 Next question is from Liam McCurkbride. What is the most effective way to bulk? And should I track macros or be intuitive? You know, here's the thing with intuitive eating, right? Intuitive eating means you're in touch with the signals of your body. You're eating kind of what your body needs at any given moment. The direction intuitive eating will bring you is balance. You're gonna be relatively lean, relatively muscular and strong, fit and healthy. You wanna go outside of that, right? You wanna get extreme, you wanna get super shredded or super big. It's not intuitive. There's nothing intuitive about pushing my body to gain 15 pounds of mass or to get down to 4% body fat. It's just, it's not intuitive because your body is always trying to be healthy. And if you're intuitive about it, you're gonna be healthy. You push outside of that, you're probably gonna have to track. I know I do. When I'm trying to bulk, I have to track because if I do it intuitive, it ain't gonna happen. You can only be intuitive if you've had the history of putting the reps in first and the training behind that. So that's always like, you gotta track to even know what that looks like. Otherwise it's just a guessing game. So there's nothing, it's not necessarily intuitive. It's just that you're kind of like guessing and feeling your body's signals which can totally be misleading. Whereas tracking, like at least to understand where your maintenance is. I think that's the very first thing. I remember being so challenged answering this question because when we wrote the intuitive guide, we got a bunch of this. Cause we're promoting that. I mean, ideally I think that that's the place to be. Like you wanna get there. I think for when we talk about general health, longevity, right? Sustainability. Yeah, we've talked about like that is the place to get. Like you wanna get to a place of intuitive eating, intuitive training to where it's not this big stress or something you have to think about all the time in order to do it. But the truth is if you have very specific goals, even as long as we've been training, I don't eat intuitively. If I really care about adding 10 pounds of muscle or shredding 10 pounds of fat and I wanna do it as fast and as efficient as possible, I'm tracking still today. Now, does that mean that I couldn't do it intuitively and maybe slowly get there? Well, yeah, I could probably do that. I can intuitive- I don't think you'd be able to do it to get down to 5% though. No, you're right. Cause it just- Intuitive is your body saying no. Yeah, well the more extreme the goal is the more important it becomes to be diligent about your tracking because there's less room for air as you scale up or down. Yeah, intuitive could take you from inactive to fit or obese to relatively lean, right? Intuitive is home base. This is your home base. Now, if your home base is healthy and balanced and you're fit and you can move and you feel good generally and then you wanna move away from home base and go extreme. Extreme is not healthy. It just isn't like forcing your body to hit ridiculous PRs all the time is not longevity promoting. It's fun. And I think that there's something to it with quality of life on that stuff. But we'd be lying to ourselves if we said that that was about longevity. Same thing with getting super shredded like is getting down to single digit body fat percentage is that good for longevity? No, no, longevity is higher than that, right? It's not super high, but it's higher than that. Getting super, you get on stage and you compete. There's nothing, that doesn't promote longevity. It just looks super shredded. So if you're trying to do it in an intuitive way and you're really intuitive about it and you're honest your body is saying, no, I don't wanna keep eating 3,500 calories a day or no, I don't wanna get down to that leanness. I mean, I know when I get down below 9% body fat or 8% body fat, my intuitive signals are saying you need to eat, this is not, you don't wanna be here. Well, and I know there's definitely people right now that are listening like, oh, I have no problem. I eat intuitively and I'm shredded or I can do this. It's like, there's always gonna be exception. And by the way, congratulations, you're a black belt in this. I mean, when you get to a certain level of training, dieting for so long, you get pretty good at being able to adjust a few things to get your body to respond in the direction that you want to go. I wanna add a few pounds of muscle. I know there's a few things I can do right now that will instantly do that for me. And the same thing goes for going the opposite direction. So it doesn't mean that there's not people that can't move their body weight up or down or get really shredded and lean or get really buff from intuitive eating. It's just, it's way more difficult for the average person. And if you really have a very specific goal and you also wanna do it as quick and as efficient as possible, you just gotta track. Now to answer the part of the question, that's like, what's the most effective way to bulk? Figure out your maintenance calories. So whatever you need to eat to not gain weight and to not lose weight. Add about five to 700 calories to that depending on how your body responds. Make sure you eat about, you know, generally one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And depending on your gut health and how you feel, you don't wanna go too low carb and that's it. And that'll be the most effective way, right? You could go a thousand calories or 1500 calories over maintenance. You'll gain more weight, but it won't be more muscle. In my experience is about five to 700 over is kind of the magic sweet spot for most people. And then here's the other part of this. If you have a workout that's not stimulating muscle growth then it's not gonna work. You're just gonna gain body fat. So if you send the right signal, bulking is actually easy. If you're not sending the right signal, bulking can be a real big pain in the ass. So make sure your workout is really effective, really well programmed. And then you add 500 calories to your maintenance and you'll see muscle. My favorite thing to do as far as the workout and being effective is when you make this mental decision that I'm gonna switch to a bulk, like the advice I give to clients is this is where I have them switch to another maps program. So whatever they're currently following, it doesn't matter where they're at and I normally will go, okay, we're gonna add five, 700 calories and now we're also gonna transition into a different program. So a whole new stimulus. Absolutely.