 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we talk about bulking, gaining, getting more muscle, speeding up the metabolism, increasing the way your body looks in terms of its curves and firmness, or just building more mass. But we talk about doing it the right way. Oftentimes when people try to increase their calories and train for weight gain, what they end up with is a lot of body fat and a little bit of muscle. So we go through the process of how to clean bulk. Clean bulk refers to gaining lean body mass and not all the body fat and crap that sometimes can follow with it. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. Now Legion makes some of the best performance enhancing supplements you'll find anywhere. Now the reason why we like working with Legion is their supplements are transparent. So when you look at the bottle of whatever you get, what it says it has, in there, it's all verified by third-party testing. 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Go to mapsstrong.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-T-R-O-N-G.com. And then use the code Strong 50. That's S-T-R-O-N-G-5-0. No space for the discount. Let's talk about bulking. The concept of... This is the fun part of training. The bulk. Actually, before we get into that, can you... It's getting into this, but I mean, can we say it? Call it something else because I feel like right away it turns off women. It's true. Yeah. Totally true. Maybe you need a rebrand. I mean, we're saying bulk because that's what it's commonly referred to, but really it's a cycle of diet and training where the goal, the target is to gain lean body mass. And I think it's essential. Let's call it build. Can we say it's essential? This is 100% true. Yes, it is an essential cycle. I think even if your goal is to lose weight and get leaner, the process of... I'm going to do quotes here, bulking, will help with that process. And again, that's a good point you make, Adam. Really, it's about building. It's about getting into a positive tissue growth phase, but there's also a lot of other side effects that come along with that. Besides the lean body mass gain, it speeds up your metabolism. It results in a body that burns more calories all the time, both because you now have more lean body mass and more muscle requires more calories to support, but also because the signal of bulking, which we're going to go through how to do this properly, the signal that it sends to the body is to not worry so much about being so efficient with calories. And the reason why I said that is you'll have some people say, oh, the metabolism boosting effects of building muscle are overstated because three pounds of muscle really only requires X amount of calories to support. It's not that big of a deal, but that doesn't tell the whole picture because I would routinely take clients through a proper building process and they may only gain, like a female client, for example, might only gain two or three pounds of lean body mass, but their caloric maintenance, in other words, the amount of food that they could eat and not gain any body fat, hundreds of calories, 500 calories. I've seen people's metabolisms go up by 800 calories, small people too. So there's definitely some tremendous benefit to this aside from the building lean body mass, which by the way, speaking of women and building lean body mass, this is what gives you that sculpted look, gaining two or three pounds of muscle on your body. You're not going to look bigger. It's not enough muscle to make you look bigger, but you are going to look tighter and you're going to feel more defined, more carved. It's ironic that this, I know the title, whatever dug into the titling and if he puts bulk in there, it's going to turn off a lot of people that don't think they want to bulk and so think it's not for them. That's why I wanted to address that right out the gates because the truth is, as we go through all these points and talk about this, in my opinion, it's more important for women. Well usually because they don't want to do this at all. Right. It's against the grain. And similar to like we talk about, you know, the best thing that you can do is the thing you're not doing when we talk about exercise and program design and because it is novel, I think the same thing is similarly true to nutrition. It's so common that when I would assess a female client's diet that they were under consuming calories and normally for long periods of time, by the time they hired me, they're frustrated. They've already been doing this for a long time. They've gone up and down or they've plateaued for a long time. And I don't know how many times this has happened to me where I get a client who's, you know, 30, 50, 100 pounds overweight. And when I assess their diet, I'm just blown away by how low of calories they eat. And it used to be one of the biggest challenges for me as a coach. This took me years to get over this hurdle. Oh, I thought people were lying for years. Right. I went through that. And that's why it took so many years. The first half or the first few years or whatever it was, I thought people were lying. And then once I realized, oh wow, they're not lying that they actually have slowed their metabolism down over years of diet, yo-yo dieting and eating excessively low calories. And now what I know I need to do is going to be really, the other half was, okay, now I got to convince this lady who's sitting in front of me who, you know, is, you know, really down on herself because she's up 30 or 40 pounds. I need to convince her she needs to eat more calories. That's not an easy conversation. Oh, it's a real difficult one. And to your point, like I just remember the mentality of, you know, some of my female clients that I've had forever where if they go, if they exceed their calories at all above their maintenance, it was like they failed. And that's just been something that they've kept in mind for years. It's not just like something that's like, you know, every now and then, like they allow themselves to, you know, splurge a little bit. It's the sense that if they're exceeding their maintenance calories and they're not in a deficit, then they're doing something wrong. And so this just, you know, you think about that over, you know, a long time period of constantly trying to reduce calories, reduce calories and like how easy that is to see how their metabolism slows down. There's nothing wrong with reducing calories to burn body fat. But when that's all you do, and it's combined with other signals that tell the body to become efficient with calories, typically what happens, people cut their calories, cut their calories, and it does work at first. And then they add cardio and it does work at first until the body starts to adapt to that new, because here's the thing, your body gets good at whatever you do a lot of. And if you're eating a low calories and doing lots of cardio, your body gets really good at having endurance and burning few calories. It's just what happens over a long period of time. And so it's important to try to reverse that through, you know, a proper building phase. You know, I used to have female trainers that work for me. I used to love using them to demonstrate to potential clients the benefit of doing this because whenever I, when I