 Now I don't know any studies that have been done on bulking, but I can speak from personal experience. In my experience, and this is for me and for clients, when I would include bulking breaks, I would gain more lean body mass and less body fat. You are listening to the number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. Now in today's episode, we talk all about bulking. Now this is the process of trying to gain muscle and strength and size, maybe a little bit of body fat, but really you want to minimize the fat gain. Now a lot of people when they bulk, they make a lot of mistakes that results in less muscle and more body fat. In fact, we've isolated the six most common mistakes that we saw our clients make time and time again when they were trying to bulk that it did result in a lot of fat gain and not a lot of muscle. So you're going to love this episode if your goal is packing on the strength and the muscle. 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You pay your 99 bucks and then you try them out for a month. And if you're not totally blown away, you can return all of them for a full and complete refund. So you literally have nothing to lose except for maybe some body fat. All right. If you want to sign up or just check them out, go to maps, November.com. That's the word maps, M-A-P-S, November.com. Let's talk about the bulk. Pack on size, muscle, lean, body mass, great. Good time for this conversation. A lot of people are transitioning into the bulk right now. It's like winter time. Lockdowns are coming. Thanksgiving around the corner. Go with the flow. I was on a bulk for most of my life, I would say as a kid. What do you guys think about that though? Like seriously, are you pro switching to the bulk during a time when you're probably going to be eating in a surplus with the holidays? Totally. It makes more sense to not add more resistance to like, imagine trying to lean out during the holidays where I don't have to say, imagine I've tried it before and it's a pain in the butt and you avoid, you end up missing out on a lot of good times with your family and friends. So it makes more sense to bulk during those times and it does to cut. Way more sense. Plus it's cold. So you're going to be wearing sweaters. So I agree. So I totally agree with you. And I think I'm more on this train now. But I was always the guy that was fucking backwards. I never timed the summer get shredded thing. I was always off. Always trying to be a rebel. No, it's not even trying. It's just that whatever was going on in my life as far as consistency and dieting down or whatever, it just never lined up well for me for a summertime. I was always off during that. And for some weird reason, come wintertime, just the things lined up for me. And I think maybe what it is, is that in the summer I'm going. I'm taking trips. I'm traveling more. I'm outside. I'm going, doing places. And so I guess when the wintertime comes, I'm just not doing as much. And so you're more focused? Yeah. I think so I actually, I've died and competed. In fact, I don't know if you guys remember this, but you know, I competed the day after Thanksgiving. I do remember that because we had to go to it. Yeah. It was my first pro show I did was down in Southern California. And Katrina and I spent Thanksgiving at eating a Burger King burger for Thanksgiving. That was our Thanksgiving dinner. And I promised her that night. I said, I'll never do this to you again. At least supersize me. Well, you know, you know, it's funny about that. Forget the competing, but when you were younger and here you were alternating or whatever, it does highlight some of the, I think mistakes or maybe misconceptions that are around bulking. Cause I think people, they think of dieting to get lean as let's say on a scale of one to 10, a 10 in terms of challenge and difficulty. And then they think of bulking and it's not, they don't think of it as being challenging or difficult. In fact, people think of bulking as just, I'm just not watching what I'm eating. Yeah. There's this implication that it's like free reign, like all food is on the, on, you know, on the horizon for you, like anything you can eat because you just need the calories. People make just as many mistakes bulking as they do when they're trying to get leaner, just as many mistakes. But the misconception is that bulking is easier. It means I don't have to watch what I'm eating, just eat more food and I'm going to end up gaining the kind of, you know, mass or lean body mass that I'm looking for. And nothing could be further from the truth. I spent a lot of my, you know, lifting career in a bulk. I was a skinny kid. I was a real fast metabolism. And so for me, it was just, you know, put on weight by all means necessary. And I, and I made so many mistakes that later on as I started to figure out the mistakes that I made, bulking became so much easier and it was so much easier to gain muscle. I do want to speak up though for the skinny kid because you guys are looting right now that, you know, most people think that bulking was easy. I did not think I thought it was extremely difficult. I