My Bulking Plan

Glitch267 wrote: »

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Here are my starting photos. What do you think my BF % is?

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Your BF% is, or should be, meaningless to you at this point. Just work your plan to add mass.

.It's a valid question though, I'm sure someone will come along and hazard a guess. It's really good to keep records for future bulks, cuts and maintenance. Measure the circumference of your arms, chest, waist, legs and take a 7 day average of your daily weight to get a true picture.. Plot it on a graph.

Also, I am concerned that you are doing this hand in hand with your ED recovery plan. Most people in recovery aren't encouraged to exercise and are put on high calories to do internal repairs to organs.

Fellow hard-gainer here. Been a skinny dude my whole life. Hopefully I can help you out, about to roll over onto month 8 of my bulk.

You are going to gain 2-3 lbs of muscle in 2 months. Max. The "rule" is 1lb per month. That is all your body can synthesize, given you eat enough calories, have enough protein, and provide growth stimulus lifting heavy and often.

If you want to look "bigger", as in muscular, your goal is going to be keeping your body fat gains low while adding muscle. I will tell you what, I have gained 15 lbs since I started, and I look less in shape than when I started (even though I am MUCH stronger than I was when I started). Looking muscular/ripped/shredded acutally is mostly attributed to low body fat.

My advice for you, starting out in your fitness journey and looking to get bigger is the following:

-Make a plan. Seriously, just sit down for an hour and map out your next 6-12 months. Sounds like you already have some kind of goal in mind. Figure out your workouts, figure out which days you are going to add more reps or more weight to each exercise (progressive overload), get meals planned a week in advance and have a mass cook-off once a week so you don't have to spend too much time in the kitchen. Just make sure you plan bro. I would say over half the people that fail to make progress do so because they had no goals or plan in mind when they started. It is easy to get off track when you aren't tracking anything in the first place!

-If you are truly at 2500 calories per day as your TDEE, make sure you are eating 500+ calories over your TDEE, especially for you given you have lots of room to grow still. Sounds like you already have that figured out. I am 6'4", 215lbs, and my TDEE is only 2600 cals, so I saw your number and it struck me as odd, but you did state you were highly active, so maybe that is where you got your number. I would still double check it to be safe.

-Automatically add 100 cals to your macros every 4 weeks. Don't wait until you plateau to bump your calories. Your time is valuable, and those 1-2 weeks it takes you to realize you hit a plateau (unable to get any progress in lifting) add up to months of wasted time over the course of your fitness plan.

-Be really careful with compound lifts just starting out. If you haven't developed the proper stabilizer muscles yet, you can end up falling or hurting yourself, even if your form is great. Do bodyweight versions of the exercises, or use and empty bar for the first week or two, with high reps until your muscles feel fatigued. This will help "wake up" these muscles that might not be used to the movements, and starts to form the neural connections that are needed to recruit more muscle fibers during lifting.

-Being a hard-gainer, I have found my body type responds to pretty much only one thing: punishment. Some lifters can get away with only working a muscle group once during a workout and have it grow, no problems. I found that I need several exercises, spaced out over the workout, that target the same muscle group in order to trigger it to actually grow. When I leave the gym, I AM EXHUASTED. An example chest/shoulders day workout: 10 min high intensity cardio warmup-> Bench->Military Press->Shrugs->Chest Fly->Delt Raises->Tricep Extensions. My reps sets vary, but I found 4 x8 at heavy weight to be pretty effective. Everybody has different bodies, and it is important to figure out how yours best responds, but in general, if you stagnate for awhile, it is important to learn to change things up.

MrM27 wrote: »

Brolympus wrote: »

Fellow hard-gainer here. Been a skinny dude my whole life. Hopefully I can help you out, about to roll over onto month 8 of my bulk.

You are going to gain 2-3 lbs of muscle in 2 months. Max. The "rule" is 1lb per month. That is all your body can synthesize, given you eat enough calories, have enough protein, and provide growth stimulus lifting heavy and often.

