Hello! Had a question regarding your To Be a Beast article:
Our hypothetical novice, Johnny, is now 180lbs and squatting 255 x 5 x 3. He’s hovering around 20% bodyfat and he’s getting awfully squirrelly about having lost his abs.
Beyond the fact that I never had abs this is me, pretty much. 5’9", 177lbs, ~19% bodyfat. 1RMs are 305lb squat, 370lb DL, 195lb bench, 135lb press. Waist about ~33.5in. When I talk about potentially going on a cut people look at my like I’m crazy, as they probably should.
I’d like to gain about 10 more pounds while maintaining a good body composition. During a recent dirty bulk I didn’t think through very well I gained about 15 pounds (starting at ~15% bodyfat) at rate of about 30% muscle to 70% fat. I didn’t keep good records but I think I was gaining on average around 4-5 pounds a month. Can I expect the ratio of muscle to fat gain to improve if I focus on bulking cleanly and slowly as laid out in the article? If I were to gain 10 lbs at a 50/50 split of muscle and fat, that would put me at around 20.6%, a little fluffy but nothing terrible. I don’t care if it takes a year, I’d rather get as much muscle growth in as possible before I even think about going on a cut.
Thank you!
Randy,
I’m not sure if it matters whether the bulk is clean or dirty with respect to food quality, though I suppose if you objectively measured food quality via one of the tools that’s currently available you could argue about that, but I digress…
Ultimately, I think the three main determinants of your success (or failure) are as follows:
- Genetics. “Can’t touch this.”- MC Hammer
- Rate of weight gain. I wouldn’t advise 4-5lbs per month unless you’re genetically gifted or on drugs. 1-2lbs per month would be more advisable.
- Training. Not sure what kind of training you’re doing, but you might just need some more stimulus to drive the adaptations you want.
-Jordan
I’m not sure if it matters whether the bulk is clean or dirty with respect to food quality, though I suppose if you objectively measured food quality via one of the tools that’s currently available you could argue about that, but I digress…
Sorry, I meant dirty in the sense that I was just focusing on maximizing weight gain in order to increase my lifts while running NLP. My food is relatively clean - about 70-80 percent of my diet is single ingredient foods from pre-measured meals and the rest of the time I just sort of adhere to IIFYM, which definitely includes some junk.
- Rate of weight gain. I wouldn’t advise 4-5lbs per month unless you’re genetically gifted or on drugs. 1-2lbs per month would be more advisable.
I think this is my main problem, thanks.