used to manage gyms, a lot of what I did was talking to new members or potential new members about proper exercise, proper resistance training, why they should probably work with a trainer or how, you know, being a member of the gym, if they do it properly, it's going to really benefit them. And I would often talk about this, what we're talking about right now, how you speed up the metabolism. Because having a faster metabolism today is a huge advantage, mainly because there's a lot of food around us and we're busy, but we don't move a lot. We're just not burning a lot of calories and there's a lot of food. It's everywhere. We're going to eat it. It's enjoyable. So you want to put yourself in a position to be able to, you know, mitigate all that or at least, you know, live in this modern world with some advantages. So I talk about this. And oftentimes I'd hear the women say something like, you know, well, you know, but I think I have a lot of muscle already. I don't want to gain any weight. I need to lose weight. Like let me just focus on losing weight. Once I lose a lot of weight, then I'll, then I'll worry about building. And then what I would do is I'd say, you know, give me a second. I'm going to have someone come in here. I want to show you something. And I would page one of my trainers, my female trainers to my office. There was one in particular. She was five foot one. And lean, I think her body fat was probably 16 or 17% all the time, which is visible definition. It's not so lean that she, you know, she was too lean, but she was, if you saw her, you'd think to yourself, oh, that's a fit athlete. And she'd walk in, you know, all five foot one of her. And I would tell the person to guess their trainer's body weight. I'd say, don't, you know, and they'd of course feel embarrassed. And I'd say, you know, and then my trainer would say, no, no, no, don't worry. You can guess my weight. And I'd say, okay, how much do you think she weighs? Be totally, totally honest. And sometimes I would even spruce it up a little bit. And I'd say, if you're right, if you get within five pounds, I'll give you some, some free personal training sessions. And that would motivate them to be honest. And they'd say, and they're going to fail. Yeah. Never, they would never guess right. And they would look at her and they'd say, oh, she's, I don't know, 110, you know, 105 110. It's okay. That's, that's a pretty good guess. Let's go walk over the scale. We'd walk to the scale. We'd weigh my female trainer who would weigh good 20 pounds heavier than what they thought. So I was able to illustrate that the muscle is that muscle is very dense. She looks like she weighs 110. She actually weighs 130 or 125 or 130. Then I'd do this follow-up question. I'd say, can you please be honest and tell this, you know, this person, how much you eat every single day? And she'll, oh, I eat like, I don't know, 2700 calories, 2800 calories. And then I'd show them in food what that means. And they'd be blown away. And I'd say, wouldn't you like to be in a position where you can eat maybe as much food as you're eating now in terms of calories? We'd still have to be healthy, but you know, you're eating as many calories as you are now, but you're losing weight. Wasn't that a better situation to be in than reducing your food intake and losing weight and then stopping and having to reduce it more and more each time? And they would always, they would get it at that point. That was always a very powerful way of communicating that. But that's the value of going through that building phase. I know I don't have to sell the other values of building. If you want to build, obviously, if you want to build, you want to know how to build. Well, that's why I wanted to start with addressing women right out the gates is because I don't want to lose the attention of our female audience because they don't think that they fall in the category of bulking. It applies to both. Right. And we're talking about obviously every hard gainer or skinny guy, ears perk up when you say bulk, because that's what they're interested in. But the reality is that I probably spent more time with female clients talking about this and trying to communicate this than I did with men. But on the men's side, so the conversation was a little bit different. When I'd have male clients at bulk, most of them did it really wrong. And guys love to do it. And I'm just as guilty of this. Oh boy, I got some stories. Yeah, I'm just as guilty of, all right, it's bulk time or it's bulking season, which really all that meant was there was no strategic plan to build muscle really, or to gain strength, or to just- It was about shoveling food. It was about I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted because I was in a bulk and I was trying to build. Therefore, I get carte blanche. I can go bananas with whatever I wanted to eat. And it was a season because there was no end to it. Yeah, right, right. And you would time it normally around Thanksgiving and Christmas so you can excuse yourself for all the crazy extra calories that you would eat. And let me tell you, this is so prevalent in the gym culture that even at the highest level of professional competitors, I see this. I think I've touched on this on the show before that when I would see some of these athletes, my peers at the time, dieting and training for a show, they would still kind of live by these rules. We'd all be training in the same gym in the off season and we'd all be in the quote-unquote bulk time. We're not ready. Prep time is the final six to 12 weeks before you get ready for a show. All the months leading up to that would be considered bulking time or building. And I'd be watching the way they all eat, and they're putting on 25, 35 pounds during this few months of getting ready for prep. And what would happen is they would peel all the way down, get shredded three to five percent body fat, and I would be looking at the same exact physique that I saw. Maybe like a one, two pound difference. Not even. The same, literally like the same. It was just part of how they... All that work. Right. And not to knock them, they look great. They got on stage, they competed at the highest level, but they weren't improving and they weren't improving because of their method of bulking. Right. So what is the goal with bulking? The goal is to gain lean body mass, not body fat. Now in some cases, some body fat gain may be desirable. This is for people who are super, super lean. Like if you're a man and your body fat percentage is below 10% and you want to start to gain some muscle, you're going to probably have to gain a little bit of body fat to do that. When you're really, really lean, your hormones get affected a little bit. It's harder to gain muscle. The body likes to gain when you're lean, but not shredded. For women, this is probably when you're below like 17 or 18% body fat. You're probably going to need to gain a little bit of body fat. Not a lot, just a little bit to get into that good, you know, building stage. But aside from that, the goal is not to just gain body fat. This was my problem. Or just gain weight, you should say, because like, of course, no one's goal is to gain, but nobody goes on a bulk and says I want to gain body fat. Well, that's where I'm going because this