Can you build muscle without bulking? Is the bulking/cutting phase really necessary? Most bodybuilding diets have two phases: bulk and cut. The first phase takes place in the off-season and involves eating huge amounts of food in order to gain muscle. The second phase revolves around clean eating. When cutting, most bodybuilders reduce their carb intake and do more cardio to burn fat and get shredded. However, recent studies indicate that traditional bulking may not be necessary.
The Truth About Bulking
Increasingly more athletes are turning to a new approach to build muscle. Some even claim that the whole bulking/cutting thing is a myth. Weight fluctuations are not good for your body. According to researchers, advanced lifters and pro bodybuilders benefit from cutting and bulking. However, this approach may not the best option for beginner and intermediate lifters. So what’s the truth about bulking?
Proper nutrition is essential to muscle growth and repair. Your muscles need food to grow and recover from intense training. If you don’t meet your daily macros, you’ll end up losing muscle despite training hard. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the more you eat, the more you grow.
If you’ve been training for a while, you probably know that it’s impossible to build muscle without gaining fat. Traditional bulking can help you get bigger and stronger, but it also increases your body fat levels.
Natural bodybuilders have a limited capacity to build muscle. Their ability to synthesize new muscle tissue from protein depends on their testosterone levels, genetics, insulin sensitivity and other factors. If they exceed their nutrient requirements, they will gain muscle to a point and then stop. Eating more food than they actually need will lead to more body fat being gained.
What’s the Best Approach to Building Muscle?
The idea behind traditional bulking is that you can’t gain muscle without getting fat in the process. In other words, you should eat huge amounts of food for several months while training hard and then switch over into “cutting” mode to shed fat. In theory, you should keep over 90 percent of your muscle gains and lose all the fat. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. Most people end up losing both fat and muscle during the cutting phase.
Clean bulking and carb cycling might just be better alternatives to traditional bulking. These two approaches will cause slower gains, but keep you lean all year round. At the end of the day, you’ll still end up making the same progress in terms of size and strength.
Bulking and cutting is the traditional way of doing things. However, this isn’t necessarily the best approach. If you’re new to bodybuilding, you may not know what works for your body. Try different approaches to building muscle and track your progress.
Depending on your goals, you can increase or lower your calorie intake along the way. What works for one person may not work for another, which is why you should try different diets and workout routines. Assess your results and play with your macros until you find a diet that best suits your needs.
