If your goal is to improve your body composition over time, at some point you will have to enter a gaining phase. This means, you will be eating more than your body burns and will be focussing on getting in the gym. While this sounds simple on paper, there are tons of things that can go wrong while executing this. From faulty programming to eating whatever comes in your sight, there are multiple ways how an uninformed bulker can derail himself from the path to his goal physique.

The issue stems from the fact that the bodybuilding culture in the early 90s and 2000s promoted bulking as a 'go big or go home' sort of approach. In fact, there are still a lot of people who believe in the 'eat big to get big’ mentality, and while the so-called ‘hard-gainers’ can get away with this mindset, the majority of us mortals with average metabolisms and a not so active lifestyle will just get fat following this approach. Hence, to effectively change your body composition over time, you will have to make sure that you are not eating literally everything you see.

Calories for bulking

Based on your level of experience, you can sort of gauge the amount of muscle you can put on in a given year. While this will not be anything close to accurate, it can give you an idea of how much you're supposed to eat to build muscle. Overeating above what’s required will just result in fat gain. If we could all build muscle by just stuffing down more and more calories, we would all be bodybuilders by now.

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So how do you go about setting your calories for bulking? Let's take an example of someone who wishes to put on a modest 2 pounds a month. This would require this individual to eat at a surplus of roughly 250 calories a day. Now, 250 calories over your maintenance isn’t a large amount of food. As a matter of fact, a single slice of pizza could fulfill this requirement and go a little over what’s needed. Hence, tracking your nutrition is just as important in a gaining phase as it is in a cutting phase.

The simplest way to approximate your maintenance calories is by multiplying your body weight in pounds times 15. For an individual weighing 75 kgs, the resulting number would be 75 x 2.2 x 15 = 2475 calories.

Adding around 250 calories on top of this number would bring us to 2725 calories a day which can be rounded to 2750.

You don't need to be exact in these calculations as they aren’t going to give you an accurate number anyway. This is just to give you a starting point.

This individual can consume 2750 calories a day for a month and see the amount of weight he gains. If he hasn’t gained enough weight, he can simply increase his calories the following month. If he gained a little more than he should have, he can reduce his calories the following month. Keep in mind that the amount of weight he wishes to gain should be congruent with the amount of muscle he can put on based on his level of experience.

Obviously, you can rearrange these calories in any way you like. You can cycle your calories and keep higher calories on training days and lower calories on rest days. It is completely up to you. Just make sure that you average at a 250-ish calorie surplus per day. If you wish to be a little more relaxed and don't mind a little more fat gain, you can push this surplus up to 500 calories over maintenance a day.

Macros for bulking

While bulking, hitting your macros is easier as you have a higher number of calories in total to play with.

For protein, aim at getting 0.8-1 gram per pound of body weight.

As for fats, you can eat a moderate fat diet with around 25-30% of your calories coming from fats.

The rest of your calories can be filled with carbs which will help you fuel your training and make progress.

Training for bulking

As a natural, training while bulking will not be very different from training while cutting. To make progress, you still have to follow the principles of progressive overload. This means you will still be lifting with the goal of getting stronger in the gym. The only difference will be that you will be able to make faster progress compared to when cutting because of the surplus of energy in your body. As long as you increase volume over time, whether it is in terms of weight lifted, or in terms of the number of sets and reps, you will make progress, given that your nutrition is right.

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Cardio for bulking

Don’t stop cardio while you're bulking. Reduce the amount of cardio but make sure you keep it in while bulking. It can be as simple as going for a 30-minute walk on rest days. If you wish to do more intense cardio, make sure you space it out from your weight training sessions. Cardio is highly beneficial for health and you have absolutely no reason to skip it. You’re not a pro-bodybuilder and cardio won’t have any negative effects on your physique if done correctly. Do not use bulking as an excuse to get lazy.

Conclusion

As you see, bulking isn’t as hard as it seems. As long as you don't go overboard and stay consistent with the process, you will make progress. Make sure to keep track of your nutrition and get stronger in the gym. As a natural, this is the easiest way to build muscle over time. It is a very slow process and requires a lot more patience than we think. The more effort we put in our nutrition, the longer we can stay in the gaining phase, helping us achieve better results than if we were to just bulk and cut every few months.

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