- 37m who has worked out with compound lifts in some capacity his entire adult life.
- Spent 1.5years on slow cut going from 195—>160 to get to 10% BF and see unflexed 6pack for first time in my life
- Finished cut a few months ago and slowly transitioning to bulk. Currently 165lb.
- I do compound lifts, hitting all the major muscle, 3x a week and all the minor muscles should be getting hit by something atleast 1x a week.
- 6 months ago I started going to BJJ 4x a week.
I want to get back to cycling bulks(~ 0.25lb per week) and cuts so I can eventually walk around lean at a higher body weight. I have successfully done some variation of this my entire life so programming for this wouldn’t normally be an issue. My issue is the BJJ has put a wrench in the works.
I sleep 7-8 hours every night. I laugh at myself about it, but I have even cut out almost all alcohol because I can’t spare any recovery. Between 4x a week BJJ and 3x a week lifting, I feel very strapped for recovery. I just had to take an unplanned deload week 2 weeks ago because I just started to sleep terrible & everything was aching for weeks. I’m walking around sore all the time. I think with a planned deload every 4/5 weeks, I can keep the current volume up, but I don’t think I can increase it at all.
In the past, I would workout 4x a week and easily be at 50% more volume.
The question:
I don’t know if I can increase my volume to a high enough level for my lifting experience (atleast intermediate) to sufficiently benefit from bulking. I’m worried that without enough hypertrophy stimulus (volume) I will just be putting on fat and spinning my wheels for no reason.
Thoughts?
Timelinex,
Thanks for the post. There are a few interesting questions in here. Don’t worry, I’ll try to be brief 
Do You Need To Be In A Surplus To Gain Muscle?
No, but people will generally gain more muscle in a surplus compared to maintenance, where they will gain more muscle than in a deficit. There’s lots of nuance here, but I feel comfortable saying that for trained individuals not using anabolics, gaining significant amounts of muscle mass requires some weight gain.
Does The Rate Of Weight Gain Affect Muscle:Fat Ratio?
Yes. Greater surpluses do produce more muscle than smaller surpluses, but they also result in more fat gain. Generally speaking, the increase in fat mass gain is greater than the increase in muscle. In other words, it makes the ratio of muscle:fat (also known as the P-ratio) “worse” compared to a modest surplus.
Do You Need More Volume To Gain Muscle?
Maybe. There does seem to be a dose -dependent relationship between training load and muscle gain, where training volume is the most dynamic part of training load. The caveat here is that people need to be able to tolerate the training, e.g. fuel and recover from it.
It seems like you may be at the limit of your training tolerance right now physiologically and logistically. I suspect you’re getting a decent enough dose of training load from your current program to drive muscle growth in a surplus. Would you gain more with more volume? Likely. However, I do wonder if some of your current experience (e.g. sore, tired, etc.) may be driven by insufficient energy intake. Just a thought!
If you’re trying to increase training volume with limited training resources, you may want to check our our Time Crunch template. The hypertrophy-priority programs in there would be right up your alley.
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