If you want to look "bigger", as in muscular, your goal is going to be keeping your body fat gains low while adding muscle. I will tell you what, I have gained 15 lbs since I started, and I look less in shape than when I started (even though I am MUCH stronger than I was when I started). Looking muscular/ripped/shredded acutally is mostly attributed to low body fat.

My advice for you, starting out in your fitness journey and looking to get bigger is the following:

-Make a plan. Seriously, just sit down for an hour and map out your next 6-12 months. Sounds like you already have some kind of goal in mind. Figure out your workouts, figure out which days you are going to add more reps or more weight to each exercise (progressive overload), get meals planned a week in advance and have a mass cook-off once a week so you don't have to spend too much time in the kitchen. Just make sure you plan bro. I would say over half the people that fail to make progress do so because they had no goals or plan in mind when they started. It is easy to get off track when you aren't tracking anything in the first place!

-If you are truly at 2500 calories per day as your TDEE, make sure you are eating 500+ calories over your TDEE, especially for you given you have lots of room to grow still. Sounds like you already have that figured out. I am 6'4", 215lbs, and my TDEE is only 2600 cals, so I saw your number and it struck me as odd, but you did state you were highly active, so maybe that is where you got your number. I would still double check it to be safe.

-Automatically add 100 cals to your macros every 4 weeks. Don't wait until you plateau to bump your calories. Your time is valuable, and those 1-2 weeks it takes you to realize you hit a plateau (unable to get any progress in lifting) add up to months of wasted time over the course of your fitness plan.

-Be really careful with compound lifts just starting out. If you haven't developed the proper stabilizer muscles yet, you can end up falling or hurting yourself, even if your form is great. Do bodyweight versions of the exercises, or use and empty bar for the first week or two, with high reps until your muscles feel fatigued. This will help "wake up" these muscles that might not be used to the movements, and starts to form the neural connections that are needed to recruit more muscle fibers during lifting.

-Being a hard-gainer, I have found my body type responds to pretty much only one thing: punishment. Some lifters can get away with only working a muscle group once during a workout and have it grow, no problems. I found that I need several exercises, spaced out over the workout, that target the same muscle group in order to trigger it to actually grow. When I leave the gym, I AM EXHUASTED. An example chest/shoulders day workout: 10 min high intensity cardio warmup-> Bench->Military Press->Shrugs->Chest Fly->Delt Raises->Tricep Extensions. My reps sets vary, but I found 4 x8 at heavy weight to be pretty effective. Everybody has different bodies, and it is important to figure out how yours best responds, but in general, if you stagnate for awhile, it is important to learn to change things up.

1 lb per month? Yeah.....no. If you are an advanced lifted then maybe but not as a beginner. Aiming for 1 lb per month is a nice way to spin your wheels.

Think about what you recommended. You said go 500 above maintenance, so basically 1 lb per week. But then you say he can only add 1 lb per month of muscle "max". So basically you are advising him to add 1 lb of muscle a month and 3 lbs of fat per month. And that's with doing everything 100% correctly? Makes sense?? No, it doesn't.

http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-much-muscle-can-you-build-naturally/

I won't even bother going into picking apart your sub optimal advice for training.

Except your muscles are going to use somewhere between 200-400 calories everyday to repair and synthesize new fibers. Hence why "clean bulk" plans say to go 300 over TDEE. So no, he is not going to be gaining 1lb of fat per week, BRAH. If he sticks to the 500 rule, he might end up with an extra 100-200 calories a day, which will pack on about a 1lb of fat per month, but will also keep his body from slowing down muscle fiber production. 500 is mostly there in case you lowballed your initial TDEE and you are undereating your first month or two.

"Aiming for 1 lb per month is a nice way to spin your wheels."

You realized the source you gave states he is going to pack on MORE than 1lbs per month of muscle in year 1, correct? Did you like....read the article even?

Here is my source. Have had a ton of success using these principles:

http://www.acaloriecounter.com/building-muscle.php

I enjoy that you are acting like an expert on the subject, but judging from your profile pics you are hardly any bigger than I am. Shredded? Sure. But huge is not the word I would use. Let's not mention you are attacking me saying I am incorrect and then you go on to contradict your own source. lulz.