Who doesn’t love a good bulking season. It’s the fabulous portion of time when some peeps eat donuts half the day, clean eaters are stuffing themselves with chicken, oatmeal and sweet potatoes and everyone is beast mode in the gym. I mean, I heart food, you heart food, we all heart food.

But how do you go about a bulking season in the first place? And, can you do it without getting all extra “bulky”?

Types of bulking

People can go about bulking in various ways. A clean bulk, a dirty bulk and the third is what I like to call a lean bulk.

Clean bulk: A clean bulk is when you methodically increase calories over the season to steadily gain about .5-1 lb per week. You need those added calories to really build the energy expensive tissue called muscle. And most of these calories are from clean, whole foods.

Dirty bulk: This method may be darn fun for a while but it will take its toll. Dirty bulking is when you eat what ever, whenever without any thought to macros (protein, carbs, fat) or caloric intake. While this will definilty provide enough calories to build muscle, it may or may not provide enough micro-nutrients (vitamins and minerals) and you could pack on that fat way faster and gain way more than you would like.  Let’s not forget you are going to have to burn that fat off to hit the stage and we all know how hard that is.

Lean bulk: This is similar to a clean bulk but with an added alternating HIIT program I like to do. Works like a charm. I’ll explain more in depth in a minute.

How to

It’s safe to say I covered dirty bulking pretty in depth above ;D so I will not explain that any further in this section.

How to Clean Bulk: 

Find your caloric intake needs. Super simple. Take your body weight and multiply it by 16. A 135 lb woman would need to consume 2,160 calories. Monitor your weight and of course track progress by pics every 4 weeks. I personally like the accuracy of taking weight daily and using the average over 7 days. Body weight can fluctuate so much, especially for woman so save yourself and look at a weekly average. If you don’t gain anything, add about 200 calories. Keep monitoring and adding in this fashion while slowly gaining weight. And don’t forget to lift beast mode. 😀

How to Lean Bulk:

WTF is a lean bulk. It’s like a huge contradiction in terms. How do I get lean and bulk? Well it is possible. You can increase calories, gain muscle and ditch gaining all the weight. The following method is something I like to do in clients’ off seasons and for those that need to build metabolic capacity after having yo-yo dieted themselves overweight.

how it works: Start at maintenance calories. Enter HIIT program. What I like to do is alternate cardio weeks. This can be done in several ways but essentially I will have clients do about 15-25 HIIT intervals overs a weeks time or 7 day span. That could be three days of 5 HIIT intervals each, 6 days of 3 HIIT intervals, 3 intervals for for 6 days and so on.  The next 7 day span, no cardio. Continue lifting as usual. (Read more about HIIT cardio here.)

3 HIIT intervals would look like this:

• • warm up 5 minutes

• • 30 seconds super hard

• • 90 seconds slow jog

• • 30 seconds super hard

• • 90 seconds slow jog

• • 30 seconds super hard

• • 90 seconds slow jog

• • cool down

• DONE

After a few weeks of this when you have settled into the program alternating the HIIT week and the  no cardio weeks, if weight has stayed the same or gone down, add about 100 calories to your diet at the beginning of a HIIT week. The next week, no cardio, just lift, diet stays the same including those added calories. If weight has gone up, you may opt out of adding calories depending on your goals. Otherwise, add more calories in the next HIIT week.  Feel it out as you go.

What happens on this program is the HIIT cardio spikes protein synthesis which means muscle building but you get the post workout calorie burn. The best of both worlds! By alternating the weeks and doing the super short intervals within a weeks times, every other week, your body doesn’t adapt to the cardio like it would if you were doing the same amount of steady state each week.

Take this example of one of my clients. This client needed help to build muscle and lose fat but wasn’t losing weight on the lower calories she was eating. So I took her maintenance calories, set her up on the alternating HIIT protocol and got some results.

Another example below. This client  came to me with the goal of gaining muscle and losing fat and was stuck. I didn’t feel dropping calories more would help her long term goal so, I put her on a lean reverse (email me about). She is lifting regularly, doing some short HIIT sessions and maintaining her weight while we increase calories.

Below is another tenacious client of mine who came to me with goals to build muscle and lose fat. She was in a place where her calories were lower than I’d like to start for  cutting down and she was stuck. So, I suggested a lean reverse diet and she was game.

She currently  lifts 4-5 times per week, has alternating HIIT weeks where she does very short HIIT sessions every other week and is up 265 calories from her original maintenance calories.

You do have to be patient on this program. If you stick with it, you will see calories go up and your physique change before your eyes! Another bonus is your contest prep will be cake (well, better than it would have been!).

I have female clients that have taken the off season to do the above program, not gain weight, build muscle and metabolic capacity and  go into shows where I have pulled out nearly all cardio save maybe two HIIT sessions a week at 4 intervals and getting super lean while eating over 200 carbs with around 120-170 protein and 35-50 fat grams….

Of course every one is very individual and this program may be needed to be done longer than others to get the above desired effects.

Also see  Build Muscle While Losing Fat; Fact or Fallacy.