. But when enough of those small improvements coalesce, it can produce significantly more muscle growth.
When these improvements have proven themselves in the field and in the lab, they get incorporated into the conventional bulking diet. I’m sure we’ve missed some effective methods, but it pays to be patient. Mixed in with the glimmering gems are mountains of shiny but worthless glass. We think it’s wiser to wait until the evidence is strong enough to be reasonably certain.
As the research currently stands, this is the best bulking diet.
The most important part of any bulking diet is the calorie surplus. Not everyone needs a calorie surplus to build muscle, but most skinny people, lean people, and intermediate lifters do. That’s what bulking is for.
But how big should that calorie surplus be? How fast should we gain weight? We have a full article digging into the research, but as a rule of thumb, gaining around 1 pound per week allows us to build muscle fairly fast while keeping our gains quite lean (systematic review).
We can do a bit better than that, too. The researchers say skinny beginners are able to gain muscle faster, gaining as many as 1–2 pounds per week without showing much fat gain. We often see the same thing when helping our members bulk up:
A beginner gaining 1–2 pounds per week without much fat gain.Then, as we build more muscle, we get closer to our genetic potential, and our rate of muscle growth slows. So for intermediate lifters who have already gained their first 20 pounds, a better rule of thumb is to gain 0.5–1 pound per week:
An intermediate lifter gaining 1 pound per week without much fat gain.To be clear, some research shows even faster muscle growth with faster rates of weight gain, even in advanced bodybuilders. However, that extra muscle growth often comes at the cost of gaining a disproportionate amount of body fat (study). It usually isn’t worth it.
Plus, for every study showing a benefit to gaining weight faster, there’s another study showing people getting super fat by rushing things. We want the best of both worlds: fast muscle growth with minimal fat gain. Gaining 0.5–1 pound per week is usually the best way to do that.
There are three main ways you can get into a calorie surplus:
Choose whichever method you prefer, and don’t worry too much about being perfectly precise. It’s common for beginners to get hung up here, trying to calculate exactly how many calories they’ll burn. Truth is, no calculation, no matter how complex, is accurate enough to be all that useful. This is just a starting point. The sooner you start, the sooner you can refine.
A common beginner mistake is to fail to gain weight, assume your initial calorie estimates are off, and then go back to the drawing board, redoing those initial calculations. That’s the wrong approach. If you aren’t gaining weight, you aren’t eating enough calories. Add more calories to your diet plan. It’s that simple.
Whatever method you choose, the most important thing is to adjust your daily calorie intake based on how much weight you gain each week. If you’re not gaining weight, add 200–300 calories. If you’re gaining weight too fast, remove 200–300 calories.
For example, if you weigh 150 pounds and start by eating 3,000 calories per day, perhaps your Hellish metabolism is not so easily overcome, and you find yourself failing to gain weight. That isn’t a flaw of the formula, it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to stay skinny forever, and it doesn’t mean you need to retreat back to calorie formulas. March onwards. Add more calories.
There’s a bit of nuance here, though. Our weight fluctuates quite a lot. If you weigh yourself before breakfast, you might be a few pounds lighter than you are after dinner. So there are a few tricks to tracking your weight gain:
The food we eat contains nutrients. Some nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals, don’t contain energy. These are called micronutrients. Other nutrients, namely protein, carbs, fat, and alcohol, do contain energy. These are called macronutrients—macros.
For the purposes of building muscle, we care about three macros:
You don’t need to know any deep science about the macros, but it does help to know what we use them for. The ones we’re most interested in for building muscle are protein (building blocks) and carbs (energy), but that doesn’t mean fat isn’t important, too.
When you’re trying to build muscle, a good rule of thumb is to aim for roughly 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, eat around 150 grams of protein each day. Nutrition labels tend to make this easy, listing how much protein there is in each serving. Otherwise, you can weigh your food on a food scale and look up how much protein it contains.
1 gram/pound/day is a rough goal, though. The latest research shows eating as little as 0.7 grams of protein per pound bodyweight per day works just as well (2019 systematic review). Similarly, Jose Antonio, Ph.D., has been doing research for years showing extremely high-protein diets are neither better nor worse for building muscle than moderate-protein diets (study, study, study).
Consuming 5.5 times the recommended daily allowance of protein has no effect on body composition in resistance-trained individuals
Jose Antonio, PhD
What seems to be more important is spreading your protein intake out over the day, eating several meals with protein in them. If you can eat 3–6 meals per day, all of them containing at least 20 grams of protein, then you should be able to build muscle faster and more leanly (2019 systematic review).