thought that was hard. But getting lean was easy. I used to make the joke that all I had to do is look at a treadmill and, you know, weight would fall off. So getting lean was very easy. But so there's definitely a percentage of people out there that, and I think that the stuff that we're going to go over today are so important. It's all the mistakes that I made trying to bulk, you know, I spent at least a decade and a half in a calorie surplus or what I was trying to be in a calorie surplus, I should say. And failing. And the number one thing that I think about that where I was probably making the biggest mistake was I knew I had to get more calories. And so I was chasing all these high calorie foods, processed foods, fast food, milkshakes, whatever I could get my hands on. I was consuming thinking that, of course, a, you know, number one for McDonald's that's 1500 calories is going to help me get to my targets faster than a chicken breast and rice lunch. So I would always opt for the fast food. I mean, I ate a ton of that. The exact same thing that I did, exact same mistake to me. I understood early on, just from reading the bodybuilding magazines and stuff that you had to eat more calories than you burned. And I remember reading an article where they made a big point about that. They said, look, no matter what, if you're not taking in enough calories, you're not going to gain any muscle. You just don't have the building blocks. By the way, this is true. This is a true fact. But this is all I thought everything was this right here. And to me, all calories were calories. It didn't matter where they came from. It didn't matter what I ate. And so if I had an opportunity to drink a soda or juice, I would because there's 200 calories right there. If I had the opportunity to supersize my fries, I would, if it was a different, for me, it didn't matter what it was. I wasn't going to aim for any type of health. It was all about calories. Oh, pizza. Oh, five slices. That's about 1000 or 1200 calories. I'll eat pizza or I'll have that ice cream. Oh no, go with the full fat stuff because I need the calories. And I would just pile on the junk food. And this was a huge mistake. It was a huge mistake for many different reasons. Yeah, believe it or not. I was a skinny kid. And I was in high school, dude. I was like a freshman. I barely weighed 200 pounds. It was my sophomore year. I really took off and just gained all this muscle was crazy. But no, like I approached it in a way where I the same way I was training, like I was all in like I was all about intensity, like in spite of sort of a mentality, right? So I would take these crazy concoction, like just any amount of calories I could throw into a shake and down it didn't matter about my digestion didn't matter about my stool, my sleep, like none of that stuff considered to where like I was in pain and miserable this entire process. That's the biggest part. The biggest part is if you are anything you're doing, I don't care if you're trying to build muscle or lose body fat or improve your performance. If your health starts to decline and I don't mean like terribly, it's obvious if you have terrible health, you're not going to be able to build muscle. But if you're just, if you're bloated and your digestion is off and you're lethargic because you're eating a lot of junk food, your capacity to build muscle, adapt and perform well is significantly reduced. It took me a long time to put this together. I mean, my post workout meal of choice because of the calories used to be a number four super size for McDonald's, which was a double quarter pound of a cheese, super size fries, regular Coke. And then I'd get another six piece nugget and I'd be like all these calories are great. And then I'd feel like garbage for like four hours afterwards. And I'd sit on the couch and not realizing I was killing myself, shooting myself in the foot. Yeah, I got all those extra calories, but my health wasn't doing any better because of it. So I remember when this, this changed for me. So this is going to sedate me a little bit, right? So when I, when we were doing this, like the fast food thing and I'm right with you, Sal. And this is exactly how I was eating. This was back when, when there was none of these cool phones with apps and tools. Before Ed Hardy. Yeah, even before Ed Hardy. Whoa. Four Crocs. Yeah, even before, yeah, way before Crocs and definitely before Ed Hardy. This was when Calorie King, calorieking.com was a thing, right? And so I was only really tracking calories at this point because of a lot of thermodynamics, right, that we touted all the time. And I knew that, like what the science said about being able to build, I have to be in a surplus. I'm chasing all these high calorie foods. So that was how I decided how I was eating it. But at this point, I'm not really breaking my macros down. That was too, too much work for me. It was just enough like, let's figure out my calories, this meal or that meal, choose the meal with the higher calories. That was it. It wasn't until body bug came around and we were tracking how much we were burning. So