 All right, here we go. Look, I can read all of your minds right now. And you all want to build muscle. None of you want to gain body fat. Yeah, I know. I'm basically a psychic. Some people call me Sal Stradamus. So this episode, we talk all about the things you can do to build muscle without gaining body fat. Also, we have a giveaway for you today. As usual, today's giveaway is Maps Strong. Great workout program for building muscle and functional strength. You can get free access if you do the following. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If we pick your comment among all the other comments will notify you and you get free access to Maps Strong. Isn't that great? Also, two workout programs on sale right now, both 50% off. Maps Performance and Maps Suspension, both of them half off. Go sign up at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Just use the code SEPTEMBER50 with no space for that discount. All right, here comes the show. All right, boys, I think it's time we do a dedicated episode and really give people specifics on how to build muscle without gaining body fat. We get this question all the time. Can we just call this the Goldilocks episode? Oh, totally. Right? Totally. You know, what's funny is I really identify with this question because, you know, growing up working out, all I wanted to do was gain muscle. I could really care less about being shredded. I was already skinny, so that wasn't an issue. So it was all about always trying to gain muscle. But the problem was because I had this particular insecurity of wanting to gain weight, I messed up a lot. In fact, I have there's one instance that was where it's kind of became clear to me. And by this point, I'm probably, I'm probably in my early 20s. And remember, I've been working out since I was 14. So it took me that long to kind of figure out, uh-oh. I think I'm, I think I'm spinning my tires in the mud. And I remember it was this period of time, I was actually managed, I actually grand opened the club on Santa Teresa. You guys know which one that is, because you guys worked there. Yep. And myself and my, my trainer, one of my trainer friends and my fitness manager all decided that we were going to do this bulk together and all of us wanted to gain muscle. And so I did probably the most aggressive bulk of my entire life. And literally my, my thought process was, you know what? That's it. Like I've always been trying to gain this time. I'm going to gain and it's going to work and I know how to work out and all that stuff. And so I did, I gained, I think I got my body weight up to almost 240 pounds, which is very heavy for, for me and my friend. How many calories are you putting down? I, you know, it's funny. So here's, it's great. We'll get into this, but I didn't track anything. It was just eat everything I possibly could. Anything possible. And can I gain weight? Right. And I did. I gained a ton of weight and at the end of this bulk, I, I don't remember how much I put on 20, something pounds or something ridiculous like that. And I got my body fat tested and I remember being just crushed that I think out of the 20 something pounds, 18 fat, two pounds of muscle. It was, it was like four pounds. It was something silly, like of lean body mass. Yeah. And then later, when I went to get rid of some of this body fat, cause I was definitely too heavy. It was uncomfortable. I remember at one point I was on the stationary bike because my staff was teasing me that I had no stamina because I was so heavy. I got on the stationary bike and I was breathing heavy and I was like, oh, I got to do something about this. I cut all the way down and I literally was in the same place I was when I first started it. And so it was a huge massive waste of time. So don't you believe part of the, the problem or why this is so challenging is that most people fall in one of the two extremes. Either they were like us were in, they're insecure about being skinny. So then they, everything inside and they're don't ever what the, the scale drop one pound cause they're worried about being skinny. And then you have the opposite side who is so worried about adding any weight to the scale whatsoever that they're just been cutting forever. Yeah. They're cutting forever or just barely at maintenance cause they're scared of letting the scale go up. And so part of why I think this is so challenging is because I think most people fall in one of those two categories. Most of us were, you know, got into fitness and working out because of our insecurities. That's what drove us there. And you normally kind of fall in one of those two categories. And then you figure this out that, okay, I need to lift weights and this is one of the best things that I can do for my metabolism and to look better or whatever your goal is. And then you go like, okay, well, I, I don't want to put any body fat on. I just want to add muscle. Okay. So how do I do this? And yet I'm, but I'm still working through my insecurities, very, very challenging, totally challenging. And I know, you know, in contrast to later on when I started to kind of figure all of this out, when I would do bulks, the scale would go up not much at all or, or it would go up a little bit, but then it was my lean body mass that was changing. And then the way I looked was significantly different in a good way. Not to say that when I bulked up to 240 and it looked different, I did, but it definitely didn't look like I gained lots of muscle. I looked like I got, you know, gained lots of body fat. And so this is the big challenge. It's like, how do I gain that muscle without gaining body fat? Because some of the things that you need to do to gain muscle are also the things that can consume, especially if you don't do them the right way, that can, that can cause fat gain. And look, this could be true. This is something that's a struggle for people who are looking to just speed up their metabolism. So you might have listened to our podcast in the past and your goal is to, you know, get a faster metabolism. So it's easier for to be lean. And then you hear us on the podcast, say, you should do a bulk and you're like, I just want to get lean. And we say, no, no, no, if you do a bulk right, speed, different metabolism, well, now this is even more important to you. Like, well, okay, but I don't want to gain tons of body fat. Like what's the deal? Well, I mean, there's a reason it's so difficult, right? Because our bodies, natural tendencies to want to be able to, you know, store energy for, you know, future emergencies or, you know, like if there's a shortage of food or, you know, if it's hard to come by, so the natural mechanisms in place, you know, want to be as efficient as possible at everything we do. And so now we have to sort of go against that system in place, you know, to be able to get that kind of desired outcome. What a great point. So you don't need a lot of planning at all to get your body to store body fat, because when you're storing body fat, what your body's doing is it's storing energy, like Justin said, for later as an insurance. This is a default way of gaining weight. It's very, very easy. I can get anybody to gain body fat. Gaining muscle, well, here's what you're asking your body to do. You're asking your body to add very expensive, costly tissue. Okay. So now we're going to make your caloric requirements even higher, which means you have to find more food and feed yourself more, which in survival terms, that's not necessarily beneficial, but