As a result, intermittent fasting isn’t recommended while bulking. If you prefer it, it can indeed work, but a more even protein distribution tends to be even better. Plus, intermittent fasting reduces our appetite, making it harder to eat enough calories to gain weight. That’s not a problem for everyone, but it’s often a problem for naturally skinny guys (like us).
The next question is what types of protein to eat. Fortunately, it doesn’t really seem to matter. We can get our protein from seafood, poultry, red meat, eggs, and dairy. But as we explain in our article on vegan bulking diets, plant-based sources of protein are just as good. Nuts, legumes, grains, seeds, peas, and soy are all great sources of protein, too. The real trick is to make sure you’re getting enough protein.
Vegan and omnivorous diets build muscle equally well (2021 Hevia-Larraín study).So to summarize, a good default is to aim for 1 gram of protein per pound bodyweight per day, to spread it out over 3+ meals, and to make sure each meal contains at least 20–30 grams. For instance, maybe you have 3 eggs with breakfast, some nuts as a midmorning snack, a bowl of lentil stew for lunch, some chicken with dinner, and a little cottage cheese before bed.
Dietary fat isn’t that important for building muscle. Not that you shouldn’t eat any, just that you’re probably eating enough already. When you get into a bulking diet, you probably won’t need to add more intentionally.
When bulking, you want something like 0.25–0.75 grams of fat per pound body weight per day, which usually works out to around 20–30% of your total calories. If you aren’t tracking your macros, that’s okay. There’s no need for great precision here.
The thing to keep in mind is how dense fat is. It contains over twice as many calories per gram as protein and carbs. It’s common for people to start tracking their calories only to realize they’re getting 50%+ of their calories from fat. That’s not the end of the world, but if you want to make the fastest and leanest muscle gains possible, it’s probably better to get the bulk of your surplus calories from carbs instead.
As for where to get your fat, try to choose unprocessed foods. Try to get a mix of saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. Think about fats like extra-virgin olive oil, avocados, nuts, cheese, yogurt, kefir, eggs, and fatty seafood (such as salmon).
Carbs have somehow become controversial. Perhaps they’re simply too good at helping people gain weight and so are being blamed for the obesity epidemic. But as skinny guys, this is not our issue. In fact, ours is the opposite: we tend to have a hard time gaining weight.
Indeed, when researchers remove carbs from people’s diets, they often have a hard time gaining weight and muscle. For people who are overweight, that’s great. For skinny guys trying to bulk up, though, limiting carbs only makes our quest all the harder.
For instance, if we look at a 2021 paper by Paoli et al, we see restricting carbohydrates can cut our rate of muscle growth in four:
Carbs allow us to gain weight and build muscle much faster.There’s some nuance to this study, as we explain in our article on ketogenic diets. The low-carb group had a harder time eating enough calories to gain weight, thrashing their ability to build muscle. Plus, limiting their carb intake caused them to store less glycogen in their muscles, reducing their muscular endurance and making them appear less muscular. That may have hidden the muscle they gained.
This is all to say that if we look at the research, it’s clear carbs are a valuable ally for people who are trying to bulk up (study). That’s why conventional bodybuilding diets, bulking diets, and athlete diets recommend getting around half of your calories from carbs:
Now, it’s worth pointing out that these recommendations include wide ranges, and that this is a fairly minor factor to begin with. If you get a third of your calories from carbs instead of half, you probably won’t notice the difference. As a result, there’s no need to track your carb intake. Eating plenty of carbs is great, but there’s no dire need to be precise.
I built most of my muscle out of habanero chili. Every Sunday I’d cook up a giant pot, put a few servings in the fridge, and put a few more servings in the freezer. Whenever I wanted a good bulking meal, all I had to do was reheat it in the microwave and toss a bit of pre-ground cheese or cilantro on top. I am a lazy efficient person, and so this often meant I was eating chili at least twice per day.
Around that time, one of my good friends, Payam, asked me for help losing weight. Chili is high in protein and convenient to make, so I suggested he give it a try, just using smaller portions than I was eating. He lost 20 pounds in a single month. Seeing his success, another of my close friends, Willem, tried my chili diet. He got similar results.
This was also the diet Jared used to gain over 27 pounds during a 4-month bulk. We were roommates at the time, I relied heavily on chili, so we would cook it together on Sundays and then eat it together during the week while watching half-episodes of The Shield.
