 Cardio is overrated for cutting and dieting. Cardio is overrated for getting lean. Good morning. Good morning. Come to story time around the fire. We're talking about bulking. I'm going to go throw some clothes on and warm up. I got six sets of two. Bulking baby, that's what we're doing out here. You just don't want to get shredded. What I want to do and what I'm doing is different, you know? Sometimes you got to do what you got to do, whether you want to do it or you don't want to do it. Anyone ever tell you that? Yeah, you tell me that all the time. My mom used to yell at me all the time. Sometimes, Mikey, we got to do things we don't want to do. That's what you say to us. Because it's fucking true. Dan, Seabass, and Kyle are hanging off of a cliff. Who are you saving first? Oh, who are you saving? I feel like I'm saving Seabass. Well, first of all, I probably can't pull any of them that regardless of. Yeah, you can't. You think so? You got to look 430. I'm not going to give my reasons to you guys who come up with your own. Okay, what if Mike's hanging? Oh, if it's just, is it just you? No. Do as I say, not as I do. So with bulking, right, there's things and tips and tricks that I do that we're going to go into in this video. Like everything else we say, as strict as your goals are, as strict as your plan and your action and execution need to be. If you're trying to be Mr. Olympia, or you're trying to be the greatest power lifter that ever walked the planet, you should probably have a stricter guidelines and plan than I have. If you just want to build some muscle, some strength and look pretty good when you decide to cut back down, which we're doing in January, stay tuned for transformation challenge. Not really a challenge, but documentation. Then you can get away with a couple other things. I don't know exactly one, two, three tips, but something easily I do. The team killed it on our launch this week. Seabass and Aview are here grinding. So I bought cookies for the team and I ate a cookie where when I'm dieting, I don't eat no cookies. One simple trick that I do like to do is obviously when we're dieting or cutting, I'm tracking every single thing I eat when I'm bulking or it's off season or I'm not as worried about my body weight. I will just track my protein. So right now I'm making sure I get 200 grams of protein a day and then I eat kind of whatever else I want. Trying to get some veggies in, trying to get some water in, and there's some basic rules I still follow. Like I try not to drink my calories. Maybe I'll do a cappuccino or a latte or something small, but I'm not chugging Gatorades full of sugar. So anything that's crazy calorie dense, even like the peanut butters and the guacamole's and stuff like that, I still avoid when I'm bulking just because I know how easily it is to go from 3,000 calories a day up to like 6,000. Little changes I make and I enjoy switching from like chickens and turkeys, 99% ground turkey. Now I'm eating a little bit more beef. I want to taste a little bit better. It's got a little more nutrient dense, but it does have more calories. So I eat a lot of 90, 10 beef, but I still, I still meal prep. I'm still like this week. I'm eating all protein pasta and a bunch of ground beef in there where when I'm dieting, I mean a bunch of cauliflower rice and a bunch of ground turkey or maybe ground bison. Like a tip necessarily, but I guess like a suggestion or something that we should think about is depending on how drastically you've dieted, right? If we've gone from 30% body fat to 25% body fat, this may not apply to you. No offense. You may have some energy stores still left in you and you may still be feeling good. But if you've gotten, you know, below 15 or something or like as you guys saw the last transformation I did, I dropped like 65 pounds, which is a significant amount. And I got fairly lean. You know, I'm not C bum. I'm not JPG. Never claimed to be not a bodybuilder, not even a fucking powerlifter. Just a dude who lifts weights here hanging out with y'all. But I got fairly lean and I had to diet pretty drastically based on my lifestyle, genetics, et cetera. So my energy was low going towards those last like two months of training and my training didn't like suffer a ton. Leverages got weird. So strength wasn't necessarily there. I traveled a bit. So that affected it. But my general, how hard I could push on all my lifts went down. All right. I have less calories in less energy in less energy. I have to put out. So when you bulk, you may not just automatically hit a hundred pound deadlift squat PR. But I do know and think you'll be able to push your volume and strength on your accessories a little bit more me and see Basser even just talk about that. You know, a lot of times as a strength athlete or even a bodybuilder or aesthetic trainer, anyone that goes to the gym, we get acclimated to the same weight. So we use the same thing week after week. We'll do, you know, we'll push ourselves, but we're handling RPE seven, what we think is a 10, but it's still a seven on dumbbells or a chest press. And we just found a weight that's comfortable, but challenging. We just stay there. When you begin to bulk, it's time to rev your shit up, man. It's time to get a little bit better. And so how do we build more muscle? How do we build more strength? Start chipping that thing up. I use the hammer strength chest press one of my favorite machines and I'll add fives, 10s, quarters, when I can, I'll do another extra set at my heaviest load where typically I'll do a top set and I'll back down one or two sets lighter weight. If I'm bulking or right now I'm feeling better. I'll jack that up. We're just talking about I do belt squats. And Joe, shout out to Joe standing, my coach right now has it prescribed it like RPE eight. And so with a heavy band, I'll do two or three plates. But now that I'm eating a little bit more, I'm a little more acclimated. I'm a middle of the training cycle. I feel a little bit better. I'll throw on three plates in a quarter and you got to start to chip yourself and push yourself. And that's kind of the benefit of the gym. And that's why the gym is our microphone. And