that's actually detrimental or can be detrimental, right? So building muscle requires much more planning and structure. Gaining body fat is literally the default. And so it's very important you understand that. So that when you do move forward with a bulk, you do the planning properly rather than just trying to gain weight, which is really easy. Well, it's also a very fine dance too that you're doing because one is anabolic and one is catabolic. So you're sending competing signals in a sense, right? Or you're asking for competing goals here. I want to build muscle, but then I also want to not put on any body fat or potentially lose some body fat. So you know, you're kind of asking the body to do two conflicting things, which you're not going to be able to do it simultaneously, but you can do it like throughout the course of a week or weeks or months or years of, you know, kind of weaving in and out with what you're doing with your diet and your training. Yeah. And really to dive into that a little bit deeper, think about what you just said, right? You're telling your body, I want you to increase your caloric requirements. I want to add expensive tissue while simultaneously not adding more insurance to itself or not protecting yourself. So it's like, okay, your body is like, all right, you want us to burn more calories. Right. You want us to, you know, make ourselves more vulnerable to possible issues and you want us to get rid of our favorite insurance policy against, you know, what does that environment look like? Yeah. So, so in other words, it's utopia. In other words, it's really hard. Now, when you throw on top of that, your insecurities around potentially gaining body fat or, oh, I got to gain so much weight when you throw on top of that, signals that can be misleading. Boy, does this get very hard. So no, it's no wonder that this question is so often asked. I'd say probably in the last six years we've done this show, it's got to be one of the top three questions that we get on a regular basis. And so I think what's, what a good idea is for us to not just talk about, okay, you know, here's kind of some of the stuff you do, but give people real specifics. Like, here are the steps. Here are the most important things you could do to ensure that when you do gain a new tissue that it's muscle and not body fat. So let's start with the first one. And I think these are, we've listed these out kind of in order of importance, definitely for the first one. Number one, you have to send the right signal to your body. And the signal has to say we need to build muscle. And the way you send that signal is through a effective and appropriate workout. So I'm going to use another example kind of illustrate how important this is. It wasn't that long ago that we started to identify that osteopenia and osteoporosis was becoming an issue. It's probably, I want to say the last three decades or so this has become somewhat of a concern. Like, we've noticed that, oh wow, especially in women, we're noticing bone loss. This can become an issue. I mean, you know, if you're older and you break a bone, it can really cause a lot of problems. We started seeing bone loss in men. Okay, what strengthens bone? What's one of the most important nutrients for bone health? Calcium. And so the recommendations were everybody eat more calcium. So they were advertising, you know, have more milk, have more cheese, take these calcium supplements. This should definitely help with strengthening bone. Now, here's what actually happened. Nobody's bones got any stronger and some of the side effects of this were calcium deposits and arteries, which are not necessarily good for you. And doctors and scientists were like, well, what the heck is going on? Like, we're giving people's bodies more of these building blocks to build bone. Why aren't they building bone? Here's why. There's no body using it. There's no signal. Like, there's no signal to build more bone. I could have all of the planks of wood and concrete and bricks and supplies that I want. I could have piles of these supplies. But if I don't have workers with directions, it's just going to sit there. It's not going to do anything, right? You're not going to build a house unless there's directions to do so. And a workout is what tells your body or working out properly is what tells your body to build muscle. And this signal needs to be effective and appropriate. Otherwise, everything else you do is a waste of time. Well, properly is the key word here. I remember when I was coaching over at Orange Theory and they had the first time they had it wasn't the dunk tank. It was another company that did like the bio-impedance reads. Bioelectric impedance. Yeah, either the bioelectric impedance one or the one where you lay down and it does like infrared something. I forget with body scan. Yeah, it's like a body scan. Yeah, like a dexa scan. That's what it was, Justin. And they did this and then they came back and then I had a lot of people in my class that came up and they wanted to talk to me after class about their body fat percentage. And they're like, Adam, I don't understand this. So it was consistent for the last two or three months. I don't remember the exact time in it. And I actually got fatter. Like my body fat percentage went up and I either stayed the same. Some people stayed the same way. Some actually lost a little bit of weight. This happened. Maybe some people gained. So there was all kinds of ups and downs on the scale, but consistently I had a bunch of people that were actually gaining body fat percentage and it just did not make sense to them. I don't understand like how how could I not be building muscle. I come in here every day and I'm lifting weights in this class. I said, well, it's actually there's a really easy answer to what's happened here as you've you've probably put yourself in a caloric deficit because you have this goal of losing body fat and you're lifting weights thinking that you want to build muscle, but you're not giving it enough calories to do that. You're doing it in a manner that is very like very much so like cardio. So I see you run on the treadmill for the first half of the class, then you go over to the weight area in this class and then you do it in a circuit style. No rest periods. You just one exercise after the exercise. It's not much different than what you're doing right over there on that treadmill right before that and and I would tell these people that this is what I've been trying to tell you guys in class after class when I would try and like give them little bits of education around nutrition and exercise is you know just because you're lifting weights and you know it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get more muscle from that. People have this misconception of hey if I just do the work I just go lift weights I will eventually build muscle and it doesn't necessarily work that way. Yeah if a dumbbell and a barbell are involved therefore I'm doing the right thing. Right. Not at all you're programming how you do it makes all the difference in the world. In fact proper programming with zero weights will build more muscle than crappy program with all the best you know weights that you could have access to. So let's talk a little bit about what makes an effective workout. Well number one is it needs to be the right dose for your body. Okay. Oftentimes especially fitness fanatics we overdo it. We think because we can tolerate a workout that that's the effective dose. It's