Now, it might sound like I’m trying to sell you on a chili diet. I’m not. Our Bony to Beastly Bulking Program includes a full recipe book, and you’ll see my chili recipe featured proudly, in all of its deserved glory. But the truth is, it’s just a convenient meal that happens to be a good source of protein and carbs. The chili is predominantly made from lean ground meat, which is high in protein, and beans, which is a great source of fibre and carbs (along with some extra protein). Chili is magic, but so are many other meals.
Shane at 130 pounds (left) and 195 pounds (right).A few years later, I got married and moved to the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, the diet here is rather different. Habanero peppers are even more prominent, and I also eat more seafood, beans, and rice (and way more tacos). There’s also far more fresh fruit: mangos, watermelons, bananas, and passion fruit. And that’s totally cool. It took my digestive system a few weeks to adjust to the new foods, but after that, it didn’t affect my results at all. This totally different diet helped me accomplish my lifetime goal of benching 315 pounds.
Whatever is available where you live, whatever you can afford, whatever you like—that’s what you should build your bulking diet out of. Here are some examples:
These are all perfect bulking dinners. You can eat whichever you prefer, cycle through all of them, or eat something totally different. The same goes for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. One person might blend up a fruit smoothie with protein, another person might prefer oatmeal, and a third might prefer eggs. All of those are great options. All are made mostly out of whole foods, all contain enough protein, and all will build the same amount of muscle.
So what I’d encourage you to do is think about meals made out of mostly whole foods, that you love, that you can passionately bulk up with. Bulking means eating a lot of food. Better if you love that food.
There’s a war raging on in the bodybuilding world, a war that has lasted for several decades. One side fights for clean eating, the other for If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM). And that’s just the bodybuilders! If you turn to the world of strength training, you’ll see a variety of other diets, ranging from keto to paleo to carnivore to dirty bulking.
Most of these diets have an advantage or two, but the best way to get the benefits of all of them without any of the needless restrictions or potential downsides is simply to focus on eating whole foods. A good rule of thumb is to get around 80% of your calories from whole foods.
In practice, that usually means eating a good breakfast but letting yourself have some cream and sugar in your coffee (if you want). Then, eat a good lunch, but don’t worry about how many calories are in the sauces you like. Then, finish the day with a good dinner, but feel free to have some dessert. If you want to eat at a restaurant a few times per week, order meals that are somewhat balanced.
When planning a bulking diet for the very first time, a lot of guys try to get all of their carbs from “healthy” sources, such as veggies, whole grains, legumes, and oats. Don’t get me wrong, those are all fantastic foods. But when eaten in large quantities, they can be somewhat difficult to digest, often causing stomach pain, bloating, and bulking miasmas.
There’s a reason that bodybuilders are famous for eating large servings of white rice: it’s easier to digest! Plus, there’s no real downside. Simple starches are perfectly good for building muscle quickly and leanly. The trick is to add that white rice into a diet that includes other sources of fibre, vitamins, and minerals.
That’s why the classic bodybuilder meal is chicken, broccoli, and rice. The chicken and broccoli are rich in protein, micronutrients, and fibre (especially if you drizzle some olive oil on that broccoli). And then the rice adds in a ton of easily digestible carbs.
So what you want is balance. Include whole grains, legumes, fruits, and veggies in your diet, but when you’re struggling to add more carbs, consider adding simple carbs: rice, bananas, bread, fruit juice—that kind of thing. This is especially important if you’re eating carbs before heading to the gym. You’ll want to eat something easier to digest so your stomach doesn’t bother you while working out.
You don’t need to take any supplements while bulking, and their benefits are often exaggerated. Pre-workout supplements are ubiquitous among lifters despite the fact they offer little more than a strong cup of black coffee. Still, there are a few supplements that can indeed come in handy.
There are other supplements that may yield modest benefits, such as citrulline malate, beta-alanine, and ashwagandha (which I take), but those are more for supplement enthusiasts than for any noticeable improvements in muscle growth.
Okay, so we’ve covered a bunch of dietary principles and given some examples. But what foods should you actually be eating? What are some examples to get your salivary juices flowing?
When bulking, the main challenge for most naturally skinny people is eating enough calories to gain weight. To make bulking easier, we want to lean into foods that are nutritious, energy-dense, and easy to digest. We have a full article on how to eat more calories and another about the best bulking foods, but here’s a list of examples to get you started:
Get three sample bulking recipes in a downloadable PDF file. Get the full explanation, ingredient list, macros, and steps to follow.
