Gaining fat is anathema for the bodybuilder; certainly never to one’s advantage. A right-thinking bodybuilder should desire to gain only muscle, as his goal is not to be only muscularly massive, but also defined in appearance. It is not necessary, as I was led to believe 30 years ago, that one must ‘bulk up’, that is gain fat with muscle, to build muscle […].

The goal [as a bodybuilder] is to serve the nutritional caloric needs of the growth mechanism to gain muscle mass and increase body weight while adding little or no body fat.

I’m not a doctor or nutritionist. Follow my advice at your own risk.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions in bodybuilding is that you have to ‘bulk’ to put on muscle. ‘Bulking’ essentially means force-feeding yourself. It’s not unusual for people on a bulk to consume 1,000+ calories above maintenance each day. (Whenever I say ‘calories’, I mean kilocalories.)

The idea is that you bulk up for a few months, then shed only the fat (‘cutting’) and be left with just muscle.

The underlying mistake is that of thinking you can hasten muscle growth by eating more. You cannot.

The inverse is true: you can stunt muscle growth by not eating enough. But that isn’t really a concern. Not only are bodybuilders typically severely overtrained but also severely overnourished, at least in terms of calories. People underestimate how easy it is to get their calories each day. If you live in the West, you should have no trouble getting all the nutrients you need as long as you eat a well-balanced diet.

If you’re putting on fat, the amount of food you consume cannot possibly be the reason you’re not getting stronger. In the words of luminary bodybuilder Mike Mentzer:

[M]ost bodybuilders are, in fact, grossly overnourished […] and the average bodybuilder does not make much progress, if any. If [someone] is overnourished or even adequately well nourished, and he’s not making bodybuilding progress, then do you see that his problem ain’t nutrition?

You do not need to overeat protein in particular, either. Conventional wisdom states that protein supports muscle growth and you should thus aim to consume 1g of protein per gram of bodyweight. But muscles are made mostly of water and carbohydrates, not protein. You cannot hasten muscle growth by overeating protein. You should prioritize carbohydrates in your diet. They give you the energy you need, specifically for the high-intensity workouts required to build muscle; without them, your muscles will look flaccid because the muscular glycogen stores will be depleted. In a well-balanced diet, according to Mentzer, your daily calories are composed of roughly 60% carbs, 25% protein, and 15% fat, all derived from the four basic food groups: meats, fruits & veggies, dairy, and grains & cereals.

[A] healthy individual consuming a well-balanced diet, by definition, is getting everything he needs; and the human body does not utilize nutrients beyond need.

The body does not use nutrients beyond need: it either discards them or stores them as fat. If you put on fat, it’s because you ate more than you needed to. If the extra food had gone to your muscles, it wouldn’t have turned into fat.

To play devil’s advocate, one could argue that, while it’s true that the body does not use nutrients beyond need, maybe it’s safer to overeat a little bit just to make sure you don’t stunt the growth process. Well, 1,000+ calories above maintenance is not overeating just “a little bit” – it’s gluttonous.

[M]uscle growth on a daily basis […] is negligible. […] If you were to gain one ounce of muscle a day, you’d actually be doing extraordinarily well.

Let’s do some math along these lines. If you gain 12 pounds of muscle in a year, that’s fantastic progress. It’s unrealistic for most; even newbies usually can’t sustain that growth rate for more than 6 months. But let’s be generous. 12 pounds a year is one pound a month, or just over half an ounce (about 15 grams) a day. A pound of muscle is made up of just over 600kcals, meaning you’d need a surplus of just over 20kcals (!) above maintenance to put on that half ounce.

Granted, that’s assuming the body is perfectly efficient, that the growth process itself does not take any calories, and that no calories go toward recovery, which has to happen before the body can grow. So the exact number of calories will need to be greater – let’s be generous again and increase it five-fold to 100kcals. If you track your calories and your body-fat percentage over time as you train and gain muscle, you can determine how many calories go toward recovery and growth and how many are lost due to inefficiencies, but as an initial estimate, 100kcals will suffice. Also recall that we were already generous in our initial 1-pound-per-month assumption. Whatever the exact number may be, that bodybuilders routinely fatten themselves up is proof that they vastly overshoot it. Why? Because, again, the body does not use nutrients beyond need.

Mentzer recommended eating at a 300-500kcal surplus each day, but I don’t think it’s necessary. For the reasons I gave, I think a 100kcal surplus is plenty. Some people might still call that ‘bulking’, but I think that misrepresents the typical meaning of the word – which is, again, to unmethodically force-feed yourself on an ungodly surplus to hasten muscle growth.

100kcals/day is all you need. That’s less than a slice of toast with jam.

If you’re overnourished or well-nourished and you ain’t growing then your problem is related to training. [T]raining is the first requirement. Nutrition is only a secondary consideration. It is only [once you have] stimulated growth through proper, high-intensity training that nutrition then becomes a factor, and then it’s quite simple: […] all you got to do is eat a well-balanced diet […].

Food does not stimulate muscle growth. Training, specifically intensity of effort, does. You only need food later, in adequate amounts, to supply the nutrients the body requires to facilitate the growth you have already stimulated by training intensely.

Getting adequate nutrition is easy; gaining fat is easy, too. Stimulating muscle growth is hard. So work hard in the gym, not in the kitchen.

As a bodybuilder, fat is your enemy. You should not want to put on any fat. If you start on the moderate 100kcal daily surplus when you’re already pretty lean, then train with enough intensity to stimulate muscle growth, you will gain muscle and ~no fat. You will save months by not having to go through a cutting phase. Think of not just the time but also the misery this spares you!

Track your food using something like Cronometer, figure out your daily maintenance calories, train intensely and infrequently (no more than twice a week), and eat at a 100kcal daily surplus. Be methodical, conscientious, and precise. As your increases in strength and size slow down over time, increase your calorie intake by another 100kcal or so. Going into a positive calorie balance, which is required for muscle growth, can, as Mentzer put it, “be done in a methodical, intelligent fashion, such that growth-production needs are precisely met with little or no excess to cause any appreciable fat deposition.”

This is great news. You don’t need to gain fat before you get in shape.

If you are already lean at the beginning of your bodybuilding journey, you have a big advantage. Please do not squander it by ‘bulking’.

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Update 2024-06-24

Saketh shared with me an article that says how many calories it takes to put on a pound of muscle.

The article was written kinda carelessly (typos and formatting issues), so I recommend taking it with a grain of salt.

First off, contrary to Mentzer’s claim that a pound of muscle has 600kcals, the article says it’s 700. Presumably, that’s because muscle is not 100% lean.

Next, the article says:

Some people have assumed that if a pound of muscle only contains 700 calories then to create a pound of muscle, you only need to eat 700 calories above maintenance. If this thinking was correct, then you could gain a pound of muscle every month by eating 23 calories per day over maintenance. If that sounds too good to be true.....it is.

It takes more energy to store calories in the body when weight is being gained.

So even though one pound of muscle may only contain about 700 calories, it may take 2000 or more calories to build that muscle in the first place.

And therefore, even if you create a 3,500 surplus and 100% muscle was being gained, you wouldn’t gain 5lbs of muscle. In reality, you’d gain closer to 1.75lbs.

The article draws this conclusion:

You need about 2800 or so excess calories to build a pound of muscle. When we consisder [sic] that most people can only gain a few pounds of actual muscle maximally per month, that comes down to 200-300 calories over maintenance daily. Not much at all.

A more realistic muscle gain of one pound per month would then require a surplus of around 93kcals per day, confirming my original claim that “100kcals/day is all you need”.

Therefore, as a rule of thumb, I suggest going 5% above daily maintenance.