not true just because you can handle it doesn't mean that it's the right amount. Oftentimes fitness fanatics overdo it. You got to remember what you're doing in the gym or with your workouts is you're sending a signal. Your body often has to heal and recover from that signal but then it also has to adapt which is separate. So healing would be like I get a cut on my hand and it heals. Adapting would be my body then develops a callus over that cut so that next time if I were to scratch my hand again it wouldn't get cut like it did before. This is the same with a resistance training. So it needs to be the appropriate dose but let's get a little bit more specific. Let's start with exercises first. When it comes to exercises they are not all created equal. When it comes to stability. When it comes to corrective purposes. When it comes to building muscle. Some exercises are amazing at building muscle. Other exercises not so much. Which ones are the most effective at building muscle. It's the compound lifts. Basic compound lift gross motor movement type exercises. I can name most of them right now right. Barbell squatting. Deadlifting. Bench pressing. Rowing. Overhead pressing. Like those exercises I just named are more effective than all the other exercises that you can think of on a one per one comparison basis when it comes to building muscle. Now are there exceptions to this rule. Yeah I'm sure there's exceptions. The bodybuilder who's like oh I get more connection doing this. Okay I get that. But generally speaking those exercises by far are going to build the most muscle. So if you're not doing those exercises and you expect to build muscle without gaining body fat. You're literally taking out some of the most effective tools out of your toolbox. Well and speaking to that signal you want that signal to be loud. Okay and that's why the compound lifts you know play a major contribution to that because of every you know bit of muscle you have to recruit to be able to pull off a lot of these movements through a multi joint movement. And so to be able to wrap that into your programming is going to be essential when you're kind of constructing it towards building muscle but also what have you been doing for a long period of time especially for experienced lifters. You kind of get into a point where you get into a ret. And you know if you haven't changed up your programming and and adjusted some of these acute variables like you know the amount of reps you're doing. You know maybe shifting it more to a hypertrophy range versus you know like just you know doing our five rep type of protocol. These are things to consider in terms of adding a new stimulus for your body to adapt to. Maybe you're too adapted right now. Absolutely that's a great point. So let's talk about general and remember there's always individual variances but generally speaking study show and our experience backs us up that working body parts anywhere between two to three days a week is probably ideal for most people. So the old you know work your back and your chest and your legs and whatever once a week. That old message is wrong. Study show that about two days a week or three days a week is probably ideal for most people. Going to failure on your sets is too much intensity most of the time so don't go to failure but rather stop one or two reps short of that. Rep ranges Justin just touched on that. Most of the rep ranges build muscle. So anywhere and I'll be a little bit more specific right. Rep ranges between five reps as high as 30 reps. All of them will build muscle. Which one do I pick the one that you're not accustomed to doing. If you're always in the five rep range. I guarantee if you move to the 20 rep range or the 15 rep range. You're going to see bigger changes on the contrary or the flip side. If you're the person that's always doing the 15 rep range you do some sets of five reps and you do this for you know a few weeks. You're going to see some of the best results doing that. Well I think this is one of my favorite hacks and I'm glad it's the first one because it's still to this day like this is like my go to move anytime I transition out of a cut or a bulk. So regardless of what your goal is. When I make a decision that I'm going to try and move my body fat percentage or add more lean mass. I also like to transition into another program. And it can be rep ranges like you talked about. It could be tempos. It could be new exercises that you weren't doing in there like any any and or all of the above is ideal. Because the way I look at it is the more unique the louder the the more unique the exercise or more unique the programming is compared to what I was currently doing the louder the signal is and the more likely that any additional calories that I take in will get allocated to building muscle versus storing body fat. I just think this is one of the best insurance that you can do when you're you're trying to achieve this goal. Totally. Now in terms of total volume per body part studies will show and again this is also backed by our experience. Anywhere between about nine total sets per week and maybe as high as like 18 sets total per week will work best. Anything more or less than that and studies show that that doesn't really do as well. Now there's a bit of a range there right nine to 18 sets. This is where you got to kind of figure it out for yourself. Where should you start right people that will start with 18 and back down. No you're better off starting up with nine and then moving up for there. I know Adam always says you want to do the least amount of work to get the most amount of results. This is very true when it comes to your total volume. I think if you're not sure I would start with the nine sets per week and see how everything is responding and then you can move up from there. It's much harder to go overboard and then back down. Now I know that when it comes to workout programming things can get very technical exercise order. What about tempo. You know we talked about frequency and volume and you know there's so many different factors that make workout programming a little bit technical. And so if you're somebody that's like okay I just want I just want the specifics and I want to follow something that I know is well written. The best muscle building programs that we offer for bulking include maps anabolic I would say maps aesthetic maps power lift maps strong are probably the ones I would say are probably the best for the bulking split also. Thank you very much. So there's there's five programs right there that you can kind of choose from all of them are really really good for gaining muscle. They're really really good at sending the right signal. Which one do you pick? Well when you go on our site mapsfitnessproducts.com look at the program look at the description the one that's kind of most different from what you're used to that one's probably going to give you the best results. If you train like a bodybuilder all the time maps power lift will probably be good or maps strong and then you know vice versa. And don't get suckered into marketing and advertising around programming that's built for widely marketed as the best program for burning for burning body fat that has everything to do with you could build you could bulk in on on hit. Yeah. This idea of that the the programming is what's going to burn the body fat. It says that has everything to do with you nutritionally. You can take one program run it in a calorie surplus and it becomes a