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Here are the most important factors when building your bulking diet plan. If you can combine this diet with a good hypertrophy training workout program, you’ll build muscle—guaranteed.
If you can follow these diet principles, rest assured that your diet will never hold back your muscle growth. The other major factors to look into are your workout program (the most important factor), avoiding the vices you already know are holding you back, and getting enough good sleep each night.
If you want us to walk you through the entire bulking process, check out our Bony to Beastly (men’s) program or Bony to Bombshell (women’s) program. They include a 5-month customizable workout routine, a full bulking diet plan, a bulking recipe book, a deep dive into lifestyle and fitness, and coaching from us.
Much of what I will share with you is specific to me, while other parts of it will hopefully be more general. Keep in mind that everybody is different, and what worked (and didn’t) work for me might not work (or might actually work) for you. The only way to really figure out what works for you is to stick with a process for an extended period of time, be consistent with practices, and objectively measure your results. Only then can you really know if the process was or was not effective for you.
I’m used to eating what I need. I have no desire to stuff my face, and I also hate wasting things. However, in order to be successful with bulking, I soon realized that I would have to be quite serious about my eating, eat more than I thought I needed, and eat more than I wanted to.
When done right, yoga can be an incredible way to build more muscle mass. Increasing your mobility, improving muscle activation, facilitating faster muscle recovery, and strengthening auxiliary muscles is extremely important for strength training. But the best workout to build muscle is the strength training itself. During the bulking process, I made a special effort to avoid unnecessary yoga workouts and conserve my energy my weight lifting or HIIT workouts. Not to mention, I’ve been doing yoga almost daily for 5+ years. Volume is one way to grow muscle, but intensity and variety are the other two ways, so it was a good idea for me to put all of that yoga to use with the weights, and I’m glad I did!
The yoga training I had done leading up to weight training had prepared me very well to get serious about weight training – way more ready than I was when I was in high school throwing weights around, with little to no idea about how to lift properly.
The 6% body fat percentage revealed by the InBody assessment probably would have been around 6% even if I had done the test 3 years before April 2018. My body had been in that state of deprived calories for at least 2 years. I never counted calories (and still don’t), but I’m certain that I was well below the amount of calories I needed to accomplish the physical tasks I was putting my body through on a daily basis.
It’s hard to see change over time, but the lack of strength work was apparent when I went to a group workout class in March 2018 and got my ass handed to me by plenty of guys who were probably in “worse” shape than I was.
I was also surprised to hear that if I wasn’t waking up every day with an erection, that this was an indication that something was wrong with my hormones. The good news is that these issues of strength, endurance, and sex drive were all successfully addressed after ~3 months of hard work in the bulking process.
The “weigh-in”, or InBody assessment, at the end of April that prompted the beginning of my bulking process revealed that my total weight was 163 pounds, and my fat percentage was about 5.6%. Here are some other measurements and self-assessments that I would use to gauge the effectiveness of my bulking:
Weight & Body Composition
Before:163 lbs, 5.6% body fat
Muscle Tone
Before:Very toned, sharply defined muscles.
Overall Power
Before:Great, but only in very short bursts. Fatigued very quickly.
Sleep
Before:No issues, 7.5-9 hours per night, along with naps 60-90 minute naps 1-2x per week.
Sex Drive
Before:Relatively average.
Endurance
Before:Very little sustained strength for anything more demanding than yoga. Muscles felt drained, and I felt almost immediately drained in cardio or HIIT workouts.
Feeling hungry
Before:Would usually fast as long as possible until I could not wait any longer to eat.
Pre-Bulk: Photos taken in June right at the beginning of the bulk.
Hearing about the potentially lowered hormonal levels was the final straw, but I had not been feeling like myself for years.
I was always the guy who could push himself to beat out the competition. I might not be the strongest or the biggest, but I would outwork the competition. I’m an athlete. I played lacrosse in college, and I continue to play as competitively as I can in a men’s league now. But I had lost a significant amount of muscle since college, and I really wanted to get back to feeling (and looking) the way I personally viewed myself.
Deep down I always knew that this leaner me wasn’t the real me, and in my conversations as well as to myself I joked about how much muscle I had lost, but I also fully expected to one day return to regular weight lifting and get back to where I used to be – and hopefully be even stronger, now that, thanks to my mobility practice and improved muscle activation, I had corrected most of the imbalances and mobility deficits that held me back from my maximum strength potential.