was always my challenge. Now I was that, that skinny hard gainer. I was that ectomorph that, you know, my body just didn't seem to want to gain any weight. So when I went on a bulk, it was all about the scale. I didn't look at anything else. It was how much weight can I gain to the point where I would prefer foods that would make me even hold water because the scale would go up. And I liked the fact that the scale would go up. I remember one time in particular, this was when I was, I was in my twenties. So at this point, I'd been working out for a little while and, and I under, and I, you know, I was really, really dedicated to, to gaining weight. And so I was, I was pretty good at it. And I went through this bulk period where my body weight went from, I don't know, 205, 210 to 240 pounds. I gained like, you know, almost 30 pounds on the scale, which is a tremendous amount of weight for somebody to gain, especially someone with my frame. And somebody who's an advanced lifter, who's been lifting for a long time. And I'm lifting a lot of stuff. You know, I mean, 210 for me is pretty muscular. So I gained, you know, 30 pounds on the scale. And I remember this was the first time, first off that I went all in and, and consistently. And second, I tested my body fat. So I tested my body fat before and then I didn't test it until after. And I was, uh, I wasn't, it wasn't pleasantly surprised. Whatever the opposite of pleasant is. That's how I was surprised. I tested my body fat, all 240 pounds of myself, super proud of, you know, all the weight that I gained in the, you know, it took me like four months or whatever of this bulk. And, um, I had gained like a few pounds of muscle according to my body fat percentage, like 27 pounds or something like that, uh, was all not muscle that I had put on my body. And I had this rude awakening like what it, like I, it was a waste of time. I gained a few, I could have gained that few pounds of muscle without gaining the additional 27 pounds of body fat. Um, and a big mistake, a big part of that was, um, all I did was look at the scale. I didn't use any other metric. And so I kind of lied to myself a little bit as I was going through that process. We used to do these, uh, competitions. Justin probably remembers this, um, with my trainers, I love to do this. We, we would get the hydrostatic way. So the dunk tank, right? Where you submerge underwater to get your body fat percentage, one of the more accurate ways to do it. And we'd have an outside source do it. So it was fair. And we'd have these competitions. It was a fun way to engage my, my staff, uh, with staying focused on staying fit and do some sort of a cash reward afterwards for the, the person with the greatest muscle gain. If we did a muscle gaining one, if we did a fat loss one, the greatest percentage of fat loss. And that was when I really, like I, when I first started doing that, that was about five, six years into my career, uh, where we had something like that that was someone else was tracking. We were all competing each other. And that was like the consensus. And I'll never forget like when, when it, when it first happened, when I first started doing it, how many trainers were like, Oh, this is bullshit. This thing's inaccurate. You just can't believe it. Yeah, you can't believe it. That happened to me. You didn't want to believe it. Right. And, and I, and I agree. I felt the same way. Like this can't be possible. Not all of us can't be this bad at this. Like we're all trainers. We should know what we're doing, but it was, it was true. It was accurate. And it was because we all kind of fell into that, that old way of, of training and dieting of when you go on bulk, you just, again, like you said, Sal was trying to gain on the scale. And what would end up happening is, you know, you would put on, on as equal. And this is what, what sucks about it is, even if you added, let's say you're 30 pounds, because this would happen to me. Maybe I added 20 or 30 pounds. And I actually gained 10 pounds of muscle, which is awesome. 10 pounds of muscle. But because I gained 20 pounds of fat with it, when I decided to pull off the 20 pounds of fat, because I don't want, you know, if I put on all this extra weight to build the muscle, the idea is that I have just the muscle and get rid of the fat. So then, okay, okay, now let's go to a cut and you start cutting. Well, in order to lose 20 pounds of fat, it's really hard to not lose 10 pounds of muscle along the way. And this is what happens even at the professional level is you see guys and they do, they put on some muscle, they don't, they don't fail at putting muscle on during that time. And they know it because they can see their strength go up and they can visually see it. But because they put so much excess fat on with the muscle, that when it comes time to cut, they've got to go through a pretty aggressive cut to get rid of 20 pounds of fat. And it's almost impossible to not lose some muscle. And when the ratio is that high to fat to muscle, and you got to go that far back down, it's inevitable. So you end up doing 30 gain 30 pounds to cut off 20 pounds of fat. And when you do that, nine pounds of the muscle, you netted one pound. You know what I'm saying? Like after it's all said and done, you went through training for three months of all this up and down dieting to get one pound of muscle. And you could have done that in a way that was way easier and didn't require so much, I guess, damage to the body. Yeah, effort. It's so misleading because you do feel the strength gains because like being on a higher calorie amount makes you feel like better. I have more energy. I have more strength output. My performance is increasing. Therefore, I have to be gaining muscle through this process. And it's one of those things like even like on the athletic level, you'd see guys that would like through the entire off season or through the summer, their whole goal was to gain this muscle. So that way they come back in with all of this new, you know, strength and performance ability. And you know, when they have to go down to shed the weight and get back into the cardio and move quickly, you know, all of that progress is just completely back to where they started. Right. So you can use the scale, but also use body fat tests and also look at your strength. But don't just look at total strength. Also look at your strength to weight ratio. This is important because let's say you gain 20 pounds on the scale, but you're in your bench press or your squat goes up five pounds. So you did get stronger five pounds, but you gained 20 pounds on the scale as a percentage of your body weight, you technically got weaker. Does that make sense? Now it doesn't have to be one to one. It doesn't work that way at some point, you know, when you're smaller, you have a better strength to weight ratio than versus when you're bigger. But that's a pretty big difference. So what I would start to do later on when I got good at this is I would look at my strength gains, look at my weight gains and say, okay, I gained 10 pounds of body weight, my strength went up, you know, five to seven pounds. I think I'm okay. If it was 10, if it was one to one, I knew I was great, but if I gained a little bit of strength and a lot of weight, then I knew, oh, I