great program for building muscle and bulking you can take that same program run it in a caloric deficit and it now becomes a great program for losing body. Right. So so let's talk about nutrition because this is a very important component and this is what I think. Aside from workouts this is where most people make the biggest mistake. So here's the first most important thing you can't get around this. In order to gain new tissue you need extra calories. Okay. So what does that mean extra calories? It means more calories than are required to maintain your current level of of fitness health and body weight. Okay. So if you're consuming 2,500 calories a day and you're not gaining weight you're not losing weight you're just maintaining in order to gain you have to go above this. Now here's where people tend to screw up especially people like myself and I like the story I told about earlier is we just go nuts with the bulk. So we go I want to gain let's see how much I could possibly eat. Here's the truth even if you were to gain one pound of lean body mass a week which is a lot. That's a lot of muscle like lean muscle a week that's a lot to gain in a week. Even if you did that it would not require a thousand or 2,000 extra calories a day. That's just way more than your body needs to gain that one pound per week. It's actually much lower than that. So the first thing I would say is start by tracking and then do a small surplus. For most of you this means anywhere between 200 to 500 calories above what your maintenance calories are. That's probably going to be the sweet spot for most of you in terms of the right amount of calories to bulk. Now those of you that are afraid of gaining body fat because we just talked about you know we kind of talked a lot about the person who's like I just want to gain weight and I don't care. Well what about the people who are like well I want a bulk I want to speed up my metabolism but I don't want to gain body fat. You still need to go into surplus of calories to make this happen. It's not going to happen at maintenance. It's definitely not going to happen at deficit. So this advice is true for everybody who wants to bulk. You got to go above your maintenance calories. Make it a small bulk bulk. Two to 500 calories. I have such a heart that's why sometimes I don't like when we talk about the small surplus because it really depends on who I'm talking to if I'm leaning like I'm definitely telling that to the insecure young version of you or me right. Like I'm definitely telling like yo kid you don't need to you don't need to need to over do 700 to 1,000 calories every single day and we're not like I'm telling that kid that he or person that you know the surplus just needs to be very little but then I also know the other end of the spectrum where you have somebody who's so afraid to eat even the slightest bit over and you say oh you just need a tiny little surplus. And they like 20 calories. Yes. And they're leaning on that or they might hit a surplus on one day but then they have a day where it's a deficit the very next day and so it's averaging out to be maintenance still or lower and so telling that person I'm like you know don't be afraid to put it like listen and I know this is a generic number but you know 3500 3500 extra calories equals one pound of fat. So even if you overestimate by 100 okay every single day you still are only talking about a 700 calorie surplus on that at that rate it would take you over a month before you would even put on one pound of body fat. Right. So don't I mean even though we're saying small surplus if you're that person who's so afraid of adding little calories do not freak out of adding an extra 50 or 100 because at the end of the day even at that rate even if it was more than you needed 100 extra calories a day is still not going to give you a pound of fat in a week or two. No and it needs to be consistent by the way so you said something that I think is an important point like one day they're in a surplus and the next day they go down to maintenance it needs to be a surplus consistently definitely by the end of the week because sometimes people are in a surplus Monday through Friday Saturday and Sunday they go off they skip breakfast they sleep in whatever or they freak out over the fact that they were in a surplus for five days so that they drop it down Saturday then you do the math and it's like you're barely in a surplus or you're not because it just wasn't consistent so when I'm saying two to 500 calories a day that's what it's averaging out to and it needs to be relatively consistent for this to happen not just you know Monday through Friday but rather every single day or at least averages out to be that much every single day and the other thing is to to make sure you're getting quality food and high protein I remember another mistake that I made as a kid as I when I was bulking was I just eat everything inside and I remember I wasn't tracking at first and then I began to track and then I realized oh my god I'm just eating you know sugar and fat and my I'm coming I'm hitting over on my calories but then I'm not getting enough for my body to build and recover like I need it to and so then you end up putting on body fat but then I don't really add very much muscle so it is important to make sure that you're on a good high protein diet when you're trying to do this yeah you know what's interesting is that they actually there are some studies that shows very interesting effect where calories are controlled but one group has high protein the other group doesn't so the same calories the higher protein tends to lean towards more muscle even with the same calories so protein is a very important macro nutrient I would say aim for just to be you know just to know you hit the mark one to one body yeah about one gram of protein per pound of body weight that's probably overdoing it a little bit but it's such an easy way though yeah you know everybody like in our space loves it they didn't get real specific loves to get in the debates over if it's 0.7 or 0.8 or if you're whatever it's 1.5 per kilogram of lean body I mean dude just whatever you weigh eat a gram of protein for that unless you are considered severely obese if you're severely obese then it does there's a little value and you actually figure out your exact lean body mass and using that and using that but for the for the general population most people unless you are like I said clinically obese you're probably going to be just fine targeting one to one and it's easy to pay attention to it yeah and it's it's a bit challenging once you start really focusing on upping your protein if you're doing that from a whole foods perspective if you haven't been used to eating not much meat in your diet and there is the option of protein powders but the the the reason I bring this up is because much like sal when I was trying to bulk you know the majority of that started to come from protein powders which were you know riddled with sweeteners and all these other things that that they added with that in the calories got out of control but also too I wasn't really you know in a good ratio at that point too by bringing it like focusing it all just on the protein powders yeah the way I would use protein you know Adam's talked about this and I think this is really really smart is you have a protein powder and you use it just in case right and so what you do at the end of the day if you're tracking which I think is important by the way tracking