that's why I'm here talking to y'all is because when we start to realize how we can push ourselves, how we can succeed, how we can build a goal or have a goal, build a plan and then execute that plan and push ourselves day in and day out showing up. That's where the magic happens in bulking. Sometimes it's easier to see and feel because we can add weight where when you're cutting sometimes we can go a month and because we see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don't feel that we're making progress, but we can visually see and feel progress as we're lifting and bulking. And so that's another reason I'm a strength training advocate is because I don't care if your goals are strength or if your goals are aesthetics or health or I don't really care. When you focus on strength, regardless of all this, you can continually see the steps it takes to get better and push yourself through progressively overloading. Cardio is overrated for cutting and dieting. Cardio is overrated for cutting and dieting. Cardio is overrated for getting lean and Cardio is underrated for building muscle and a bulk. Now, I think Cardio having a baseline of it will help our work capacity. We can dig into GPP and just general fitness later, but having a base of healthy heart, healthy cardiovascular system will benefit you in the long run of life. If you get sick all the fucking time, if you're out of breath all the time, if you have a heart attack, you can no longer bench press news flash. And if you no longer bench press, we can't grow big titties. And that's what we're trying to do here. So while you're bulking, I suggest just like everything else, five to 15 minute warm up, 10 to 30 minute cool down, call it cardio, call it GPP, call it a recovery walk. I don't care what you call it, just do it. And same thing goes when cutting. Let's manage our calories better. Let's up our neat, which is our non exercise activity, meaning how much we walk, taking the stairs, standing, pacing, jiggling your hands because your ADD is fuck while you're trying to work and you're supposed to be listening to your boss who's trying to get you to work more productively, but you're too lost in your head, shaking your fingers and shaking your heels. I get it. I'm there. But when we're dieting, nutrition, when we're bulking, base level of fitness, because then also when we flip it around, we're probably going to cut eventually and we may need to up our cardio to supplement our dieting. And then you're going to be so out of shape that it won't benefit us by the time you get in shape, your cuts going to be over. Hopefully that makes sense. Do a little bit of walking, do a little bit of fitness, be a human, take care of your heart, take care of your vastness. So tracking food while you're bulking seems a little crazy when you're a thick boy like me and maybe some of you that relate that tend to be a little thicker. The truth is our metabolism is way overrated. So the variance in what each of us need to live every day, the genetic difference is so small. The bigger difference is how much you move or not. And like me, I don't move a lot. I train. I try to walk a little bit. And otherwise I'm working at a desk all day literally sitting down all day long, where if you're a nurse or you work in a warehouse or any job, really, you're going to end up walking more. I mean, construction, something. All right, you're going to end up walking. And although it seems little, it can add up really quickly and you can burn a lot more calories. So those people, and then the other part of that is the mental aspect, which we could call genetic or nurture. It doesn't really matter where some people don't realize how many calories they eat. And a lot of people, either for too much or too little, some people like, dude, I eat so much. I can't gain weight. You're not eating that much. So tracking while you're bulking seems kind of silly for a lot of us, but for a lot of those hard gainers, which I hate that term because it's literally false. You're just not eating enough. So for those folks, ignore tip number one and start slamming peanut butter and avocado, et cetera. For you to track your food and get an idea of how much you need daily is going to be key for a bolt. Certain of us, right? There's always those people that don't track, you know, I'm making this up at 60% of us are going to gain weight when we don't track. 20% of us are going to lose weight. We don't track and 10 to 20% are going to stay the exact same. If we don't track, you have to know where you sit in that kind of spectrum, mentally, physically, et cetera. And if you're dedicated enough, if you want to build muscle, if you want to build strength, you're going to have to track while you're gaining weight. Know how many calories you get in every single day, put it in your phone, weigh it, before you put it in your mouth, be prepared. And for someone like that, you may have to meal prep and get more meals in, you know, the six meals a day has nothing to do with metabolism has nothing to do with digestion. You're not going to be more efficient. That's just some old school bro science. There is a little bit of truth to dosing out your protein evenly through the day that will help build muscle, but it's miniscule. I wouldn't over exaggerate it. But if you have trouble gaining weight, you may need to eat five, six, seven meals a day, smaller, medium, larger meals to get in those times. I guess it, we got squats tomorrow and then big pause dead last Saturday. So we'll catch that in the vlog for sure coming up. Appreciate you guys, man. 3SB.co for all the new fits. My favorite zip up hoodie. Telling you cozy. I'm telling you cozy. And I know I made it so it sounds like I'm biased and I am, but it's honestly the best because I'm picky about what I wear. I'm picky about what I share with you all. If you all followed for the last 10 years, you can count in one hand the amount of things I recommend and sell to you. So if you want to support, you want to be part of the crew driven by community culture, 3SB.co, good company. Southern Mike, we're out of here. New videos every single Monday and Thursday. Catch you soon.