It’ll come as no surprise that bulk yourself up, you have to have an extra intake of food. It’s just physics, chemistry and biology all rolled into one; you can’t make something bigger if you don’t add to it. When you’re a parent, it’s nice to be able to put a focus back into yourself when the time is right. To be able to get to the point where you are adding muscle, you need to ensure that you are adding a significant amount of calories to support your muscle growth. There is a fine line between eating too much and eating too little when you are are bulking up, and if you’re consuming less than your recommended intake, you could actually be depriving the muscle of the nutrients it needs and see it wasting away rather than getting bigger – no matter how hard you are training. But just how much do you need to eat to gain… and is it always the answer when you reach a certain point?
What To Eat?
Just because you’re having to eat more food, meaning more calories, this doesn’t mean that you have free rein to eat whatever you want to. Opting towards junk under the false presumption that anything and everything counts in terms of energy is not the way forward.
However, it’s the same with any food that you are eating whilst trying to bulk; there’s truth in the saying that there can be too much of a good thing. The one nutrient that everybody thinks of when putting on muscle is protein, but there’s only so much that you can eat without it turning into fat. There is a process that the protein has to go to be able to help your muscle build up, but when it’s there in excess i.e. not needed for the process, it turns into fat stores instead.
Who To Turn To?
If you are looking for more information on bulking up, what powders to use, how to get to where you need to be in a certain amount of time and any other question, you’re best heading to the internet and asking the professionals. There are writers such as Erny Piebst who can provide blog posts on everything that you need to know about the process on the whole, plus a lot more too. Obviously with bulking comes the need to exercise – in this case, mainly weightlifting – and so there needs to be research put into this too and how you can effectively combine the two to give you the results that you are aiming for.
What Comes After Bulking?
With bulking comes shredding. It’s pretty much a process of one after the other. When you bulk up, you need to be able to shred off the fat layers that you have built in order to see the muscle that’s underneath – else what’s the point?
There’s quite a bit of science behind it, but as long as you follow the rules that have been laid down and tested for years, you are bound to be doing the right thing. The results will follow pretty quickly after this – at least, relatively quickly. Nothing will come overnight but changes will start to show in a couple of weeks rather than having to wait years for a slow reveal.
How Long Should I Be Doing This For?
This is open to debate and differs from person to person, but the average is around two months of maintaining and building up the extra weight before going through the cutting process (cutting and shredding are the same thing – it’s up to you which word you want to use). There is a danger of going on too long with it, where you risk really turning all of your calories straight into fat which will take longer to work off and burn into muscle mass.
You don’t have to go overboard with your training, which could also be detrimental to your progress; slow and steady wins the race with this trend. There are those who opt to go for a clean bulk, which is slightly slower and sees results coming on a lot later than if you were to pile on for a quick bulk and cut.
It all depends on how long it takes your body to adapt to what you want it to do; it will be stored in its memory the more you do it, and you should start to see faster results each time you go through the process. Make sure you give yourself a break between phases and take it at your own pace.