New year, new fitness goal? One of the biggest difficulties for athletes is how to lean bulk without getting fat. Find out below.
Getting stronger without getting fat. A goal most people have in common, though not easy to achieve. However, the Buff Dudes shared some tips on how to get to lean bulk without getting fat.
The Buff Dudes is a YouTube channel with over 2.5 million subscribers. Despite the name of the channel, brothers Hudson and Brandon White are not your stereotypical bro-gym. They deliver clear information with a good background story while poking fun at how buffed they are.
In one of his videos, they tackled the idea of trying to put as much lean body mass without gaining too much fat. “If you are trying to build lean muscle mass, you’re going to have to know more than just what it says on the scale,” says Brandon White.
How to Lean Bulk Without Getting Fat
Know Your Body Composition
Before you start preparing to build lean muscle mass, you need to know and measure your body composition. That means knowing your body fat percentage, photos of your body to see the progress, body circumferences such as your neck, arms and waist.
Calculate Your Calories and Macros
The BMR (basal metabolic rate), which calculates the amount of energy your body needs to function while resting, will not be useful as most people would think on how to lean bulk without getting fat. For that, you need to know your TDEE, the total daily energy expenditure.
Around 500 calories a day above maintenance, which means for most people around 3,500 calories per day that you will need to eat to be able to lean bulk.
After that, you need to calculate your macros. “This can be a little bit of a trial and error,” says Brandon, “but making sure you track what you eat and the percentages that you have are really gonna tell what works best for you.”
Buy the Correct Food for You
The macro intake is different for each person and whatever your macros are, it should dictate what you buy at the grocery shop. If you need to add fat to your daily intake, you can go for salmon, steak, or avocados. On the opposite spectrum, you should buy more lean meat such as chicken and turkey.
Brandon eats 40% protein, 40% carbs and 20% fat. Eating well in every meal you make is very important, he reminds everyone. “When you’re eating that much, you want to make sure to keep it not only simple but healthy as well.”
Have a Workout Strategy
“Compound exercises are really the best bang for your buck,” Brandon says. When eating more than usual, you have a lot of fuel in your body and you need to make sure that fuel is being put to good use, hence the compound movements.
“Compounds take priority over isolations [movements] especially if you are trying to gain that quality muscle size and strength. Only after that, you can supplement with isolation exercises in movements,” Brandon says.
If you are a beginner, the buff dude suggests full body compound movements three days a week, much like a 5 x 5 training program.
After that, you can start experimenting with supersets, drop sets, different techniques with other isolation movements. Just make sure you hit the gym harder than you are used to because you have that extra fuel in your body. “You want to increase your training intensity as you bulk. That’s going to make sure you put on that quality muscle size and keep the fat off.”
Recover Properly
You don’t grow your muscles during your workouts, but rather while you are resting and your muscle tissues who have been damaged are healing and getting bigger.
Besides a good night sleep, you can use a foam roller to get a better flow into your muscle so they can repair properly. Make sure you are stretching and hydrating properly as well.
Read More: Top Training Programs to Gain Size and Mass
An enviable physique requires strong lifts and careful diet planning.
Image Credit: takoburito/iStock/Getty Images
A dedicated workout ethic and proper diet are key to bulking up. Eating whole foods rich in lean protein, rather than highly processed foods, is especially important when it comes to putting on muscle rather than fat.
Besides marring a buff physique, belly fat is especially concerning as it's inflammatory and raises your risk of disease. If you're serious about hitting the weight rack and fuel well throughout the day — you can add pounds of muscle without expanding your belly.
Add Calories Carefully
To gain weight — including muscle weight — you must eat a surplus of calories. Use an online calculator to determine how many calories you use daily, according to your age, size, gender and activity level. Then, increase this number by 250 to 500 calories to determine a daily caloric intake target that encourages muscle gain.
If you increase your calories by too much, it will lead to fat gain. You can only realistically gain at most 1/2 to 1 pound of muscle per week. If you add more than 500 calories, you'll be bulking up by adding fat, not healthy muscle.
If your body type tends to add fat easily, make the surplus right around 250 calories. Extra fat may or may not head straight to your belly — but why risk it?
The quality of the calories you eat matters, too. Consuming fast food, processed snacks, sugar, saturated fats and refined grains means you're more likely to add belly fat. Instead, use extra servings of protein as the primary way to increase caloric intake.
A weight-training athlete seeking to add muscle should aim to eat 0.75 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. For a 150-pound person, this comes out to 113 grams per day. Divide that over four or five meals for 20 to 30 grams of protein at each meal.
Other quality foods to use for adding calories include healthy fats, such as olive oil and avocado, and whole grains, including brown rice and quinoa.
Vary your workouts by using different equipment.
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Lifting Weights Is a Must
You'll also gain fat, and possibly belly fat, if you fail to hit the gym. For every pound of weight gained while sedentary, two-thirds of it is weight from fat.
Include short cardio sessions, such as brisk walking or stair climbing, when your goal is adding bulk because it keeps your heart healthy and your joints supple. However, your primary exercise focus needs to be on lifting heavy weights.
Challenge all the major muscle groups at three or more workouts per week. Leave at least 48 hours between workouts for specific muscle groups to permit them to repair and grow. If you lift more than three times per week, perform a split routine in which, for example, you work the upper body one day and lower body the next.
The major muscle groups are the chest, back, abs, biceps, triceps, shoulders, legs and hips. Large, compound movements that work multiple muscle groups at once stimulate multiple muscle fibers and contribute to growth.
Build in moves such as deadlifts, chest presses, barbell rows, squats and leg curls. Aim for at least one set of four to eight repetitions of an exercise or two for each muscle group using a weight that makes it hard to complete the final efforts with good form. Work up to as many as six sets for the most gains.
A study published in Obesity in 2010 showed that resistance training deters visceral fat regain, too. Visceral fat is the dangerous type of belly fat that surrounds your internal organs and raises your risk of disease.