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Bulking and Cutting – Know Your Goal
Very few people possess the knowledge needed to successfully gain muscle or lose fat. A person may know how to lose weight but most of you don`t know how to keep all of your hard earned muscle in the process. On the flip side, you may know how to gain muscle, but you need to learn how to gain this muscle without the fear of fat gain. I am going to discuss the basics of bulking and cutting and hopefully give you the knowledge needed to complete your next bulking or cutting diet.
Bulking
Bulking is simply eating more calories than what you are used to eating, but it`s not as simple as it seems. Your calories need to be from healthy bodybuilding foods and not from junk foods like pizza, chips, and cookies. The other hard part of bulking is determining your BMR or basal metabolic Rate.(Your BMR is basically the number of calories you’d burn if you stayed in bed all day.)
To start, you should eat 500 calories over maintenance everyday. If you your gaining to much fat after a week reduce that number to 300. If you seem to not be getting any bigger then you should increase that number to 700 calories.
Cutting
While cutting, your prime concern should be keeping muscle loss to a minimum. That is why you don`t want to crash diet and try losing weight to fast or you’re most likely going to lose most of your hard earned muscle. To start, you should lower your calories from your BMR to roughly 300 fewer calories a day. You can change that number according to the results but 300 is a good number to start out at. You can either eat less food or do more cardiovascular exercise to burn these calories. How you do it will depend on the individual.
Body Fat, Bulking and Cutting
Some bodybuilders like to bulk up to the size of elephants before they decide that they’ve gained to much fat, and then they go on a cutting diet. Others seem to always be sporting a low body fat percentage year round and slowly gain muscle as time goes on. Again, how you go about it will depend on personal preference. I always try to stay relatively lean even during the off season because I cannot stand the thought of gaining fat.
So can I gain muscle while losing body fat as well? Some bodybuilders genetics allow for this while most of us sit in awe wondering how they did it. The use of steroids allow for fat loss and muscle gain at the same time but should only be used by experienced trainee`s who know how to properly bulk and cut without the use of them.
You need to decide what you want to do with your body right now. Do you carry around to much fat, are you to skinny, to small in the upper body? All of these factors determine what you decide to do with yourself. You are the only one responsible for the results you receive.
Bulking – Maximum Muscle Growth
Building muscle is a quality very few people possess. Not only do you have to train like a bodybuilder, you must be willing to eat like one too. This article will educate the people who are interested in building muscle on the basics of bulking. You will learn what bulking is, the difference between clean and dirty bulking, and bulking supplements used when trying to bulk up.
Bulking is a time when you are primarily focused on building muscle. You must be willing to train like an animal and eat more calories than what you are used to eating. It is very important that you set goals for yourself when trying to successfully bulk. You can only gain .5 to 1 pound of muscle naturally every week, so set realistic goals for yourself so that you don`t get discouraged when you`re not gaining the amount of weight you’ve set yourself out for.
Clean Bulk VS Dirty Bulk
Your main concern when trying to bulk is your diet. Clean bulking is eating clean, making sure that you don’t gain any fat. Dirty bulking is thinking that by eating pizza and cookies that you will gain mass. Doing this will cause weight gain, but not the kind of weight you want to be gaining. Your diet should consist of the same bodybuilding foods that you would normally eat, just in a higher caloric amount. Aim for an excess of 300 to 500 per day and make adjustments at the end of the week if you feel that you`re not gaining enough muscle.
Most bodybuilders use muscle enhancement oils and bodybuilding supplements to assist with muscle growth. The three most frequently used on a bulk are creatine, whey protein, and glutamine. Creatine holds water, making your muscles look harder.
Whey protein is just a more convenient way of getting your daily protein needs, and glutamine is an amino acid used to keep fat gain to a minimum while doing a clean bulk. There are many other supplements that aid in muscle growth, but for the beginning bodybuilder, these three are your best choices.
Don`t confuse bulking with cutting. Cutting is the exact opposite of gaining muscle. When cutting, you are trying to shed as much fat as possible while not worrying so much about muscle gain. It is very hard to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, so bodybuilders have two choices. To cut or to bulk. Which one are you?