gained a lot of body fat, especially when you do the body fat test. I'll take it an even step further. So I literally went from one side of the paradigm to a complete opposite. Like it was a spectrum, I mean, so I went from the guy who all he cared about was the scale and watching that like you saw just, you know, and eating same thing, eating foods that held water, whatever, just to keep that get that number up, because I was obsessed with it, to actually going the complete opposite on a bulk. So now when I bulk, I actually don't I I'm only watching the scale to make sure I'm not losing. So my goal is actually not even to see the scale go up that much if it goes up one or two pounds, whatever, not a big deal. But I'm actually using the scale to say, make sure I'm not losing. And my goal is to actually slowly keep adding calories without seeing a major fluctuation on the scale. Can I keep adding calories in the diet without seeing my scale dramatically go up two or three pounds? And if I can see that, and then I can also watch my strength, I know I'm in a really nice place. So if I let's say my goal is to bulk right now, and I weigh 215 pounds, and I want to bulk, I'm monitoring my weight while I'm increasing calories and watching my strength. And if I see my strength go up, and I know I've added calories to the diet, and my scale doesn't stay the same, I like where I'm at, I'm in a very good place. I'm probably building muscle, I'm getting stronger, I'm adding calories to the diet, I feel confident about in fact, I might even be losing a little bit of body fat at the same time. Oh, you mean the calories stay the other weight stays the same. Yes, that's okay, which that to me that would have been I'm failing, you know, but 10 years ago, if I was trying to be on a bulk and my scale wasn't going up, I would have thought I was failing, but I actually look at it now as a very good place to be. Now it's hard mentally, because your goal is to bulk and to not see the scale. But hey, listen, if you know for a fact, you've added calories to the diet, and you are maintaining strength or gaining strength on your big lifts, you're in a very nice place. A slow gain is king when it comes to a bulk. You got to understand one thing, especially if you're natural, right? If you take anabolic steroids, it's a little bit different. It's a different conversation. But if you're natural, muscle gain is not a fast process. It just isn't. You got to understand that muscle, number one, is a very expensive tissue for the body, meaning it requires a lot of calories to maintain. And number two, muscle is very adaptable. If you have more muscle, it's because your body thinks you need more muscle. You never have more muscle than your body thinks you need. You're never stronger than your body thinks you need to be. It just doesn't. It's expensive. It would make no sense, especially considering how our bodies evolve for most of the time that we've been on earth, makes no sense for your body to be super muscular and burn all these calories. When you sit around all day long, you don't lift heavy things, you don't need it. So the muscle gain process is actually, when we're talking about lean muscle is actually pretty slow. Now in men, here's some numbers, okay? And of course this can vary depending on your genetics. There's some genetic freaks out there that are a little bit different here. But for the vast majority of people, I would say for men, you're looking at anywhere between a two to four pound gain in a month. And four is aggressive. You're getting four pounds a month. That's pretty aggressive for a man. So you're probably going to be closer to the two pound gain a month if you're going to be leaning, if you're going to be bulking properly. For women, you're looking about one to three pounds. One to three pounds a month of gain is perfectly fine. I used to like my female clients to maybe gain a pound in a month. Oftentimes, what would happen is what Adam's talking about where I test their body fat, and they did in fact gain a pound of muscle, but they also simultaneously lost a pound of body fat. And so the scale actually didn't move at all. If your scale is moving up faster than that, you can be pretty sure that what you're gaining is not necessarily muscle, maybe water. And of course, it may be body fat. That's why you got to be careful not to allow the scale staying stagnant as a sign of you're not doing really well. There's actually a very good chance. Again, if you know you're increasing calories, and you have good programming, there's a very good chance that you've hit the sweet spot. And it's a great place to be where you have a very close to even exchange where you're losing a little bit of body fat and you're also gaining a little bit of muscle, and so the scale is kind of maintaining. And this is also why I do like to track, and I think it's so important to learn this about your body and how it responds, because if you know for a fact that you're adding calories and you know for a fact that your program's on point, you're probably building muscle. Even if the scale is not going up, you're just also probably losing a little bit of body fat, and that's a great place to be. That's the best place to be. Now, for calories, I'm going to give some general numbers that are going to apply to a lot of you, not everybody, but a lot of you. But typically, of course, you need to eat more calories than you're burning, so let's start there first. Your body won't add new tissue unless it has the building blocks to do so. So that means if you're burning every single day when you include your activity, I don't know, 2,000 calories a day, you can't add new tissue at 2,000 calories and certainly not at lower than 2,000 calories. You need to supply your body with extra calories, extra nutrients to build this new tissue. Now, typically, what you want to do is go up, increase your calories about 10% above maintenance. That's generally where you want to go if you want to do this the right way. So what does that mean? Well, if you're maintenance calories, you figured about 2,000 calories and now you want to go on this clean bulk or whatever, you add 200 calories. That's 10%. What if your calories are 1,300 calories at maintenance? Well, that's 130 calories. So you guys get the idea. Add about 10% above maintenance and then wait a few weeks to see what happens. If you're not gaining muscle or strength, you can add a little bit more, but for most people, 10% above maintenance with good programming, that's really important. We'll do the trick. Now, do you guys have a preference of where that 10% comes from as far as proteins, fats, or carbs that you typically recommend or find people have more success with? If protein is not at 1 gram per pound of body weight, then I'll go protein. But once I'm about a gram per pound of body weight and if fat is essential, if they're eating enough fat, then I tend to add carbs. Carbohydrates tend to do better in this phase than more fats. Those are the two essentials. Then carbs is really where I start to play around with adding that in and seeing how that increases their performance specifically in the gym. That's one of those where you can really see the difference when you start adding carbohydrates, when that really wasn't very high for a lot of