this is like, I don't know, I want to say about five years into my lifting career, which is probably about seven to 10 for your style when body bug comes around, somewhere around there. So it's like 2000, what, four? Yeah, yeah, somewhere around there. That's when I remember it coming out. And this tool at the time was the most accurate thing that we had out there, to get a good idea of what my metabolism was burning, how much steps I was taking. And then also with the app came a food tracker, and then you would implement your food, and then it would break down the macros. And what I found was, I just, I wasn't hitting, even, and this is why I've talked about this on the show at Nazium now, I was never hitting my protein intake, at least not consistently. Maybe I have one day, like, of course, if you have, you know, four Big Macs and 20 Chicken McNuggets, you get pretty high up there on protein from that. But I mean, for the most part, I was missing protein on a regular basis, but then over consuming carbohydrates and saturated fat. And so I was getting like skinny fat, I would put on weight sometimes, but then I didn't feel like I really put muscle on, and then it would come right off, because then I'd have three days in a row where I couldn't hit the calorie intake. But it wasn't until I really started to look at all of my macros, did it really start to kind of come full circle? Same here, because, you know, here's the thing with the junk food is for me, at least I noticed, and I noticed with clients as well, is I just wasn't able to perform as well in the gym. So I'd wake up in the morning, and I think to myself, I need to have a high calorie breakfast. And so either I would go to McDonald's and get, you know, six bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits and whatever I could get over there, and I get a lot of them, or I'd be at home and I'd eat a big old bowl of Fruit Loops cereal with whole milk, and then I'd have a bunch of eggs and toast and pancakes. And I mean, I was dead after this, I would feel absolutely terrible. And my workout suffered, and I didn't really necessarily notice because I was just concentrating on the calories. Once I started to clean it up a little bit, I felt so much better, my workouts got so much better, and I used to gain, and I gained more lean body mass. Now as far as protein is concerned, that light bulb went off for me when I started to pay attention to these weight gain shakes that I would make, the 2,000 calories, and I'd mix this crazy gainer. And then when I pay attention to the protein, like 40 grams of protein, no joke, 2,000 calories, 40 grams of protein, this is insane. This is all sugar and carbohydrates and garbage in there, and I need these proteins. So protein became a big one for me. When I was started to chase that over calories, it did make a big difference. Well, you know what I also noticed too is just your digestion, right? So if I would eat these big fast food meals or big junk food meals, even if they were really high calorie, 2,000 calories and 50, 60 grams of protein, because of all the saturated fat and how much calories I was eating in one sitting, it would make me feel all lethargic and bloated for like the next four or five hours. So I wasn't motivated to eat again. And it was such a, it was so weird when I switched over to like leaner stuff like chicken thighs and rice and avocado. They're just whole natural foods? Yeah, whole natural foods. Sure, I was eating a quarter or a half of the calories. But what I found was within an hour or two, I felt like my body had already digested that was starting to utilize that and I could eat again. And so I would be able to get two, three meals in the same amount of time of doing the junk food. And then the food that I'm getting, the quality of it was so much better. Now it's easier to hit the protein intake. Yeah, one year, I think I was, I want to say just turned 16, my parents had gone out of the country for like, I was like almost two months. And so we stayed with my grandma and my grandma, old school Sicilian grandmother. So she, her, her goal in life is to make you food. That's her favorite thing to do. And I'm in the middle of like trying to gain muscle. I've, I started working out at 14. So by the time I'm 16, I'm like really into it. And she says to me, she goes, I don't want you to eat out no more. She goes, I'm going to make you whatever you want. So I thought, Oh, what are the two foods that are the best for building muscle that are reading the magazines? I'm like steak and rice. I'm like, Nonna, I want you to make me steak and rice. Now my grandma, if you tell her you want something food wise, she's going to feed it to you until you explode. So I had steak and rice, and then she throw their stuff on top of like vegetables and eggs four or five times. It's basically as much as I wanted. Definitely breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then in between, she'd always asked me if I wanted more and I did in that two month period. I gained more lean body mass for meeting those whole natural foods. And I felt better than what I had done