I guess the final piece of the puzzle driving me to want to be serious about this was the fact that I am a huge advocate for integrating yoga with weight training. If I couldn’t stick out a program myself, how could I recommend it to other people without being a hypocrite? I decided that I needed to set my ego aside, be willing to change my lifestyle, get the information I needed, do the hard work, and commit to the process.
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The first part of this process involved learning what I needed to do to actually add on weight. There’s a great analogy when it comes to energy that says something along the lines of, “in order to increase your energy, you have to figure out where your energy is leaking first”. Applying this concept to bulking, I first needed to figure out what I was doing incorrectly to make sure that my efforts to gain weight would be as significant as possible. In other words, I needed to stop doing many of the things that were keeping me lean.
Everybody was talking about the benefits of low-carb diets, and I just assumed that a low-carb diet was what I should be doing as well. But in my case, as an active guy with very high base metabolic rate working to improve fitness performance, that was exactly what I should not be doing. Not to mention, the majority of people who buy into the fitness industry are looking for solutions to LOSE weight – not gain it, and I stupidly assumed that if I just ate more vegetables and more fat that it would magically make up for the carbs I was missing out on. Wrong.
For the last 4 years, I traded my 2-3 weekly resistance training workouts for daily yoga workouts, along with inconsistently doing bodyweight workouts that mainly focused on pull-ups. This, combined with the low-carb diet, my fast metabolism, and the multiple yoga workouts I was doing on a daily basis, resulted in a much leaner version of myself.
One of the issues I was having with weight training was going over the top with my lifting sessions. On squat day, I would end up doing 50, 60, 70+ reps of weighted back squats. Deadlifting days involved 3 x 10 as a warm-up, followed by hip thrusters when I couldn’t deadlift another pound.
My recovery times were insane – it took me 4, 5, and sometimes even 7 days to fully recover from my workouts. I assumed that this was due to my low-carb diet, but this soreness persisted even after my body fat percentage returned to the healthier 8-10% realm.
What I learned from this is that most of the workouts you see posted online, or even those written in books by fitness “experts” aren’t appropriate for you. (I even know of one guy in particular who insists that overtraining is not a thing, as long as you spend enough time on recovery.) The issue with this is we kill ourselves in our workouts, but then we don’t give ourselves enough time to recover.
We try to be smart and listen to our bodies, but then play head games with ourselves in which we seesaw between “I really should let my body recover” and “I need to push myself through this next workout”. In reality, we should be doing workouts that are appropriate for our fitness level, and if we feel sore for 3 or more days after a workout, we probably shouldn’t be doing that workout on a regular basis.
Now that I had the information I needed, I was ready to put it into practice. Of course, the learning what I needed to do was the easiest part, and it was now time to put in the actual hard work – so I could get the results. There are three separate areas of fitness that I specifically addressed in order to make the bulking process a success. But I also did it in a way that did not require me to drastically change my lifestyle or decrease my quality of life.
I mentioned earlier that eating was one of the surprisingly most difficult aspects of the bulking process. Eating became like workouts in a sense that I had push myself beyond what was comfortable. Let’s get into specifics.
I started every morning with a large breakfast, which I usually had to force myself into finishing. It was no different than finishing another set of exercises, even when I felt my body had certainly had enough. The difficulty here was that this process added on about 30 minutes to my morning routine. I could no longer just make my smoothie, brew my coffee, and then take it in a to-go cup to work. I had to cook eggs, mix in some carbs, and sit down to slowly chew my food before going to work.
I started eating carbs again for the first time in YEARS. I went from having carbs once per week to having calorically-dense carbs with EVERY meal. Pasta, tortillas, rice, and beans were back on the menu for the first time since 2014. Sweet potatoes, which had already been a part of my diet, now seemed like a light snack compared to these heavier carbs.
I know all about strategies to decrease appetite, but didn’t know much when it came to the opposite. I now had to adopt practices to make myself want to eat more, instead of wanting to eat less. There was only one thing I already did to increase my appetite, and that was preparing food. (I prepare most of my own meals, and this process helps you get hungry.) But I also had to start doing way more than just that. The 3 main practices included:
It wasn’t that I was never hungry. I’m still human. I get hungry. The point is that if I ever was hungry, I needed to get myself to my kitchen, because I should be eating. I now had this weird, inverse relationship with food. Instead of being hungry and stoically ignoring it, hunger was something that had to be immediately taken care of. It got to the point where I felt guilty about missing a single meal, and for the sake of consistency and my desire to put on additional weight, I very rarely missed out on getting myself some food when I felt hungry. This was challenging, because there was no immediate feedback to tell me that eating that extra meal was a good thing. If I missed it, the event passed without anything happening. The only indication that any of that eating paid off was when I weighed myself once per month at my InBody assessment.
