“HOW LONG SHOULD I BULK?: THINGS THAT ARE EASY AND THINGS THAT ARE HARD”

 

 

I have upset a lot of the internet with the following sentiment that I have expressed on numerous occasions: losing weight is easy.  It’s honestly probably the easiest thing in the world.  All you have to do is this: NOT eat.  That is INaction: the NOT doing of something.  Do you realize how easy it is to NOT do something?  Inertia is a powerful force: objects at rest stay at rest unless force acts upon them.  So for someone to lose weight, they simply have to just keep NOT doing something and then weight will be lost.  Hell, people NOT eat ALL the time.  Sometimes they even do it so much that they die from it.  Yes, that’s callused, but it proves the point that all these folks that try to dramatize losing weight as the most difficult thing in the world are significantly misunderstanding what actually is challenging.

Losing weight ranks somewhere along "dry pasta" at this event

Inevitably, someone will fire back at me and go “It must be nice for weight loss to be easy for you: I just LOOK at food and I gain weight.”  No you idiot: weight gain is easy too.  Gaining weight is another one of those stupidly easy things to do.  Want proof?  How about the fact that the majority of adults in the United States are overweight, and a significant portion of those that are overweight are even obese.  If the AVERAGE person can accomplish something, it’s not difficult: it’s, at best, of AVERAGE difficulty.  And, in truth, the average person is only going to put the bare minimum effort into something anyway, so if we really think about it, gaining weight is honestly stupidly easy to do.  Sit in front of the TV and pound away at some food that came packaged in a box until that box is empty.  Pick up a fast food combo on your way home from work.  Hell, just eat out ANYWHERE and eat everything that is served to you: portion sizes are ridiculous these days.  And much like NOT eating, gaining weight is another one of those things that people do so much that they die from it, as obesity related maladies are the #1 killer for the US.  In either capacity, the point stands: just because losing weight is easy doesn’t making gaining weight hard.  They’re BOTH comically easy.

 

So what IS hard?  Gaining MUSCLE.  No, not “lean muscle mass”: that’s a stupid phrase.  ALL muscle mass is lean: there is no fatty muscle.  Gaining actual muscle tissue is VERY hard, especially compared to losing fat.  This is why you see so many success stories about dudes losing 300+lbs and so FEW success stories about dudes WEIGHING 300+lbs with low bodyfat and being absolutely jacked out of their minds: building muscle is a VERY tough process.  Same reason there are so many ripped out of their minds dudes modeling on Instagram and so few folks with a decent amount of muscle.  Getting ripped takes months: getting jacked takes years.  I’d be sorry for all the brospeak if a cared, but honestly, I think in this instance, the vernacular is appropriate, especially since I’m about to use the word “bulk”, despite how much I hate it.

Check out that strength rating...just saying

 

But why am I going to talk about bulking?  Because the question “how long should I bulk” is a question that demonstrates that the trainee asking it has not fully grasped the DIFFICULTY of gaining muscle.  No one that actually understands the process of gaining muscle is going to ask that question, because someone with an understanding already KNOWS the answer: you bulk until you can no longer sustain it.  And that’s not some sort of stupidly dramatic “no pain no gain” thing, nor is it a license to “permabulk” (another REALLY stupid phrase): it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that muscle gaining phases of training are INCREDIBLY difficult and unsustainable.  It’s why so many muscle building programs tend to be 6 week long shotgun blasts: that’s about as long as a regular adult is going to be able to put up with a muscle building phase of training without some sort of break.    

 

What do I mean?  Just examine the logistics of it.  Again, we acknowledge that gaining muscle is different from gaining weight.  What’s the difference?  Presence of stimulus to cause the body to gain muscle.  Sure, if you just overeat you’ll gain a LITTLE muscle along with a bunch of fat, but if your goal is to gain a significant amount of muscle, this means you have to train, and you have to train HARD.  If you just perform a moderate amount of training for a moderate amount of intensity (understood to mean “effort” vs percentage of 1rm, for you nerds out there), you place no real demand on the body to grow.  You must, instead, train STUPIDLY hard and put the body in a severe state of recovery in order to force it to want to grow.  This is why muscle building programs are so ridiculously hard, like Super Squats, Deep Water, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith, 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, DoggCrapp, Mass Made Simple, etc.  These aren’t maintenance programs, they’re not fat loss programs: they are INTENSE efforts intended to put your body in a compromised state so that you can feed it and it will grow.  This sort of training WILL break you if you run it for too long.  I legit had to throw away one of the t-shirts I wore during my Deep Water squat workouts because it was so saturated with fear sweat that it smelled like an open grave, and no amount of washing would get it out.  I would spend 13 days in between squat workouts just DREADING going into the gym.  I laid on my back in between sets 7 and 8 of squats and seriously contemplated quitting lifting and selling all of my equipment because I did NOT want to train anymore for the rest of my life.  You wanna ask how long you should bulk?  How about: how SHORT can I bulk?  That’s what the experienced dudes wanna know.

Alternative title was "How To Make 6 Weeks Feel Like Eternity"

 

And this doesn’t even take into account the OTHER logistics of gaining muscle: all the EATING you have to do which, unless you’re independently wealthy, ALSO means all the cooking and cleaning that goes along with it.  The gallon of milk a day is so popular for gaining because it doesn’t require any additional prep to get in 2k calories, and it sounds stupid to people that haven’t ever seriously tried to gain, but for those that have exhausted all other avenues it makes TOTAL sense.  Otherwise, eating basically becomes a second job, and your life revolves around food, because you need to keep eating in order to recover from the stupidly intense training you’re doing, and if you miss a single meal you’re suddenly behind the 8 ball and now you gotta do some serious triage work.  You’re treading water the whole time and just barely able to breathe.  It absolutely sucks.  And you wanna know how long you should bulk?  You’ll know when you’re done: believe me.  And I haven’t even gone into the simple reality that, on top of all of this, make sure to budget extra time on the toilet into your day, because more goes in and more comes out.  That seems to shock some people.

 

THIS is why young dudes in high school are constantly told to bulk: it’s not about “puberty is natural steroids” (holy cow another REALLY stupid phrase): it’s because you’ll never have a better lifestyle suited to sustain gaining muscle.  I realize high school kids love making their lives seem dramatic with AP classes and sports and social obligations and etc etc, but when you’re working full time and pursuing higher education with family obligations, you’ll look back at high school and remember fondly all that extra time you had.  Absolutely: some high school kids have it rough, but the AVERAGE kid has someone ELSE making their food, cleaning their dishes and taking care of all the finances and obligations in the house.  All a high school kid needs to do is not get arrested, graduate, maybe work a job, and otherwise they can dedicate themselves to eating and training.  If you’re OUT of high school, wait until you find periods of your life that remind you of high school living and make THAT the time you focus on gaining muscle.  If you have a period coming up where your life obligations are going to be low, stress is going to be reduced, and you have an abundance of time, you are approaching a period where you can bulk.  Bulk until you cannot sustain it.  Life will determine when it’s time to stop.