is going to be imperative if you're trying to gain muscle without gaining body fat trying to wing this is going to be really really hard to do and I would only reserve that for the most in touch in tune people oh my god did this is really hard especially for this yeah because you're it's already such a fine dance to to think that you're not going to very thin line yeah it's very it has to be very controlled and it's it's very very challenging so you should definitely be tracking if your goal is gain muscle without gaining body fat so at the end of the day let's say you weigh 140 pounds and your protein now at the end of the day you're like okay let me calculate it all up oh man I'm at 110 grams of protein here's where protein powder now comes in handy now all I have to do is throw a scoop of protein in a glass of water whatever and I've hit my protein targets I think that is a beautiful way to use protein I protein powder I don't think the best way is to aim for hitting the target right out the gates with it because you tend to negate the most important you know things that you could eat which are whole foods yeah and then you end up to Justin's point having two or three shakes plus two or three bars and like 80 percent of now your process yeah came from process which you know in the context of you know losing or gaining you know calories and stuff like that that's fine I'll get you by but there's just the getting whole foods there's so many other benefits from the whole foods that you're getting aside from just the protein that you're missing out on I'll tell you what and I've done this a couple times when my protein is from shakes versus when my protein is from steak or ground beef or chicken or fish even if everything else is pretty much the same I build more muscle have more strength and feel healthier with the whole natural foods so aim for that you know what's funny is that I've had friends who compete in bodybuilding and stuff like that actually Adam didn't you experiment with this yourself? I did this with a show where I I did a couple shows where I did 100 percent whole foods no bars or shakes whatsoever and then I did other shows where I allowed shakes and bars as much as I wanted if I wanted two or there was times where I had four bars and a shake in a day and like allowed that was like okay I'm gonna just on this to stick to calories that's all and my macros where it's coming from I'm not gonna worry about it and there was a clear difference man for me it was a clear and for me it's you know obviously I'm being judged by the way I look so more than anything else you could there was a look that I had that was not the same as on whole foods and you know and there could be many variables about that right it could be the fact that I'm not getting everything but I have labels or you could be that labels can be what up to 20 something percent off and so maybe the other ones were saying they're much higher than in protein than they actually were or they're lower in calorie than when they actually were and so there was actually a discrepancy between calories were whole foods if I'm weighing and measuring some of that should be really accurate in comparison to processed stuff so I can't tell you exactly but I can definitely tell you that I did it enough times and compared that I got a better look when I was running everything from whole foods now here's another tip is to utilize kind of mini periods of maintenance or cutting within your long bulking cycle so in other words to give you an example let's say you do you're doing a bulk and it's lasting 10 weeks right so it's a two and a half months so two and a half months I'm gonna bulk I'm eating two to 500 calories extra I'm doing the good workout I'm doing all the stuff high protein within that period of time I think it's important to have a day or two in each week or a week after every you know three or four weeks where you eat at maintenance and throwing a couple days of lower calories now why is this important well let's start with the psychological first and I think this is the most important by the way and I know people oftentimes watching don't care about this because they don't consider it and they just look at the physiological but I'm gonna tell you something right now the psychological is the most important if you think of anything that's ever stopped you from achieving your fitness goals it almost always goes down to psychological aspects so why is this important because it gets tedious it gets boring it gets frustrating when you're constantly pushing for the same thing over and over again and how does that manifest my appetite goes down I've been bulking now for five weeks at you know 500 calories above maintenance now I feel like I'm stuffing myself or I feel like I'm force feeding but I don't want to eat any more food I just uh I don't I don't feel it right now it's a job yeah you throw in a couple days of maintenance or even a couple days of a slight cut like a hundred calories below maintenance and you watch what happens to your appetite all of a sudden you start to feel good so you give your digestive system a bit of a break yes you know it's demanding on your digestive system to really like intake all this influx of food all the time and you know and there may be you know an assimilation factor to that as well in terms of now you know reintroducing that much volume being able to assimilate the food and shuttle it to you know muscles as well so I like a four week to one week and I like to cut actually even more so I even like to be a little bit more drastic so instead of just trying to be maintenance I'd like to be in a deficit by a couple hundred calories for a whole week and then jump back on and then go jump back into the bulk I find and what it does for me too another thing that I always notice is whenever I would go on these bulks for a long period of time and I'm sure anybody who's done this too because experience is like you just feel like at one point you're like oh my god all I do is eat and I can't I can't gain anymore I'm like stuck in this plateau you take that person and or I used to do fast I would do this just to show this in examples fast the next day or run a calorie deficit for a week and then watch how much your appetite kicks back up again then you feel like you're hungry again and it's just easier to get back in that rhythm plus in that week's time of being in a calorie deficit if we did put a little bit of tiny bit of body fat on from your surplus exactly now I'm gonna that's gonna lean out and then I'm gonna go right back to bulking again so I love kind of this and again you could play with this but personally I like the four to one most of our programs are broken in phases too so that's another reason why I like it you're running a four week phase in a bulk but then all of a sudden you go to phase two of one of our programs and boom I'm also doing a cut for like a week so my body kind of responds to both the new stimulus and the calorie deficit and then I'm back into a surplus and here's what else I noticed now let's talk about the physiological I notice for myself and people that I've trained it's as if the body even if you're doing everything right it starts to become resistant to what you're doing so we're doing this bulk we're doing this workout we're doing everything right and we're seeing muscle come up and then I start to see muscle start to plateau a little bit and fat gains start to accelerate as if the body is used to the signal and saying