clients beforehand. If I actually like to push a little bit more with protein, I'll push to the upper limits of 1.5 before I start to do other macros. I just find that if we're trying to stay lean and we don't want to go over it all and I have room where they're at 1 or less grams per pound, I'll start pushing the upper limits of that before I start. And we're also taking into consideration they're hitting the essential fats, right? You're getting the fats that you need. I prefer to go- Make sure you have good fiber with that. So I'm going to prefer to go the protein route first before I start to go over in the carbohydrates. Because here's another thing you have to consider when you start to increase carbohydrates. For every 3 grams of carbs that you add to your diet, you're going to hold on to an extra 3 ounces of water, right? So it's a nice exchange as you start to add up. So if you are increasing carbohydrates, one of the things that throws people off sometimes is they're like, oh crap, I only increased 200 calories, but you did it all in carbohydrates. And now all of a sudden you're seeing weight gain go pretty fast and it could throw you off on if you're doing a good job because you see the scale go up. You're measuring it. But also like holding water, you do feel a difference in your performance too. That's something I've noticed specifically, maybe I am a bit water-retentive, but man, I could just feel the strength gains in the gym as a result which then motivates me to then push it. No, that's actually 100% right. I experience the same thing. When you have a little bit more fluid in your body, especially if it's in your muscle, they tend to contract harder and perform a little bit better. This is why. We're splitting hairs right now because at the end of the day, if you're trying to bulk, you probably shouldn't go below one gram of protein per pound of body. And I say probably because there are those people out there that might have digestive issues with that much protein, in which case at the end of the day, by the way, you have to be healthy. You can't follow a protocol. If you're trying to gain mass or muscle and you're unhealthy, it's not going to work. So if you do move your protein up to a gram or 1.5, as Adam said, per pound of body weight and you find digestion is terrible, you don't feel good, bring it down, increase the calories with one of the other macronutrients. One thing is for sure, you definitely should not be too low on carbs or fats. I don't think a keto diet, for example, is a great way to, even if the calories are high, in my experience, for most people, it's not a great way to gain lean muscle. Now, in the cases where that's an exception, you may be somebody where your gut health really benefits from going super low carbs, in which case health trumps all. You may be somebody where too many fats does the same thing to you, in which case I'd say, bring the fats down a little lower. But in most cases, you don't want carbs or fats. You don't want to be on a low fat bulk or a low carb bulk that typically doesn't work well for a lot of people. Now, the most important thing when you're trying to add lean body mass is to send an effective muscle-building signal. If you don't do this, you're not going to build muscle. You can add calories all you want, add protein. Your body has no reason to add muscle. So, you want to follow a routine that really revolves around muscle and strength gain. I mean, it's got to be the goal, right? That's your goal. Yeah, you don't want to go into a HIIT workout or like a plyometric type of training or circuit or orange theory type of thing with this intention. No, I would say the range would be between power lifter and bodybuilder. That's the kind of program you want to follow. The program that we have, the programs that we have that would be great in a lean bulk would be like MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Aesthetic, MAPS Strong, MAPS Strong is on sales half off this month. That would be a great lean muscle gain program. But yeah, a HIIT program or a program that's working on stamina and endurance, you're not going to really do well with those because they don't really send a loud, hey, build muscle type of signal. Now, I also like so and there is an exception to that rule and that is it depends on what I've been doing also, right? So, when I make a transition from a bulk or a cut, I also like to transition my programming at the same time. So, if you were following a MAPS Anabolic and that's what you've already ran and then you're going to transition in a bulk, I would change to MAPS Split or Strong or something different that's novel because there's benefits to that, right? Like Sal said earlier, when we were talking about calories, the same thing goes for programming that your body gets efficient and adapted to whatever it is that you've been doing. And so, if you've been doing something consistent, training a certain way, a certain modality, and you're about to make a transition to either a bulk or a cut, it's also a really good strategy to change your programming up because it's going to be novel. But that program should still be a muscle or strength focus, right? And that's why I use the analogy of, okay, let's say you're running Anabolic, making it to an aesthetic, you know, Split or Strong is a probably more advantageous strategy than going to a hit workout or maybe MAPS Performance. You're looking at MAPS Aesthetic, MAPS Anabolic, Strong, Split, those are probably the MAPS Power, you know, those are probably the best programs to build if you really want to build muscle. God, that's power lift would be an incredible one, actually. That's another one, right? Now, here's another myth around bulking that I believe for a long time, which was to eliminate cardio, to zero cardio, right? You don't want to burn any excess calories because, God forbid, you burn those calories and don't use them to build muscle. Now, I discovered this as a myth years ago. I remember I was doing, you know, I was going through this process of trying to gain, I was always trying to gain muscle, but I was, you know, trying to attack it pretty aggressively. And I remember one of my trainers, he was a pretty muscular guy and, you know, he would, he was laughing because, you know, one day he was on one of the spin bikes and I was going to go take him through some sales training. And he said, Hey, would you mind doing it while I'm doing the spin bike because I learned better when I'm moving. And, you know, it helps me out. I said, I don't care. Of course. No problem. So I went in the room, the spin room with him. I got on the spin, the spin bike next to him. And I started, you know, doing my, my training with him. And I was, as I was talking with him every once in a while, I'd start pedaling the pedals and I find myself, you know, at a breath. And the reason why I was at a breath was I was always trying to build. So I avoided cardio like it was kryptonite. Like this is anti muscle. I'm not going to do it. And he commented on it. He goes, man, he goes, your cardio is really bad. And I started laughing. I said, I know it's terrible. I said, but I'm trying to gain muscle. And he goes, you know, I, I tend to gain more muscle if my cardio is at least pretty good because then, then I'm not so