Aidan:

Hello and welcome to episode 190 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. My name is Adam Muir and I’m here with my co-host, Leah Higl. And today we’re going to be talking about the topic of is bulking dead? And this is prompted for a few reasons. One is that on TikTok, I’m on fitness TikTok. I see a lot of people talking about training and talking about like switching from push pull legs to upper lower and it’s just changed their results.

But I’m also seeing a lot of like people talking about like main gaining being like, that’s the move, right? bulking is dead. It has also partly been prompted by, I’ve had a lot of people in the evidence-based space who have been looking at this for like 10 years who have seen this type of content and then being like, this is changing everything I know about fitness because obviously more and more research comes out. But it’s interesting that like people who are really in this space, their thoughts have changed.

And then the third thing is I’ve seen some people say with extreme confidence and pretty strong claims and stuff like that. And because I put out my own content where I might use words like bulking and stuff like that, I feel like it makes sense to have a bit of a stance on this topic. So I want to talk about it today.

Leah:

Yeah. So we’re going to start with going through why people are claiming that bulking is quote unquote dead or kind of some of the reasons that they put forth making a little bit of an argument around. So we’re not going to name any names. I don’t think that’s helpful. Creating beef, we’re just, we’re evidence-based practitioners. We care about this stuff, but we don’t obviously care about drama. And I think Aidan is very much not a drama guy. So we’re going to leave names out of it. But some of the claims that we have seen, so one kind of major group is there are three interference mechanisms that can negatively affect muscle growth.

And realistically, none of these actually require a surplus of energy to counteract. So these three mechanisms include a reduction in motor unit recruitment and mechanical tension. So for example, less carbs, fuel would impact performance in the gym. The second one is a lack of protein as a raw material. So obviously having adequate protein on board is highly beneficial for muscle growth, and then also a lack of energy required to create new functional proteins.

I suppose the greater argument made there is it’s the rate of muscle growth is typically very, very slow. So the energy required on a day-to-day basis to actually build that new muscle tissue, probably not super high or super significant. So is there really a need for a energy surplus?

And then another argument is more so around the definition of a surplus, which we’re really getting into the weeds there. But basically, we’re going to go through these claims, unpack them a little bit and do a deeper dive and then finish off with our thoughts at the end.

Aidan:

So there’s definitely truth to those three points that were mentioned. I think one of the biggest criticisms I would have is it’s pretty bold to say that there’s only three interference mechanisms and to be like…

Leah:

Sure.

Aidan:

Let’s go through those one by one. like technically, yeah, you can have them, you can have enough glycogen for gym performance at maintenance or even slightly below maintenance. Like that’s pretty comfortable. You can achieve that. When you look at the amount of protein required for muscle growth, it’s easy to reach those targets and only a small percentage of your protein intake actually goes to new muscle. This is a really interesting discussion for people on PED. It’s just like a separate topic, but like even people who are gaining muscle way quicker, logically you’d make the assumption, they’ll need more protein.

But when you actually look at how much protein is getting stored as a new muscle mass and you break it down on a per day basis, it’s a tiny amount. So like, I don’t think we have a clear answer about where it actually matters about going higher for people who can gain muscle quicker or anything like that. But when you mathematically break it down, it’s only a small, small amount of protein going to that.

The energy stuff, muscle growth is slow. I often talk about a kilo of muscle being made up of around 1200 calories. It takes more energy than that to create it. I say around five times that amount, but that’s just it’s very hard to find a perfect number for that. But once again, because muscle growth is slow, if you break that down on a per day basis, you would need the tiniest, tiniest of surplus to achieve that. And or you could potentially be at maintenance calories and re-comping, for example. And because the killer body fat is made up of 7,700 calories, it would be very easy to get that energy, particularly with muscle growth being pretty slow.

But then my favourite super simple argument for why this is oversimplified logic is just because the body theoretically can grow muscle under those conditions doesn’t mean it will be optimised. There’s many other areas we can look at this. Like for example, when we’re looking at research on essential amino acids, the logic can be if people can create non-essential amino acids in their body and we give them the ones that they can’t create essential amino acids, that should help optimise muscle growth.