you know let's let's it becomes resistant in other words and cutting for a short period of time in my opinion interrupts that resensitizes the body now there are some studies that suggest they're not clear but they do suggest that we start to become desensitized to protein for example when it's high all the time and throwing in a little bit of a lower protein day resensitizes the body here's some more evidence for anybody that's ever competed in a stage presentation sport bikini or bodybuilding or physique the best gains you've ever experienced in your entire life are always right after the show it's like you wear on this extreme diet you're super shredded after the show you eat way more food you go back to your workouts and you don't gain body fat for a little while at first it's like you just build all this crazy muscle and you feel more anabolic than you've ever felt before and so part of this mini cut that you're throwing in there is trying to simulate that and resensitize the body to your bulk and then of course to your point Adam if you're really sensitive to gaining body fat and you just want to gain lean body mass it makes sense to throw in a little shortcut you know after you've you've bulked for a while now one more thing we should address with nutrition are gut issues gut issues tend to be more common in bulks than they tend to be in cuts anytime you have more food in your body I think you're increasing the amount of potential inflammation and you're just eating more of things that might irritate or bother your gut be very smart about this and worry about this I know people who try to bulk with lots of for example wheat products pasta and bread and although a lot of people have no problem digesting those things when they start to push the calories with those things in my experience and I'm just using one example by the way in my experience a lot of them start to get inflamed or bloated in their gut or they hold more water sometimes you see this with dairy you know somebody's like you know I have no problem with dairy but then they start to push the dairy and all of a sudden they're like oh it's not agreeing with my gut if you start to develop gut issues and digestive issues you're less likely to build muscle more likely to store body fat and your health starts to decline so you want to avoid this by trying to eat the most easily digestible foods when you're bulking it also it'll throw you off mentally too like you let's say you're dieting really well and you and you are dialed in calorie-wise but you're eating something that is offensive to you or that you have an intolerance to and then all of a sudden you see this bloat and water retention and a lot of times what happens is you see that and you freak out and you go the other direction oh shit too many calories I gotta back off when really it's just some inflammation and water retention that you're dealing with because you're eating something that your your gut doesn't agree with and so you're seeing a temporary response to that not a oh I was eating way too many calories and so this is what you see happen to a lot of people is they they think they're following a plan really well they eat a food that maybe they don't realize that they have issues with and then that also gives them this bloat water retention and they go oh my god they jump on some cardio gaining body fat all of a sudden right they think they're getting fatter and so they jump on the cardio or reduce calories even more when really their their color can take in a macro profile was was perfect it's just they had something that they have an intolerance to and because they're in a surplus it's way more offensive right and then they see that by the way this happens with cutting to people will cut carbs and lose water oh my god I'm losing body fat you know no actually you lost four pounds of water so you feel leaner but it's not really body fat which takes me to the next thing it's very important that you track your lean body mass if your goal is to bulk without gaining body fat it's like how do you know that the weight that you're gaining especially in the early stages is muscle not body fat now there's there's two types of people that get confused by this there's the person like me who thinks every pound on the scale is a gift from god this is great as long as I get heavier I don't care and then there's a person so afraid of every pound that goes up on the scale that they're like oh my gosh I'm gaining body fat like how do we reconcile this track your lean body mass what's the best way to do this body fat testing now here's the the key with body fat testing I don't care generally speaking which way you test your body fat there's definitely some that are more accurate than others right underwater weighing is the most accurate it's also the most inconvenient like most of us don't have access to a a dunk tank on a regular basis you have calipers right calipers less accurate but whatever and then you have electronic impedance which is probably the least accurate but here's the key to all of them do them all exactly the same at the same time the same hydration the same fed state that'll give you the most consistency with your body fat readings because what you're looking for is not so much what body fat percentage I'm at but rather the direction that it's moving because if I get a let's use calipers I like calipers because that's what I always use with my clients it's pretty easy they're inexpensive you can buy a pair of calipers on amazon for nothing and whatever here's the key with calipers same time same place same fed state and get tested by the same person this is really important it varies dramatically person to person that tests that's the only reason why I tend to be the one that all of us that kind of knock on the calipers most is because that because it requires another person and another person consistently at all those points you made the time you're fed that how much water you have in you the time of day what day you're doing it the same person so I just prefer something that's more consistent something that I have more control on and so if that's a you know a you know which we call it electronic electronic one that's fine and again to your point which is exactly how I always have this conversation with people that are like why read that this is x percent accurate and this is inconsistent and those things are no it doesn't matter what it says we are just using this as a map for us it's just a guy that okay you're at x whatever it is doesn't matter now we decide we're going to add calories or take them away or change your program when I went back and I measured the exact same time everything all lined up like Sal's saying in two weeks what did we see did you go up in lean body mass from that or did you go up in body fat or did you stay the same and that's what we're that's all we're using it for yeah and by the way don't you know marry the a single result what you want to look at is trends you want to look at trends because it could change a little bit in a week and you could freak out about it but really look at the trends after three weeks four weeks five weeks which direction is it moving and usually it looks like it's not linear it's not like perfect lean body mass gain but it's kind of the step ladder that starts to move in a direction this is a really great way to kind of track your progress what direction am I moving am I moving in the right direction or am I moving in the wrong and this is why I hate