previously when I was eating lots of cereal and bread and sandwiches and junk food and juices and sodas just to try to pack on the weight. So when I cut out that junk food and had those whole natural foods, I just noticed, and here's the thing, the scale didn't move up like it did before, but the lean body mass definitely went up. And I noticed the performance was much more. Yeah, a lot more gradual, but your digestion, I'm sure, was way better with that. Now stronger. Yeah. And it's like you bring that energy into, you know, your workouts too, which I feel is another thing that people like tend to neglect a lot while they're going through this bulking process. Yeah, I would say if you're all, if you're bulking, now junk food does play a small role, especially if you're somebody who you have a really fast metabolism. And so junk food can be kind of palatable. And so sometimes throwing it in is okay. But I would say this for bulking, probably 80% of the time you should be eating whole natural foods, 20%, maybe 10 to 20% of time you can have in that junk food. Don't make the mistake a lot of people make, which is the flip, 80% of the time it's processed food, 20% of the time it's whole natural foods. That's a big mistake. So I used to, I used to have a, like a rule that I said is like, okay, if I can get myself to my protein goal in the day through whole foods, I would allow myself to use junk food to pile the calories. That's a great strategy. So it was like, that was the, it was, like I know early on junk food at all, it was get as much whole foods as possible, try and get to my protein intake through whole natural foods. If I get there, then I would allow myself to do that. And then the other thing that was I would, I would toggle back and forth between that or a protein shake. This is also how I use my protein shakes by the way too. So a lot of times people talk about having a protein shake right after your workout for, oh, it gets into your muscles so much faster. Again, I use my protein shakes to as like a emergency. So it's not like integrated into my daily meal planning. My daily meal planning is always going whole foods ideally. That's where I'm pushing always. But I also know that sometimes should happen, you get busy, you don't get a break for four or five hours. And so a meal gets missed. And so here I am at seven o'clock at night or whatever I've had most my meals. And I had maybe I missed one in the middle of the day because I worked for four or six hours. And so I'm behind 30, 40 grams of protein. This is where I allow the protein shake to go in there. Yes. So there's that there's I would set these little rules that ended up really helping me always hitting my my protein intake and then also not abusing the junk food. Yeah, when you're in a bulk eating that stuff, you can get away with it more often. But again, if I know that most of the time I'm going after whole foods and I make sure I get my protein intake through Whole Foods first, then it was a lot easier. I like that because it's more behavioral based than anything else. So if you hit your protein intakes early with whole natural foods, then you're going to have a little bit of room for the process stuff. And you hit the most important thing. That's the I mean, the second big biggest mistake is just not tracking and hitting protein. And I would see this too with clients, you know, when people would hire me. And it's obviously it was much more common for people to hire me to want to lose weight. But I would get the occasional person that wants to gain mass and size and strength who really wants to pack on the muscle. And the first thing I would do is I would have them track and lo and behold, you know, I'd have a 150 pound, you know, man who's consuming a lot of calories and not even hitting 120 grams of protein, not forgetting hitting one to one, but not even hitting 120 or 100. And it's because most of these processed foods and junk foods are not very high in protein. So hit that first for sure. Avoid tons of junk food, hit your protein. And then with food, it becomes much more successful. So a hack for that, right? I think another and you've talked about this Sal before about the whole made up breakfast foods, right? But if you look at breakfast foods in general, it's mostly like carbs and sugary type of stuff. It's not very high protein. There's so I think one of the biggest strategies that, you know, changed it all up for me was being able to stay ahead of my protein. So that's what I when I get somebody who DMs me or asked me like, you know, I have a hard time hitting my protein intake, the key is the first meal. That's what I think. I think that the rest of it like lunch and dinner, I think is easy to get higher protein meals. It's breakfast. Because even like if you have four eggs, which is a lot or six eggs, which is a lot for it's not as much protein as you think. Yeah, it's not. That's you're talking about 37 grams of protein tops with six eggs and who eats six eggs. Most people eat two to five. Even bacon doesn't have a lot of right. So that that to me is, you know, have a high protein. So maybe