But that kind of implies that just because the body can create certain amino acids, it will do it in the exact optimal amount. And there’d be no point to ever add any more, which is flawed thinking. Similar here, just because you can grow muscle, it means it doesn’t mean it’ll be 100% optimised.

Leah:

Swinging back around to the definition stuff quickly, I suppose the technical definition of a calorie surplus is eating more than your total daily energy expenditure. I think that’s pretty well established or at least what most people believe a calorie surplus to be. Our simple definition is eating an amount of calories that leads to your body weight trending up over time. And then you can add another layer of complexity onto that and say that trending up in the form of muscle and or fat. So not necessarily one or the other, but could be both, could be either. But if we see that scale weight trending up over time, because we are gaining actual tissue, whether it’s muscle or fat, I would say that is a calorie surplus.

One super long video that we did watch on the topic used a slightly different definition to this. And I think this is where we start to get really confusing. And they said it was silly to use scale weight as the metric because it’s influenced by hydration. But I would say that whilst differing levels of hydration can lead to obvious changes in your weight on a day to day, so like general weight fluctuations, this wouldn’t necessarily impact the trend over time in terms of long-term trend over time when you’re accounting for those fluctuations.

But nonetheless, these people would argue that a surplus equals gaining fat, whilst a deficit equals losing fat. So specifically around it being fat mass and not in relation to muscle mass. Whilst a few other people have also said that whilst adding muscle at maintenance calories, body weight can increase over time and then you’ll just naturally eat more calories at maintenance. And to be honest, this is where I start to get a little lost in the definitions that other people are kind of, I guess, discussing because now we’re really just like really getting into semantics. So but anyway, let’s let’s break it down.

Aidan:

Yeah. And like I see the logic of using a different definition because like the logic is like, we can’t perfectly measure this anyway. So let’s find a different thing. I just think that that’s a silly one. I was gonna leave this a lot about actually I’ll talk about my like, rationale for why it’s silly. Like, let’s say somebody gets a pretty major injury, like say they’re tear their ACL, and they go into a tiny deficit, like say they are eating less than their total daily energy expenditure by a small bit, and then they’re doing no training, they’re immobilised, etc.

They will likely decomp, like they will definitely lose muscle, there’s a chance that they’re going to get bit of body fat in the process. That is, by definition, meaning the technical definition of a deficit but it wouldn’t meet this new quote on quote like made up definition. And vice versa, the other end of the spectrum is like theoretically it’s rare, but theoretically you can’t be in a surplus and losing body fat. And even just looking at examples that like break this once again, PEDs like there are people who are injecting testosterone and stuff like that who are building muscle and losing fat at the same time, but their body mass is going up at such a rate that it’s clear that they are in a surplus. Like if you mathematically did the calculation, they are in a surplus.

So from my perspective, I do prefer that definition based on scale weight while also factoring in that the hydration stuff matters. I would just accept the imperfection and just like focus on the average over time. And if there was any extreme cases like somebody drank way more water or they had heaps of sodium in their water, like just factoring that in and accepting the imperfection just because the other definition is too flawed.

Leah:

So just a quick note on research. I think in most episodes, we talk about research that we can pull from. And I think you might be expecting us to talk about research to really kind of drive our point home. And in a perfect world, we would love to have this where there’s like a massive sample size of research with people all on the same training programs. And then ideally they would have similar nutrition, but they’d compare things like a small deficit versus maintenance, versus a small surplus versus a large surplus to really get an idea of how these different strategies can impact muscle growth and optimising muscle growth.

But it just doesn’t exist. We do have heaps of small sample size data, but I think that’s too skewed by the fact that some people just gain muscle more easily than others. Like you can just have huge genetic outliers. Like there is such a huge range in how much muscle someone can gain based on so many different factors, genetics just being one of them. But even if we controlled for their training and their nutrition, there can still be these outliers. And when the sample size is really small, the results can be heavily skewed by this.