the scale for this reason like although I would use the scale as just another tool for me to reflect on there's a lot of deception with the scale because it goes up and down so much so much back like to my point about having something that your your gut doesn't agree with and all of a sudden you are inflamed a little bit or you start retaining water you might see the scale go up two three pounds easily if you hold onto some water because of something on it going on your gut you'll easily do that and you would don't want to all of a sudden make some some drastic changes on scale and the same thing is true in the opposite sometimes you'll just have drank less water that day unless you are measuring and tracking every ounce of water you're you're consuming maybe today I was behind on water I was less thirsty or I didn't need a lot of salty foods and so you have four or five glasses less of water one day than other and then you could see that the scale goes down so be careful of measuring with the scale and allowing that to influence influence you in the direction that you're going nutrition you know what it used to do to me this just to illustrate how it can deceive you because I always wanted to gain I would start to lean towards the foods that made me hold water totally because the scale would go up so oh you know a burrito wow that's a good mass gainer whoa pizza there's something magical about pizza yeah and then I'll weigh myself at the end of the day instead of the beginning of the day because you can make yourself gain weight throughout the day by eating certain foods oh I was so obsessed with this as a kid that I remember I would actually weigh every every morning when I wake up and then I my goal was to go to bed a pound heavier than what I did oh my gosh I did the same thing I would go stuff myself with stuff I mean that's how crazy eat a pound of food so yeah yeah that's literally what I would do and so it's terrible it's and I struggled with adding muscle and keeping body fat off it wasn't until way later when I didn't have all those issues when I was trying to gain that I had success here's how you should use a scale take your body fat test and then use the scale to subtract to figure out lean body mass that's how I think you should use a scale and that's it by the way only weigh yourself when you do your body fat test and you should body fat test no more frequently than once a week I like once every two weeks I think once a week might even be a little too much it'll get in your head otherwise right now the the other one and I know you sell a lot I know Doug too was big on the Doug still I think to this day actually uses this as his main marker which is circumference measurements yeah I like these I like circumference measurements a lot yeah because especially and Doug makes the point of like really just focusing on your waist you can see a lot you know if your waist is pretty much the same while you're getting stronger and your your body's changing elsewhere you know like especially you know with certain people that trap a lot of fat you know in in their waist line that's very visible so that's that's one that you can see difference like right away if you're if you're doing good or you know you might need to adjust yeah I think this is part of all the metrics that we're talking about you do the body fat test you use the scale to subtract to find lean body mass and do the circumference measurements I think you have a really really good idea if you do those but yeah for men especially waist tends to be a good one because we tend to store body fat in our waist and I remember piecing this together for myself when I would bulk I would wear a weight belt whenever I'd dead lift or squat real heavy and I'd have to move down a couple notches or move up and then there were times this is later on when I got really smart with bulking I would gain five pounds on the scale and the belt would be on the same small setting that to me that's like what you're looking for yeah that is the goal the goal is can I put on how much can I put on weight and not let the waist move can I get bigger but keep my waist if your waist can stay the same while you continually put weight on you're doing a really good job of probably building lean mass and putting on very little to no body fat totally all right so the last one or one of the last ones is sleep how important sleep is for building muscle and burning body fat now consider this right if you are not sleeping optimally either not getting enough time you know in bed or just not sleeping well at night this is a stress signal to the body and remember storing body fat is an insurance that your body has during times of stress and building muscle is expensive and it increases your liability for survival so trying to build muscle when your body is stressed from lack of sleep boy that's that's a running uphill with a with a backpack that's heavy on your back like good luck that's really really tough now I know a lot of people they they get away with having less sleep because a caffeine and pre workout drinks and they're like I still gained a little bit of muscle but you don't know how much muscle you could have gained this is the big thing like especially if you've got good genetics and everything else is perfect and your sleep isn't terrible terrible but it's not optimized and you're still making progress you might dismiss sleep as something that's not important try getting make it a focus to get good sleep just for one week keep everything else the same and I promise you'll blow yourself away by how big of an impact it has on we just have to keep drilling this point of the importance of recovery just over and over again because the marketing out there is so much in opposition to this it's all about like how much intensity and you know how crazy your workouts are that and it's all about the insult and it's not about the actual process of your body rebuilding itself and recovering fully so that way now you adapt in that direction versus just healing from the insult that you presented it which is where the real muscle being built is I mean you don't have to send much of a signal in the gym if you do a really good job of feeding the body what it needs and giving it adequate recovery totally I mean if you do that it's it's going to build muscle the other thing with sleep too and this is like you know we talk a lot about behavior stuff when you're trying to stick to a diet and be consistent one of the things I and this actually took me a long time to piece this together where I would notice that on days where I had really poor sleep the next day my cravings would always be crazy yep and I didn't I never connected I just thought like oh some days I have cravings some days I don't it took me a long time to connect the dots that how much it had to do with sleep totally I didn't notice that until way later in my career when I cared more about sleep and I started paying attention to that started to build routines around it then I started to notice these things and boy like clockwork if I have had a shitty night of sleep you can guarantee the next day around noon time or so all of a sudden I'm craving this food that I haven't had or even wanted in maybe even years and it's so weird how that how that happens that when you don't get good sleep there's studies that support this 100% Adam you're looking for dopamine you're looking for serotonin so hyper palatable foods you know this is why you want junk food when you stay up