New Calorie Surplus Research

Hi Jordan,

There is a new research paper by Eric Helms where they found that maintenance, a small surplus, and a large surplus all produced the same amount of muscle growth with the only difference being more fat mass gain for the larger surplus groups.

In the past, I believe you have said that a bigger surplus usually results in more muscle growth than a small surplus, but the bigger surplus comes with much more fat mass gain (please correct me if this is not what you’ve said).

So, I was curious of what your thoughts are on this research since it seems to show that maintenance and a large surplus both result in the same amount of muscle growth.

Thanks for all the great stuff you guys put out, especially the podcast! (also, is there a chance you guys will talk about this paper on the podcast?)

Yes, I saw the paper- available here.

I think this paper supports that larger surpluses track with larger increases in body fat, as measured by skin folds in this study.

I do not think this paper provides great insight into what happens with muscle hypertrophy at different levels, as only the biceps got bigger in all groups (or even the two surplus groups) and allowed direct comparison. It was a growth of 0.2-0.3cm. To me, that doesn’t really allow for a big enough different to say anything definitively about energy surpluses in a heterogenous group of trainees. That also is an important point that I’d agree with, that on average, magnitude of surplus doesn’t necessarily predict hypertrophy outcomes across a highly variable population. I actually didn’t see that they reported weight change between groups either, so it’s difficult to say much about the correlation between magnitude of weight gain and hypertrophy outcomes compared to previous data on this.

I don’t think the evidence in this paper changes my mind re: surplus size and hypertrophy. Specifically, existing evidence shows that larger surpluses and subsequently greater amounts of weight gain produces more hypertrophy than less in individuals who are lifting weights. On the other hand, the existing evidence didn’t use ultrasound to measure muscle thickness and the differences in weight change were quite substantial. I do think this paper reinforces the notion that surplus size =/= strength gain. I think additional papers showing similar results, e.g. no real differences in hypertrophy as measured by muscle thickness values despite different amounts of weight gain would change my mind.

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