And then we’ve also got adherence issues too when we can’t perfectly control everyone’s training and nutrition to a T, unfortunately, or it’s very, very hard to do so. So yeah, we would love some good quality data, huge sample sizes, but at this stage, it’s not something we have access to. So it’s unfortunately not something we can touch on today.

Aidan:

Yeah. The one thing I will talk about with that is in like prep for this podcast, I was like just going back and being like, what do we have? Like what research is there from that small sample size perspective? And there’s one that’s like quoted all the time. We’ve spoken about previously on the podcast by Garf and colleagues where they, they’re college athletes and they put them in either a 500 calorie surplus or an ad-libitum surplus where they’re told to eat a little bit more.

And the ad-libitum surplus came out as a small increase in their calorie intake and the 500 calorie surplus came out as a decently large intake like in their calorie intake. And when they measured body fat and muscle mass, one of reasons why I cite this study a lot is the group in the 500 calorie surplus gained way more body fat and then just a little bit more muscle.

And I often talk about that study being like, damn, like even a 500-calorie surplus is too large. We want to be smaller than that in most cases, unless somebody’s like super new to training and stuff like that. But the other way you can look at that study is that the larger surplus outperform the smaller surplus for muscle growth. And if I look at all of these studies, that is a very common finding that the larger surplus you go, the more muscle you gain. I think it’s a terrible idea to do a large surplus for almost all cases, right?

Leah:

It’s not like a good trade off.

Aidan:

Yeah. But that then means if we circle back to somebody saying a claim like there are only three interference mechanisms and you can achieve all of these things in maintenance calories. It’s like, okay, well, why does the data show this like technically like with a larger surplus people do get. So it clearly can’t be maximised at maintenance or in a small deficit.

Leah:

So breaking it down into a bit of an interpretation, a takeaway message, our stance, well, my stance has been the same for a long time. And I don’t think all of this discourse has really changed my stance much. To maximise muscle growth, you do likely need a surplus, albeit not a huge one.

But going into like a large surplus, as Aidan has said, is probably silly. You’re going to increase your body fat significantly and then probably spend huge amounts of times in deficit phases where we’re also not optimising muscle mass growth. And then from a timeline perspective, it just, doesn’t make much sense. And then doubling down on that, the research we do actually have has shown that you can gain more muscle growth in larger surpluses, again, just not being as efficient.

So where I have evolved over the years in my thinking is more or less around the size of this surplus. So back in the day before I kind of, before I even became a dietitian, I was like, yeah, I’m going to eat 500, 600 calories more than I actually need and gain all this, gain like two kilos a month. Obviously not a great idea.

But I still like to implement a small calorie surplus when muscle growth or optimising muscle growth is the goal. So when thinking about myself and my clients, I will even have them bulking at a rate of like half a kilo per month, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. So even over like a six month span, we’re talking about three kilos of weight gain. So really, really minimal. The surplus is tiny, but I still think we can gain more muscle with this very small surplus.

Aidan:

Yeah. I’m in completely the same boat. My first surplus I did, I gained 20 kilos in eight months.

Leah:

Yeah, that’s crazy.

Aidan:

And then like, was like, maybe I should have been more conservative. So like, as I learned more, was like, oh, maybe I should be more conservative than that. And then maybe I should have done half the way. And then like, as time has gone on, like, I should have done like way more conservative than that. And I typically do measure it rather than like trying to get the exact surplus size. I just usually measure it based on monthly rate of gain. And I can’t predict, I’m like, how much muscle do think this person could gain in the six month period?

If their rate of gain noticeably exceeds that, the odds of them gaining a decent amount of body fat is too high. Which circles back to definitions being like, it doesn’t actually matter the definition. If you use what I just kind of talked about being like, body weight trending a little bit up over time, not at a rate that’s faster than you can likely gain muscle at, you’ll probably be in a good spot.

This has been episode 190 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. And as always, if you could please leave a rating and review, that would be massively appreciated.