This was one aspect of dieting that was also hard to get used to. I was used to cooking a large amount of vegetables with most meals, and then stuffing myself with as many veggies as possible to get full. Now, however, I needed to be sure to leave as much room in my stomach as possible for the higher-calorie carbs, like beans, pasta, and rice. I did my best to get a healthy portion of vegetables after stuffing myself with carbs, but I often got to the point where there was no room.
Thankfully, I was still getting a huge portion of greens in my daily smoothies, but without this, I think I would have been concerned about a veggie deficit. Avocado consumption took an unfortunate nosedive, but I’m hoping it was somewhat made up for by increased intake of wild-caught salmon, grass-fed butter, and MCT oil.
Despite eating way more food (and many many more carbs) than I was used to, there were a few things I could have done to increase my carb intake, but did not do, mostly because I just didn’t feel good doing them. Eating breads and sweets fell into this category. I knew that sugar would help me bulk up, but I don’t like the way sweets feel in my stomach, or the sugar rush I get after I eat them. Breads continue to feel awful in my stomach. Tortillas, beans, and pasta seem to be the best carbs for my digestive system, so this is what I tended to stick with.
In order to add more weight and change my body significantly, I had to change my workout routine significantly. This didn’t mean working out for a longer period of time – it mainly meant changing my workout routine to revolve around my central goal of adding muscle and weight. And that meant weight training.
In order to build significant muscle, I needed to do more than bodyweight exercise. My goal with weight training would be to stress my muscles with heavier weights and time under tension, rather than yoga postures. My workouts typically used 3-4 sets per exercise, and no more than 10 reps per set. I also emphasized the eccentric part of the lift (coming down) for at least 3 seconds, usually 1-2 seconds for the concentric part of the lift (going back up).
Note: Free weights are by far the best way to build muscle. I do, however, need to mention that if you do not have a solid foundation of fitness upon which you can lift and avoid injury that you need to address some other aspects of fitness first, namely:
To improve for weight lifting, my yoga workouts shifted to focus more on improving muscle activation with shorter holds, rather than holding for 1-2 minutes (as I was used to). The goal of these muscle-activation focused yoga workouts was to develop awareness in the muscle, but not to exhaust the muscle. It was kind of like saying, “Okay… let’s get this thing turned on. You feel it? Okay, cool. Now relax.” So instead of holding a single-leg bridge for 60-90 seconds, I would hold it for 15-20 seconds. This helped me build muscle awareness and improve movement patterns for when I lifted, but did not exhaust my muscles in a way that took away from energy for resistance training workouts.
I needed to do less of the workouts that would take away from my goal of building muscle. This meant doing less strength-focused yoga to build endurance, and instead focusing on yoga for muscle recovery and injury-prevention from overtraining. So instead of doing Warrior 2’s, updogs, and lots of balancing postures, I was doing lizard, pigeon, triangle, and other more restorative postures to help with muscle recovery. The sessions also didn’t last as long. Instead of 40-60 minutes, I would spend 10-30 minutes on recovery-focused yoga & stretching.
I also started to do more bootcamp style HIIT workouts. These are great for getting your heart rate up while also building strength. Although this was minimal (I probably did this once every other week on average), I did notice that when I was doing HIIT workouts consistently that my body fat percentage was 1-2% lower than when I was not.
Keeping in line with my general theme of training, I shifted my mobility focus away from improving my overall mobility levels, and instead used mobility work to prepare my body for lifting, or to help it recover from resistance training workouts. This meant doing light self-myofascial release (SMR) work on the major muscle groups I would be using the day before a workout. If my muscles were tight, it meant using SMR techniques to lightly release restricted or tight muscle tissue, to speed up recovery.
I already get really good sleep, but adding on muscle is quite the process for your body to handle. During this bulking period, my body demanded more sleep than I was used to.
Here’s what I ended up doing:
A full sleep cycle lasts 90 minutes, and I noticed that my body was not waking up at the time I was used to. If I did wake up earlier, I would end up needing a nap later in the afternoon. My average sleep increased from 7.5 – 8 hours per night to 9 – 9.5 hours per night. I recognize that this is not feasible for many people, but I know intuitively that this was a huge factor in what allowed to grow as much as I did in a relatively short period of time.