limited when I do squats and deadlifts and my health's a little better. And then it kind of dawned on me. I'm like, you know, if I'm getting winded by messing around on a spin bike while I'm talking to this guy, maybe it's preventing me from building muscle. Maybe my health isn't good to build muscle. So what I did is I started incorporating just some light cardio, some hikes, some incline treadmill work, a little bit of the stationary bike. And lo and behold, I found that I built more muscle. And the reason why I built more muscle was my health improved. So yes, you can overdo cardio. Overdoing cardio can cause you to burn too many calories and maybe send a wrong signal, but eliminating cardio might reduce your health. In which case, if you're not healthy, good luck trying to build muscle. It's not going to happen. Well, you know, a good example of this or a good gauge I like to use. And I know the Rhino, right? Stan Efferding talks a lot about 20s. And if you can't do 20 squats, you know, and do about that's a great measure, right? Three sets of that, then your cardio endurance is limiting your potential because I'll tell you what, one of the things that made my legs explode was running a phase where I was running 20 sets or 20 reps of squats. It's just, it's brutal and it's so novel and very few people like to train up in that range. And you'll build muscle even though it's not in that one to five rep range, which tends to be the more typical place that people stay, going and doing 20 reps of squats, if you've never really trained that way consistently, I'll tell you what, we'll definitely bulk you and build some muscle. But if you can't do it because you're so gassed because you don't have the cardio vascular endurance, it's hindering your potential to build muscle and bulk properly. Totally. Yeah. And I think about this too, of low frequency or, you know, low intensity type, you know, movement and activity throughout the day too. Like staying in remaining active is another signal in itself that your body wants to respond and promote, you know, more muscle and strength to provide stability and support around this movement. And so like one thing to consider too is like cardio comes in various forms. It's not just like running around on a treadmill or like going out and running or jogging or it really is just staying and remaining active and frequently moving. And that's a signal in itself, which, you know, I think is is relatively not talked about enough in terms of neat and being able to do things constantly throughout the day. That adds up to, you know, quite a bit of extra caliber. Yeah. Daily walks and hikes was my favorite way. Yeah. That was my favorite way to do it. Well, I'll think of this too. That doesn't compete with the muscle signal. A big part of bulking obviously is or the whole part of bulking is building muscle and, you know, a big part of building muscle is the recovery phase is the ability to recover fast and efficiently so you can build more muscle and staying active and, you know, keeping your knee up and moving and doing cardio is only going to facilitate recovery faster. Right. So you have to factor that in. Now that being said, there's also a balance, right? Like who I'm talking to, there's always going to be that individual variance and us always saying depends because there's also that kid that I was when I was, you know, 20 years old that was wakeboarding, snowboarding, basketball, playing sports all the time and lifting weights seven days a week that I was getting plenty of knee, plenty of cardiovascular exercise and endurance that it was hindering me from getting enough calories. It was just hard to keep up with 4,500 to 5,000 calories. And so you need to know that about yourself. Like if you're somebody who is extremely active, you don't need to go out of your way to probably do more cardio if you're already that active. Well, that all comes into factoring that T.D.D. T.D.D. Yeah. So basically you're taking your maintenance of calories, but also factoring in what that activity looks like for you individually. And so if you can really nail that down, you'll have a better idea of like not to exceed that or to like maybe pull back a bit in order to allow room for you to build muscle. Yeah. T.D.E. stands for total daily energy expenditure. Just means how many calories you burn throughout the day. Speaking of high rep squats, you know it's funny. Back in the day, the old-time muscle builders and strongmen, which I love looking to for wisdom because this was before anabolic steroids, before all the bad information was coming out in the muscle building magazines or internet that were driven by supplement sales. They didn't even have creatine or oftentimes protein powders. So they just did what worked. You know what they used to advocate for? For building big muscular legs. 20 reps sets of squats. Deep breathing. These are called deep breathing squats. So what they would do, and they didn't do cardio back in those days. It was just, they were probably active in their jobs. Let's be honest, back in those days, people were pretty physical, but they didn't go and do cardio, but they did lift weights. And what they would do is they would do sets of squats and in between every rep, they would take two or three deep breaths and then they'd do another squat. That's going to be a little bit of cardio. Not even doing that is hard. Imagine taking the deep breaths in between and then having to squat. And they would say that it was just phenomenal for building, you know, good muscle. The next thing, which is this is, this next one is very important, regardless of what your goals are. But it's especially important if you want to build muscle, which is get good sleep, prioritize good sleep. Now, remember, your body does not want to build muscle unless it has to, because more muscle means more calories to support and keep you alive. Your body's always trying to, you know, increase it or improve its odds of survival. And because we evolved or our bodies evolved where food was scarce and things were dangerous. It was always on alert and ready to say, Oh, hold on a second. Let's, let's burn less calories just so we don't need as much food. Well, lack of sleep is a great way to tell your body not to build muscle, because lack of sleep is a strong stress signal. And if you think of for most of human history, if you're not getting good sleep, it's probably because you weren't safe or it's probably because you were trying to find food because you weren't able to find food during the day. Not sleeping is a fantastic way to lose strength and muscle. In fact, I don't, I can't, I shouldn't even have to convince people. Everybody listening right now knows exactly how weak they feel when they go to the gym the day after they get terrible sleep. It's just, it's a terrible one. So I tell people this, we all prioritize our workouts, we all prioritize our priming and the pre-workout and, you know, we have our programming set, but we treat sleep as a total afterthought. You know, we all expect to just lay in bed, hit the pillow and get excellent recovery muscle building sleep. We do at least till we get in our 40s, right? Or close to our 40s. And then we value the skin out of it. I just really think it's that like, I think we're just so invincible