you ask how okay, well, this is what I would do is almost always whenever we make dinner, we make enough dinner for leftover. So and we do a lot of veal ground beef ground turkey. So we have a lot of dishes. I always use that extra ground beef turkey meat. And I throw that in a scramble. And that's an easy way to take a 20 gram like egg type of meal. If you just have where to have eggs by itself, you're getting 27 grams. You throw in an extra four ounces of beef or veal or ground turkey. And there now you take that all the way up to 50 something grams of protein. And being ahead of the protein as the day goes on, it's much easier. Otherwise, you're playing catch up. Okay, so here's one reason why what Adam's saying is very, very true. And one reason why is that protein is very satiating. So it's better to eat protein consistently throughout the day from that standpoint than it is to try and eat it all at once. And what happens when you get to 6pm, and you notice, oh my gosh, I'm 100 grams of protein behind, it's going to be hard to eat anything else. You eat 100 grams of protein at one sitting. That's a chore. Oh, it's your stuff. You don't want to eat anymore. Now that's all you had. You don't get your carbs. You don't get your fats or whatever. So it is important to start out with a with a good high protein meal. Steak and eggs is my favorite. So I would have the steak from the night before. And then the next day I'd have my, you know, my eight ounce of steak with my eggs. And I'd hit my protein targets. And once you stay ahead of it, you're doing pretty good. 100%. Yeah. Now here's, here's the next big mistake. And this was, this was me all the time. I think there's a lot of people. Yes. And it was that, it was, you know, what do they call it? Permabulk. Permabulk. Yeah. I was just, I was bulking for too long. Now here's the thing with, when you're eating in a calorie surplus at first, especially when you combine it with a really, really good workout, you do gain great strength and great muscle. But if you stay on it too long, that surplus, your body tends to get used to it. And then the gains are mostly body fat. And this is when you see people are bulking for three, four, five, six months in a row. And they're like, Oh, I packed on 15 pounds on the scale. And then they go get a body fat task like, Oh, it's 10 pounds of body, that happened to me once. I remember I gained 30 pounds and something like 20 something pounds of it was body fat. And it was such a, it was like someone punched me in the stomach, you know? I think it too, like if you grow up skinny and like it's a complex you've sort of, you know, have around it that this is a tough one, right? To, to not to go away, just like if I was always trying to kind of get leaner and look leaner, like to be able to bulk for them is like very difficult. I think it's psychologically one of those things that, you know, you have to, you have to do both. You have to be able to have that healthy break from constantly inundating your body with calories. Well, talking about the psychological part, I think there's, and this took me a long time before this, this hack came, which is, and I do this to competitors myself. If I'm on a bulk and I see, I notice like we kind of stall weight gain wise, or even if I notice that we've strung like a couple of weeks in a row of like constantly surplus, surplus, surplus, I love to throw a really low calorie day in there. Just the psychological break totally of your, your constantly overfeeding, overfeed. It's the same concept with what I love to do with somebody who's on a cut all the time, dieting so hard, salads, eating hardly anything every single day today. And then also I say, Hey, guess what? Go ahead. We're going to eat all these calories. The psychological break that it gives you when you're focused on that. It's always hard to the grass is greener on the other side, right? Always. So if you're somebody who's trying to be, you know, a bulk and you're a skinny person, it's hard. If you're somebody who's bigger, trying to get lean, it's, you feel like it's just as hard. Yeah. Well, the studies that have been done on diet breaks actually show a physiological benefit as well. Now, I don't know of any that have been done on bulking, but I'll speak from personal experience. But the ones that have been done on dieting show that people burn more body fat and preserve more muscle when they include what they call in the studies, diet breaks. So the way it works basically is they would compare two groups of people, all of them on a diet to a low calorie diet to burn body fat, both of them for 12 weeks. One group, it's all the way straight through the other group. Every week or so they'll take a day or two where they'll increase their calories or they'll take a week after three or four weeks and increase their calories. Now, at the end of the study, everybody's consumed relatively equivalent calories, but they find is that the group that does the diet break burns more body fat and preserves more muscle. Now, I don't know any studies that have been done on bulking, but I can speak from personal