When I wasn’t getting enough sleep at night, I needed to make it up during the day. Personally, coffee won’t keep me awake if I have some in the afternoon. It just gives me a headache. So rather than try to stay awake, I did my best to get everything done before 3 PM, and then I would take a 30-90 minute nap in the late afternoon. As long as I woke myself up when my body told me that I had had enough extra sleep, I wasn’t groggy in the evening, and it did not negatively impact my sleep during the night. (This practice is somewhat of a developed skill though, and it’s really important to get up from your nap when you start to regain your energy and wake up a little bit, as opposed to shifting to a more comfortable position and then going back to sleep again. This usually leads to a lethargic, grumpy evening, a poor night of sleep, and a crappy next day.)
You have to make an effort to better sleep. It usually doesn’t just happen naturally – even if you’re working yourself to exhaustion during the day. It’s important to help your body wind down with the necessary practices on a consistent, near-nightly basis. Some practices I utilized for this include:
Overall, I feel much better as a result of going through this bulking process, and getting my body fat percentage up to a healthier level. I feel better throughout the day, I don’t feel voraciously hungry anymore on a regular basis, my workouts are WAY better, and I’m finally sticking to my planned workout schedule for the first time in years.
I have lost muscle tone (if you look at my before photos, you’ll notice that my muscles were much more defined, with sharper, clearer angles, and straighter lines) but the increased muscle size and improvements in actual muscular performance have more than made up for this. My thighs, hips, torso, and shoulders are the most noticeable areas of growth, and even though the InBody assessment sometimes does not reflect the growth in statistics, the growth is certainly visible.
At my heaviest, I reached about 183 pounds, with the 20 lb difference mostly being made up of stored fat. At this point, my jeans were getting a bit too tight, and my waist was larger than I wanted it to be. (However, when your total body fat percentage is at 5.6%, adding fat is definitely a good thing.) I’m now hovering around 178-180 pounds, and this is where I plan on staying. It’s actually about 10 pounds heavier than I was when I was in college, but most of that difference is accounted for in the shift from upper-body focused exercises (college meathead in the weight room) to more functional lower-body focused exercises (yoga combined with compound lower-body lifts like squat & deadlift).
Performance is better in almost every regard as a result of the bulking process. Even my overall flexibility & mobility levels have improved. Before the bulking process, my body was starving for fuel at the very low body percentage I was hovering around, and even though it took quite a long time to add on weight and increase my body fat percentage, the extra available energy I now had was very very noticeable. I was also lifting more, recovering more quickly, and taking fewer naps.
Here’s the before, during & after in terms of the criteria I mentioned at the beginning of this blog:
Weight & Body Composition
Before:163 lbs, 5.6% body fat
During:Peaked at 183 lbs, 11% body fat
After:~176-180 lbs, 9-10% body fat
Muscle Tone
Before:Very toned, sharply defined muscles.
During:Less defined, but significantly larger & bulkier.
After:Larger, still very defined. More muscle in hips, shoulders & arms in particular.
Overall Power
Before:Great, but only in very short bursts. Fatigued very quickly.
During:Improved, and also had significantly more endurance.
After:Consistently higher.
Sleep
Before:No issues, 7.5-9 hours per night, along with naps 60-90 minute naps 1-2x per week.
During:Required more sleep, consistently requiring 9 hours sleep per night, and 60-90 minute naps 2-3x per week.
After:No longer napping, sleeping 7.5 to 8 hours per night.
Sex Drive
Before:Relatively average.
During:Significantly higher.
After:High.
Endurance
Before:Very little sustained strength for anything more demanding than yoga. Muscles felt drained, and I felt almost immediately drained in cardio or HIIT workouts.
During:I got out of breath still, but at least I can continue my workout without feeling total exhaustion, as I did before.
After:Consistently high.
Feeling hungry
Before:Would usually fast as long as possible until I could not wait any longer to eat.
During:As soon as I started to feel a little hungry, made plans to get food in the immediate future.
After:Eating comfortably.
From this process, I learned a lot about updating my wellness routine to reflect my personal fitness goals. I also realized that there are several things that I did during the bulking process that I have no interest in making part of my routine.
So long as I am filming workouts, doing 1-on-1 in person lessons, and working out on my own, I will not go back to a low-carb diet. Due to my higher level of muscle mass, the fuel required for my high activity level, and the fact that I’m not trying to lose weight, there is absolutely zero reason for me cut back on my eating. As long as I am performance-focused and satisfied with my aesthetics, I plan on keeping carb consumption a regular part of my eating habits.