in our 20s that it's like, I don't care. I really believe that because it comes easy. I really believe Adam today could not go back and convince Adam of 21 that he needs to do sleep. That's why I like, you know, it's funny. If Adam in his 20s had all the responsibility of Adam in his 40s, he would be convinced because this is what I remember. I'm like, you're right. I did the same thing, but you also in your 20s had the freedom. You didn't have all these responsibilities. You had the freedom to like sleep all day on a Saturday. Yeah. I don't, I can never have that opportunity now because I have kids in responsibility. And you, I think you become just more aware of your own body. Like I don't think that I wouldn't have benefited from it in my 20s. You know, I absolutely, I just think I was so stubborn back then and I thought I was doing just fine. I probably would have seen twice as much results in my 20s had I prioritized it. Now, when I see, and I guess older, wiser, smarter me now is I can move my way, change my body composition relatively fast because I know how to turn all these knobs really well. And sleep is one of them that for a long time wasn't one of the knobs that I focused on and is a game changer when you do. And it doesn't always mean to like, you know, like it's inevitable, right? You're going to have a not a great night of sleep. If you have a normal life, you know, work is going to stress you out one day, your partner is going to piss you off one day, your baby's going to wake you up in the middle of the night. I was going to shit on your carpet or shit on your chest, right? You know, that's going to have these things are going to happen. Right. Right. So, you know, these things are going to happen. And when they do happen, learning to adjust the workout to it, you know, and really try, I was having this conversation actually this morning with my client. I was telling her that, you know, we're manipulating her calories right now. And I was telling her to try and time, you know, the higher calorie, good sleep, good workout all in one day, if you can like to be, you know, just so we get the max benefits. So if you know that you didn't have the greatest sleep ever, and you were planning to do 20 rep squats that next morning, maybe that's not the best morning for you to train that way. Maybe you take it a different day or take it easier and leave the day that you get really good rest to get after it in the gym. I just, I have found that when you learn to navigate that way with your workouts, your sleep and your nutrition, your body just responds really well. When it's already stressed because you didn't sleep very well, and then you decide you're going to punish it inside the gym as hard, harder than you've gone anytime recently. It doesn't, it doesn't really respond the way you think. Where's the time for all the muscle building? No, it all, it views it all as too much stress. It revolts. You can actually lose muscle that way. Right. If you push it too hard, you could be working out, eating more calories, but you're because you're getting shitty sleep and your workout is inappropriately intense. You can actually lose muscle. I've actually seen this happen on people before. And I'm not giving you the, I'm not giving you the excuse to not go to the gym now, right? Or, you know, Adam says, if everything's not perfect. Yeah, yeah, right. So you gotta be careful, you gotta be careful because some clients are just waiting for that, right? They're like, Oh, you don't need to work out. Oh, great. I'll take the day off. No, you just, you work more in, you take it easy. You back off the intensity. Instead of that being an 80 to 100% intensity type of training day, you go in, you train, you move, you still exercise. That's still good for you. That's still beneficial. You just learn to pull back because you know, you didn't get good sleep that night and just watch out, watch how your body responds differently. Totally. So treat your sleep like you treat your workouts. And what I mean by that is take it seriously. So here's a few tips that typically make a pretty big impact on somebody's sleep quality for most of you. Okay. Number one, about two hours before bed, make sure you shut off all electronics and go by dim light in your room or in your house. Now, if this is not feasible for you, if you need to be on electronics two hours before bed or you like to watch TV right before bed or you can't turn down your lights because you got kids or whatever, then try wearing blue light blocking glasses, blue light blocking glasses, block the light that comes from electronics that most affects your brain because here's what happens. When you go to bed and you lay on your pillow, it takes your brain a second to register that the sun has gone down. So for most in human history, this was natural. We'd be outside. We'd be doing things. The sun slowly starts to set. Light starts to get darker. It gets dark. The brain has already started registering. Oh, it's almost time for sleep. Then when it's time to go to sleep, your brain is prepared. You lay down and you get right into that quality sleep. If you don't do that, if the lights are bright, your brain is getting the signal says, sun is up, sun is up, sun and then you close your eyes and your brain goes, oh, wait, we need to sleep. All right, give us a second to get ready. And it delays that. Even if you fall right asleep, because I know some people will say, well, I fall right asleep when I hit the pillow. So I don't need to do that. Studies show that although you're asleep, you're getting less of that quality sleep. And they do this by measuring all the stages of sleep. So do that. That's number one. Number two, don't eat right before bed. A lot of people have issues with sleep when they do that. Make sure the room is cool or cold. Sleeping with minimal clothes seems to improve sleep quality in a lot of people. And then if you need something to help you relax, if you tend to be one of those anxious people, you can try some natural herbs. Passion flower has some natural relaxing properties. Although you can't use passion flower all the time, but chamomile is great. Chamomile is so mild that in Europe, they oftentimes will recommend it to children. You can drink chamomile on a pretty much regular base. It's the very, very mild, but natural, relaxing kind of sedative. I like to do that about an hour before bed to kind of ensure that I'm relaxed and I get to go to sleep. Now, the next question is when do I stop? When does the bulk stop? When do I start to reverse gears or whatever? The big sign for me is when the strength gains stop. I'm not getting stronger right now in the gym and no matter what I do with my programming and calories, the strength isn't really going up. That's when I know that, okay, my body's had enough of this signal. Now it's time to kind of reverse gears, either focus on mobility or maybe do a mild cut, do a real light cut to kind of change the signal a little bit. That usually gets things moving again. So we didn't really touch on that. I think that's important. So we kind of, we talk a lot about cutting and bulking and we recommend mini cuts and mini bulks, which are relatively short, two to four weeks tops of staying in a phase of cutting or bulking. And so if I'm in a bulk