There's No 'Perfect Method'...
There are a lot of misconceptions about how best to start a bulk. While there’s no ‘perfect method’, these 5 tips will ensure you have a great starting point without shooting yourself in the foot.
There are, of course, other factors to consider like sleep and recovery, but those are blog posts for another time. For now, let’s get stuck in.
Tip 1: Establish your starting calories & protein (maintenance)
Too often people jump in at a 500 calorie surplus on day one. They hear, ‘you need to eat big to get big’ and assume that means eat everything in sight. When starting any new training phase, you need to avoid using all your cards on the first day. If you start at a 500 calorie surplus, not only will you gain a lot of fat quickly (no matter how hard you train) but if your progress begins to stall and you need to start eating more, you’ll end up eating way more than the necessary amount to build muscle.
Start off at maintenance. Track your training numbers, pictures and bodyweight and start progressively adding food as needed. This way you’ll mitigate your fat gain. More on this to come.
Tip 2: Pick a plan (basically any plan) and see it through
‘I’m bulking so let’s see if I can hit a new 1RM every week!’
‘I’m going to try this new arm blaster I found on YouTube’
No.
Pick a training plan and see it through. The plan doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be anything special. It just needs to be consistent and you need to apply the appropriate intensity. 3 day full body, 4 day upper/lower, 5 or 6 day push/pull/legs, whatever—don’t overthink it.
With adequate intensity you’ll make progress with any plan. Testing your maxes is great, but you’ve got to choose a plan and see it through. On that note…
Tip 3: Track your training numbers (pen to paper)
If you’re getting stronger, you’re building muscle. You might not see it instantly, but it’s happening. Take note of your weight and reps every single session and always try to beat the numbers you hit last time. Set yourself mini targets of an extra rep here or an extra kilo there. We call this ‘progressive overload’ and it’s the driver of results.
In my experience, the fewer distractions the better so I always recommend note taking with a pad and pen—the old fashioned way. Taking notes on your phone is fine but it can easily lead to too much time spent on Instagram between sets or too much time on Spotify finding the ‘perfect song’ for the lift you should already be doing.
Head down and focus.
(Plus, pen to paper just looks cooler.)
Tip 4: Favour pictures over weight (but still track weight)
Most people bulk to look a certain way and be able to lift a certain amount of weight. So why bulk until you hit a certain bodyweight? If I told you that you could look like the Rock but you would magically stay at 70kg would you really care?
I think that aiming for a certain bodyweight can lead to people eating too much too quickly—Cartman’s beefcake phase, for example— and lose focus on what’s important when bulking: aesthetics and performance.
For reference, a good weight gain would be up to something like 0.5kg per week, but I wouldn’t stress too much about that.
Yes, track your weight but take weekly check in photos and use those (along with your workout data) as the primary measurement of progress.
Which brings me to my last tip…
Tip 5: Only change things when it stops working
This ties into my first point. You need to be patient. If you’re doing everything right, your body will respond accordingly so don’t rush it. Upping food too quickly will just lead to gaining too much fat too quickly and a much longer cut when you want to get lean again. Changing plans too often will mean you won’t get the chance to truly overload movements, meaning your strength progress will stall and so will your muscle gain.
If your training numbers haven’t gone up or you haven’t noticed any changes in a few weeks, slightly up your calories (about 100 per day) and work with that for a while. If progress stalls again, then repeat.
You need top give your body the chance to understand what you’re doing to it and allow it time to respond. For that to happen, consistency is key.