Healthy Eating Tip: Have Healthy Carbs Ready at All Times
This is entirely manageable, important for my aesthetic goals, my performance goals, and for my overall health and wellness. I was not able to feel, perform, and move the way that I wanted to when I was not lifting regularly, and now that I am, I feel much better.
Heart health is important. Weight lifting and yoga do address cardio to some extent, but they don’t challenge your cardiovascular abilities in the same way that a HIIT workout does. I also plan on doing more swimming, since this is a challenging activity that is great for cardio, but has virtually no impact on the joints. It also gets me into a nearby cold water creek for some cold water therapy!
Not that I wasn’t doing this before, but this remains very important to my overall, and is something I’ll continue to do. Click here to revisit my healthy sleep habits above.
I’ll eat as much as I want to, and nothing more. I don’t like the feeling of pigging out for a number of reasons (one of them out of how I physically feel, the other due to a feeling of overusing resources), and I maintain higher energy levels more consistently when I’m not.
Now that I’m back to a more balanced workout routine, I’m able to push myself in a variety of disciplines. While bulking, I had to save my energy for resistance training, but since I’m not trying to gain a relatively large amount of weight in a short period of time, that’s no longer important to my training routine.
While bulking, I gave myself a deliberately high training load. This is fine to do for short stretches of time, but isn’t really sustainable for more than 3 months at a time. I may have another stretch in the next few months where I turn up my training volume in order to address a specific goal, but for now I plan on listening more to my body and following a training program that is more sustainable in a long-term sense.
This is a pretty comprehensive blog, but there I have a few final points to make that don’t really fit into the other categories. I think that these will help you decide whether or not bulking is appropriate for you, and help you get started if you decide it’s what you want to do.
I think this is the most important part of being successful with any fitness goal. Before you make a plan and put in all the work, you should figure out why you want to accomplish a particular goal in the first place. This is important because it gives you motivation to stick to the plan – especially when you’re tired or want to revert to old habits. It makes it easier to get the results you’re working towards. For me, I wasn’t happy with the way my performed or looked. I just didn’t feel like myself, and I wasn’t pushing myself enough. Remembering that when I thought I was too busy for a workout or didn’t have the energy gave me the motivational boost I needed to do whatever I needed to do at that particular time.
Most of what we do during the day is out of habit. We’re basically on auto-pilot. It’s challenging to do get into a new routine because it takes more conscious effort, and that isn’t easy. So if you plan on making a change – no matter how small – to your fitness routine, expect that it’s going to take some effort on your part. The greater the change, the greater the required effort.
There are days when you’re not going to want to do what’s required, but you need to stick to the plan. This means not skipping breakfast, not skipping your workouts, and making sleep a priority. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to get results.
If you really want to see significant results, you have to make this a priority. That means that you make bulking more important than other things. You take the time to make sure you have food always available, clear your schedule so you have time for your workouts, and pass up on social activities during the week so you can do what you need to do. I’m not saying stop living your life altogether, but you’re going to have to make some sacrifices for a finite period.
I’m saying this again to emphasize its importance. Lifting weights and changing up my workouts was easy, but eating until I felt stuffed on a daily basis over and over again was challenging. It was no different from pushing yourself in a workout, except most people aren’t used to pushing themselves at the table. Just be prepared to eat a lot, and to make having readily available food an important part of your routine.
That’s everything I have to share. I sincerely hope you found this blog helpful. I put this together in the hopes that you would be able to learn from my experiences, and start the process of bulking yourself if you think it’s an appropriate goal for you.
Eating for Your Fitness Goals
Play VideoBulking: Build Muscle With Exercise And Nutrition
Play VideoNutrition & Exercise Tips to Effectively Build Muscle
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Dean Pohlman is an E-RYT 200 certified yoga instructor and the founder of Man Flow Yoga. Dean is widely considered to be an authority on Yoga for Men. His workouts and programs have been used by professional and collegiate athletes, athletic trainers, as well as Physical Therapists in Texas.
Dean is a successful published Author through DK Publishing (Yoga Fitness for Men), selling 25,000 copies worldwide, in addition to being a co-producer of the Body by Yoga DVD Series, which has sold over 40,000 copies on Amazon since its release in 2016.
Man Flow Yoga has been featured in Muscle & Fitness Magazine, Men’s Health, The Chicago Sun, New York Magazine, and many more major news media outlets.
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