in a light you know real late with your boys and you want to go out and eat it's never healthy right your willpower goes down when you're tired by the way sleep deprivation is one of the number one ways that that countries would break prisoners of war like you want somebody to confess positions of you know their their military or bases one of the most effective ways is to deprive them of sleep it literally destroys your willpower and discipline so if you're like eating healthy and being consistent with your workouts and you're chronically sleep deprived you're screwed you're you've got your you've that muscle that willpower muscle is totally destroyed also one of the easiest if I if somebody told me if somebody came up to me and made a weird bet and said hey Sal I would like for you to negatively influence someone's hormones in two days and I'll give you money if you make it like really dramatic just fuck with their sleep that's it that would be the easiest way to do it just just buy some air horns it's one of the it's one of the fastest ways that guys can get their testosterone levels to crash it's one of the easiest ways to get men and women's cortisol levels to spike it's very easy to get a woman's estrogen or progesterone to get thrown off just by taking away or or influencing there's influencing their sleep in negative ways that's how big of a difference it makes so if you're trying to bulk and gain muscle like we said in the beginning you're trying to tell your body increase your liability and reduce your insurance you need to give your body adequate rest because it can't be under lack of sleep stress and do that it's just not gonna work all right the last one you probably are gonna think has nothing to do with bulking whatsoever which is cardio so let's talk a little bit about cardio I know Adam this was one that you really wanted to touch upon yeah I um and I know there's I definitely know there's influencers and people in our space that are gonna disagree with this but this is my opinion and I'll take on whatever debate you want to have with this but when I'm coaching and I'm teaching somebody to do this right figure out the their calorie intake and their programming to to get that what Justin called the Goldilocks right this this build muscle don't put on body fat it's like the most perfect place to be I actually don't want to add any more variables than I need to and cardio is a variable that I do not need in order to build muscle or lose body fat it is just a tool and a tool that I can use at my disposal whenever I want to speed that process up and I don't want to abuse that and I most certainly don't want to build what will look like because this is a consistent place I'd like to live you know constantly kind of building a little bit of muscle not putting body fat on the majority of my life I'd like to be kind of in this place so if this is an area where I'd like to be a majority of my life as far as nutritionally and training I want to take out as many variables as I can or that I don't need and cardio is one of those I don't need that and so I don't want to put it in there and then I have to adjust also my training and also my calories around this cardio regimen that I've built so I'd rather build it around just nutrition and just training and then I can use cardio as a tool to manipulate whatever I'm seeing when I'm tracking my body fat percentage week over week you know I've never heard you present it that way that's probably one of the most compelling cases I've ever heard for not adding cardio during a bulk so I have to completely agree with you now the other case that we often make is that cardio sends this competing signal endurance tends endurance type training tends to tell the body to pair muscle down and become more efficient with calories which is contrary to the goal that we have now just for the sake of this podcast and just to present an alternative side to this there may be some benefit to doing cardio for people where cardiovascular fitness or their lack of cardiovascular fitness is preventing them from working out properly this is where I see maybe some benefit right so there may be some of you that just it's affecting their workout yeah like the endurance you're so deconditioned you know cardiovascularly that you know you're trying to do 10 reps on us exercise and it's just you just don't have the gas you just don't have the stamina in which case I think a little bit of cardio can help with that so that would be a case here's the other side of this I don't think I think it's important just to be active daily anyway just for health and being healthier is always going to help you build more muscle but this doesn't look like structured cardio rather this is more like just moving throughout the day yeah I was more of the angle I was going to present and it looks a little bit more like neat so like non exercise specific but you know that's just really moving consistently throughout the day and and making that a priority but that's just like making sure all the systems are working and you know you're basically just you know doing all the things you can to keep a a nice thriving healthy body so that environment is good for you to build muscle so I mean I'll play devil's advocate with my own point right the way where I would maybe have different advice is if I do have a client that when I assess them they're extremely sedentary and that so they're gonna fall in that category you're talking about if you're somebody who gets less than 2000 steps a day because you work from home and it's at your computer all day long and maybe you walk the dog at most or that's about it and you and then you get you know under 2000 steps a day and all we're doing is you know maps and a ball of three days a week like oh yeah I'm gonna assign some you know level low intensity cardio for this person it's like walking yeah for health purposes forget your goal of building muscle losing body fat has nothing to do with that it purely has I think it's it's in your best interest to be doing somewhat of cardio for overall health which is only gonna help you long-term anyway so that's the only other place where I feel like I would I would recommend this and even if even then it's still even though I was playing devil's advocate I still would probably build the routine without it and then I would introduce it after the fact because to me that's the most important part of this argument is that you know I'm thinking forever and I want to know what what's working yeah what's working without that and then if I now I see oh wow I put on a little bit of body fat in the last three weeks from my bulk I can either one reduce the calories or hey now maybe I'll introduce a half hour of you know steady state cardio in there and that is how I'm going to create the deficit and so you can use it that way and I would base that based off of how healthy of a calories in my client if my client says hey Adam I already feel like I'm cutting a lot it's hard for me to only eat this well I'm probably not going to restrict them even further I might introduce more movement instead yeah very well said look if you like our content you like this information head over to mindpumpfree.com check out all of our free guides they can help you build muscle burn body fat improve your fitness alleviate pain we even have guides for personal trainers again it's mindpumpfree.com you can also find all of us on Instagram so Justin is at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam