When to bump calories during bulk
lilawolf
Posts: 1,690 Member
My bulk/cut schedule has been thrown off a lot due to spending 2 months in Thailand away from the iron and needing to drop my weight a lot. I am just now starting to get back to where the weights are relatively difficult, but I'm not failing yet
Program: Stronglifts
Calories: 2100 + exercise calories (from experience this should be at or just below my maintenance. I've lost 2lbs in 2 months at 2300 net cals before though I wasn't using a scale and may have been overestimating my intake)
Weight loss/gain: I've been at 2100ish for 3 weeks and I've gained ~1lb, but I also added creatine at this same time which I believe is the culprit.
Should I wait until I'm failing my lifts to bump calories more, or do it now? I know that I will gain fat and that's fine, but I don't want to gain ONLY fat. I'm kind of in a hurry, because I want a fairly long bulk, but I also want to cut back down for summer time.... Thoughts?
Program: Stronglifts
Calories: 2100 + exercise calories (from experience this should be at or just below my maintenance. I've lost 2lbs in 2 months at 2300 net cals before though I wasn't using a scale and may have been overestimating my intake)
Weight loss/gain: I've been at 2100ish for 3 weeks and I've gained ~1lb, but I also added creatine at this same time which I believe is the culprit.
Should I wait until I'm failing my lifts to bump calories more, or do it now? I know that I will gain fat and that's fine, but I don't want to gain ONLY fat. I'm kind of in a hurry, because I want a fairly long bulk, but I also want to cut back down for summer time.... Thoughts?
0
Replies
-
I usually add 100-200 calories if my body weight stays the same for a couple weeks in a row (maybe a month). Gotta play it by ear.0
-
So you don't take into account your lifting performance?0
-
Well, if I were to take my lifting performance into account, I would just eat 10,000 calories a day every day. Which is basically what some elite powerlifters/strongmen do. Pure power at the cost of anything and everything.
However, I would like to not put on 30lbs of pure fat in the next month so I have to compromise. A couple hundred extra calories of surplus to keep the fat at bay while still making slowwwwwwww progress on my lifts and musculature.
Point being, if I added calories every time I started failing lifts I would be extremely obese right now. I fail all the time, sometimes for weeks in a row. Crap, I've only added 10lbs to my OHP in the last 7 months.
Does that help at all?0
