The joys of bulking, eat what you want when you want. That’s the premise of the ‘see food, eat food’ diet, unfortunately effective bulking isn’t that simple, unless you want to put on a whole lot of fat in the process. No, I’m not talking about adding lean mass here, I’m talking about no holds bard, full on weight gain, however unless the recent craze has changed since I wrote this, then most people only put on weight in order to strip it off ready for summer in order to show those newly reaped gainz. Yes if your going to construct muscle, known as the hypertrophy phase, then you are going to put on fat with it. Outside of very special occasions or the use of steroids you will not just add lean muscle tissue.
Sorry to crush dreams with that one, despite what all the muscle mags (sponsored by the supplement companies #justsaying) tell you, without pharmaceutical aid, its damn near impossible. Now that’s out of the way I can explain a whole lot easier. In order to gain weight you need to be in a caloric surplus, in other words you need to take in more than what your expenditure is. This is called being in a hyper-caloric state and to this only amounts to being roughly 500+ calories above maintenance to start with. This is where most people go wrong. The majority of prospective bulkers just eat and eat and eat, while yes that is the aim, remember that consistency is key and that most people will not stick with that kind of volume of food intake for very long. You wouldn’t, to start with, constantly throw yourself at 20 rep maxes on squats every day would you? I hope not because you’d burn out pretty quick, the same applies to our food intake.
Box clever with your meal prep and start small. Break it down how you will, so long as the total calorie intake is there it doesn’t matter if you have 3 or 10 meals a day. Make sure your macros are measurable and gradually increase the amount of calorie intake until you’ve hit your desired dietary goals. For a 90kg male looking to put on mass, you are looking at around 3000 calories maintenance (in training) to start building shoot for 3,100-3,500 increasing all the way ideally to 4,500. Anything more than that folks more often than not, is just fat.