phase, I may extend my phase longer than four weeks of bulking. I may be bulking for as long as six weeks, but I will interrupt it with little mini cuts. And that may just be, you know, a few days or even just one week of a more lower calorie diet for a while to interrupt that and to go back on the bulk. I definitely recommend that. That's like one of the way and I'm watching, so I'm watching strength, I'm watching scale. And if I feel like I've started to plateau, then I'm going to interrupt that by going the other direction for a little bit. And so, and that, and this is the individual variance that may be three low calorie days. It might be a whole week of kind of lower calorie days and then go back to your bulk after that. Body responds really well to that versus just constantly trying to push calories, push calories for extended periods of time, five weeks, six weeks and beyond. Yeah. And I like this because it allows you to continue this building process for a long period of time because you are interrupting it with these shorter periods of, you know, maintenance or lower calories. This is extremely valuable for women who are trying to balance hormones. Whenever I'd work with women who have gone through long processes of dieting and overtraining and their hormones are all over the place, we would do, we would build, we would focus on building for a long time. But I would interrupt it with a few days or a week here and there of maintenance or slightly lower calories just to minimize fat gain. But the whole, the overall process would maintain until we'd start to see hormones start to bounce. I've had female clients who, you know, couldn't get pregnant. We went through a building phase and then finally were able to because things bounced up. Same thing with men, not as common, but sometimes guys who stay lean all the time, the testosterone suffers quite a bit. And through a building phase, you start to see testosterone levels go back up. I also like that strategy for people that struggle with being able to eat enough calories because they're just not hungry. Right? So sometimes when you've been, you know, eating high calorie, high calorie, you, you know, and this has happened many times with clients and myself where it's like, Oh my God, it's just so hard, Adam, to get to that. I like to reverse out and go low for a while. A lot of times that will stimulate that appetite again. They'll be like, Oh my God, I went from being stuffed all the time to now I feel like you're starving me all of a sudden. And then now we go back up that sometimes will help stimulate them that appetite and then wanting more calories. That's a big indicator for me, especially like the inflammation, inflammation being a factor in that as well, like being on a higher calorie amount consistently, like my digestion gets affected after a while, like I could feel the, you know, those, those common symptoms of like being under a lot of inflammation where the achy joints, things like that. But yeah, like, to be able to interrupt that and then go back into a bit of a cut will really help to kind of relieve a lot of those issues. Now, here's, here's another tip that'll help you with this. Try to stay away from, you know, overly processed or highly processed foods. And here's why, not necessarily because they're unhealthy, although usually they are not as healthy for you as whole natural foods for the most part, but mainly because those foods encourage you to eat more. This is just what they do very, very well. So if you're already in the mindset of gaining and you're throwing in these hyper palatable, highly processed foods, the slow gain that we're talking about, not going to happen. It's going to turn into a fast bulk or what they call a dirty bulk. So I would say try to avoid the heavily processed foods, unless you're somebody that really struggles with appetite, which is pretty rare. I'm glad you went that direction because I know there's got to be somebody that who's listening right now who struggles with getting enough calories, especially trying to stay all clean. When this, this applied to me when I, especially when I was competing the real hard gainers maybe. Yeah. Well, and even somebody who's, I mean, when you get to, when you start getting towards that upper end, like when I got up to, you know, when I was competing, I was eating, you know, 5,000 calories. Yeah. Try and eat 5,000 calories of chicken breast and sweet potato or just unprocessed foods. Yeah, right. It's just, so a good strategy is to hit what your body needs through all whole foods and natural. This is, this was the rule I gave myself. If I was going to enjoy a five guys burger or I was going to pile on some, you know, processed type foods in the diet, if I was going to allow that in there, I first was going to get what my body needs, the protein intake, get the good essential fats and my basic carb, the basic macro breakdown of what my body needs through whole foods. And then I would use the hyper palatable foods to help push me to that caloric intake that I needed. So that's just a, there's, there's no great science to support why that's better. I have just found that works really well for me. It's worked well for my clients is to go after getting everything through whole foods first and then you use those hyper palatable foods to help push you beyond that. In that case, I used to say this, I used to say, I want 80% of your calories to come from, at least 80% to come from unprocessed whole natural foods. And then I would allow the 20%. Just because if, and this is only for some people, people like, like, you know, what, like Adam, like what he's talking about, because when I would allow other clients to do this or even myself, it very quickly, inevitably would spiral. Oh, it would spiral every time. Because remember, those foods are really, really good at getting you to eat more. You're already in the mindset of building, if you're not tracking everything, very fast, it gets away from you almost every single time. This is really only, it mostly applies to my male clients. It was rare that I had a female that, you know, I couldn't take her from 1500 to 2000 through healthy calories. It's when you start getting up to those numbers, like 4,000, 5,000 calories, that's a lot. I mean, that's a 1,000 calorie meal, 1,000 calorie meal four or five times a day. Oh yeah. You know, and if you're doing that through, like I said, whole foods, that's a monster mountain decline for some people. So that's the only exception to the rule that I would say that I would do that with. But I know there's people listening that can relate to that. So I wanted to address that. Excellent. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. You can watch us on YouTube. If you like listening to us, imagine how much you like watching us. So go check us out Mind Pump podcast. Also, you can find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. The fitness industry also started to come up with terminology that would attract women. So, you know, for men, you could definitely attract them to resist the training by saying build muscle. But for women, if you said build muscle, then you would elicit these images of big bodybuilders. So like, we can't say build muscle. We got to say something else. So they created the term toned.