I’ve already
written about the stupidity of how modern trainees employ “bulking and cutting”
(summary; don’t do it), but ultimately I find that the reason these methods are
so popular is because trainees have a fundamental misunderstanding of how
eating actually works. This isn’t to say
they misunderstand mastication and swallowing (make your jokes now), but more
that, as in most cases, they misunderstand the effect for the cause. Trainees believe that they can use nutrition
to manipulate training, when in reality, they need to manipulate TRAINING to
utilize nutrition.
Like, this is the perfect sort of training if you want to eat sh*t
As always,
I’ll start with the common, and consequently incorrect, belief. Presently, it is en vogue to believe that
your nutrition drives the results of your training. If you eat a caloric surplus (250-500 more
than your TDEE…yes, it disgusts me to write that out), you gain muscle. If you eat a caloric deficit, you lose fat. The program doesn’t matter, you just adjust
your nutrition. You bulk until you have
gained the size you want, and you cut until you are at the bodyfat percentage
that you want. Forever and ever.
Surely the
casual observer recognizes the madness of this, right? This is just spinning your wheels at its
finest. If you just keep increasing and
decreasing calories by the same amount, you’re simply adding and subtracting
the same amount of fat and muscle over and over again. If the only variable you change is nutrition,
while leaving training exactly the same, you’re not going to give your body and
reason to create anything new when you gain, nor will you be set up to
successful reach the absolute lowest levels of bodyfat.
We've all seen this happen before
When one
endeavors to gain muscle, they need to create a stimulus that places a demand
on the body to MAKE more muscle. This
means training NEEDS to change if one’s goal is to gain muscle. If one continues to do the exact same thing
they were doing before and simply increases how much they were eating, that’s
called getting fat. Americans have been
perfecting that trick for decades now; keep up the same energy expenditure
while gradually increasing calories, and we’ve all seen how well that works
out. Simply performing an hour of
lifting 3 times a week while spending the remaining 23 hours of each day
sedentary is not going to suddenly radically shift one’s biology such that,
NOW, when it eats too much, a substantial portion of it is muscle.
Even
crazier, some gurus out there are proposing that one should do even LESS when
their goal is to gain muscle. They advocate
that trainees cease all cardio and conditioning work and minimize expenditure
outside the gym at all costs. “Cardio
kills gains”, conveniently expounded by fat people who aren’t very big or
strong, and the prevailing wisdom on the internet. It’s true, bears are huge, and they like to
eat a lot and hibernate, but no matter how much you refuse to shave and engage
in basic hygiene, you’ll never be one, so quit trying to follow their
approach. Why not instead emulate those
humans who came close to being bears, like Kaz, Derek Poundstone, Mariusz
Pudzianowski, Brian Shaw, etc, who, by the way, all trained hard and often.
Like bears, Derek was a fan of chicken of the sea. Unlike bears, Derek was literally eating chicken blended in water.
That’s what
we’re getting at here people; you need to push your bodies to promote
growth. The reason why an increased food
intake is associated with muscle gain is that nutrition is recovery, and, when
one pushes their training hard enough, they need to push the recovery to
match. This means one needs to INCREASE
their volume to gain muscle. They need
to increase the demand on their body and THEN feed the body enough to allow for
recovery. Simply eating more to gain
muscle is approaching it backwards; one instead needs to train hard enough to
necessitate eating more to gain muscle.
Create the demand for recovery, THEN increase the recovery, don’t just
increase recovery when there is nothing to recover from.
Up the
volume, don’t just up the dose. Start
adding in an extra 100 pull ups a day.
Start adding more sets to get in more reps. Train twice a day. Add an extra day to your
program to focus on weak areas. Put a
GHR in your living room and hit a set whenever you walk by. Just do SOMETHING to give your body a reason
to add more muscle. THIS is how you
ensure that you aren’t stuck in the infinite hell of just gaining and losing
the same 20lbs over and over again. THIS
is how you actually significantly impact body composition.
No photoshop required
And guess
what? You’ll know when it’s time to lose
weight because you’re going to eventually reach the point where you cannot
increase the food and sleep enough to match the ridiculous demands that you’ve
put on your body. This is when it’s time
to scale back the volume, and with that, the food. Once again, we are CHANGING the training and
in turn matching the direction of the training with the necessary nutrition. If all we do is simply take away calories
while keeping everything the same, all we’re doing is further taxing our
recovery.
And what
about those gurus that advocate INCREASING demand when losing fat? What is this madness?! We’re already taxing our recovery by reducing
calories, and now we reduce it further by increasing demand on the body TO
recover? This is how burnout, injuries
and stagnations occur. It’s the lazyman’s
approach to thinking; “just work out more, that way you’ll lose weight”. We push the training and conditioning hard
when we’re GAINING weight so that we have that reserve to dip into during fat
loss.
There tend to be consequences when we spend more than we earn
If you spent
all of your weight gain time being lazy, that means you’re screwed when the fat
loss starts, because you have NOTHING to take away. You were a slug, and you conditioned your
body to only perform at the barest of activity levels while still needing a
massive surplus to “recover” from your training, and now you’re taking away the
recovery. That maniac that was training
6 days a week for 2 a days can scale it back to 4 days of training while they
lose fat; what is that dude who was only training 3 days a week going to do?
Yes, I am
fully aware that bodybuilders make prodigious use of cardio when they are
getting competition lean. Here’s the
thing; the cardio they do is VERY low intensity, because the goal of it is
simply to find another way to create a caloric deficit. When you’re living off of lettuce and water
trying to dip down to 4% bodyfat, you simply don’t have enough food going in to
take away anything of substance, so some cardio needs to occur. However, bodybuilders are smart enough to
understand the compromised state of their recovery, so they pick cardio that is
as least taxing on their systems as possible to allow SOME form of
recovery. And guess what; they DON’T
recover. Talk to any bodybuilder in the
final stretches of their contest prep and they will tell you that their strength
is shot, they’re on wobbly legs, and they feel like a zombie. It’s why you see so many videos of pre-comp
bodybuilders using machines; they lack the ability to train successfully with
free weights. Hell, many of them don’t
even want to deal with the effort of LOADING a barbell. Paul Carter wrote about this recently. It’s WHY it was such a big deal that Ronnie
Coleman deadlifted 800lbs right before the Olympia; that was sheer insanity!
There are no words
The biggest
takeaway here is that you’ll always be miserable. At least, so long as you are progressing, you
will be experiencing misery. That’s WHY
so few people succeed; so few people are willing to endure what it takes. When gaining muscle, you should be pushing
your body so hard and so close to the point of breaking that the sheer amount
of food you’re eating is no consolation whatever. The people that think that it’s the EATING
that’s the hard part about gaining muscle have clearly never had to ever exert
themselves in their lives. Fat people
eat to the point of discomfort all the time; it’s not the key to muscle gain,
it’s not even scratching the surface of the true misery needed. Those numbskulls quoting memes posting photos
of donuts writing “#gains” are clearly NOT suffering enough to actually get any
real progress, because someone earnestly engaged in muscle gaining is going to
be too exhausted to be funny. When you
lose fat, you’re going to experience enough hunger to make it so that the
reduction in volume can’t possibly register as joy. Anyone who is legitimately trying to change
themselves is going to be going through a whole lotta suck to get there.
Quit
spinning your wheels and going in circles.
If all you’re doing is changing your calories while keeping your
training the same, all you’re doing is getting fat and getting skinny, over and
over again. That’s not progress; that’s
a yo-yo diet. Train hard when you eat
big, and train smart when you eat little.