experience. In my experience, and this is for me and for clients, when I would include bulking breaks, I would gain more lean body mass and less body fat. It was like my body would become resensitized to calories. Like assimilate it better. Okay, so you talk to any competitor who's ever dieted and gotten down super, super shredded and you ask them how they feel after the show is over and they can consume a lot of calories. And they'll tell you it's the most anabolic they've ever felt in their life. It's like everything they eat, their training, everything that they do just turns into muscle. It's like their body became hypersensitive to calories and protein and wants to build muscle. In my opinion, you can induce this in yourself when you're bulking by going on a bulk break. So after about three weeks or four weeks of bulking, I like to do three, four days of slightly below maintenance, a slight deficit. And then I go back on the bulk. And what I notice is it's like my body is more sensitive to the calories again. I get that initial feeling that I got the first time I started the bulk. So bulking for too long, too consistently, you start to get diminishing returns, throwing those breaks. Don't bulk, in my experience, don't bulk for longer, getting a consistent basis than three or four weeks, throw in at least a few days of a break and then go back on it. I love sharing this hack because the next mistake we're going to talk to about is being kind of like married to the scale. And the reason why I like sharing this hack was this was a major struggle for me for a really long time. As the skinny kid who was teased for being skinny for so long wanted to put weight on, like Justin was looting to before, I would do anything just to put weight on. I was so afraid to take a day of not trying to eat any calorie surplus because of how fast my body would drop on the scale. And that was me watching the scale. Literally, I remember I used to weigh myself two, three times a day, every morning and every night for sure, at least. And I would be so frustrated when I'd wake up the next day and see that I lost a pound. And in my head, of course, because of my insecurity, it's muscle, right? A pound of muscle just fell off my body. I know there's a lot of young people that are trying to build that think the same way, too. And so then you hear guys like us give this advice of, oh, you're trying to bulk, you're a skinny guy, try taking a day of fasting, or try taking a day of really low, one day of really low calories. Hell, no. There was no way you would convince 22-year-old me that that would be a good idea. No, you end up losing three, four, five pounds of water. Yes. And now you're like, this diet break was a terrible thing. Yeah, it was a disaster. I lost muscle. Exactly. And so those that are listening right now that are hearing this advice, you have to be mentally prepared for that, right? If you eat significantly less calories for a day, there's a very good chance that your carbohydrate intake is going to be lower, your sodium's going to be lower. Therefore, your body's going to hold significantly less water, which for some of you, that could be several pounds. I mean, when I was drinking well over a gallon of water a day, my body would fluctuate six to nine pounds through the night of just water, not muscle, not fat, just water being held and released. And so if you restrict calories for a day, very easily, you could sway that many pounds in a day. You didn't lose muscle. I promise you, you didn't lose muscle, and you will benefit when you go back to increasing the calories again. Right. Which takes us to the next one, which is paying attention to just the scale. The scale is the most important thing. This is how I measure all my progress. Because I'm bulking as long as the scale is going up in weight, that means I'm being successful. This is totally not true. This is just as false as people who are losing weight who only pay attention to the scale. Right. I mean, literally. I remember I used to fall trapped to this. What I would do is I would eat foods that intentionally made me hold more water. So I'd notice, oh, when I eat pizza, I gain a couple pounds. So now pizzas are great bulking food, burritos, or I'd weigh myself at night rather than in the morning because I knew at night I'd be heavier. Obviously, the scale is only measuring weight. It is not measuring lean body mass. It's not measuring just water. It's not measuring just body fat. It's measuring all of that. It's not even measuring, it's adding your clothes on top of it. It's adding everything. And so the scale can go up simply because you're gaining body fat, or simply because you're holding more water, which in my case, I ended up with inadvertently seeking out foods that made me hold more water because it would give me this positive number on the scale. It's not the be all, end all at all. Yeah, I remember talking to a competitor, and I used to be in a Gold's Gym where there was a lot of competitors, and Adam shared a few of these stories before, where you just see these guys working so hard to gain weight in the off season, to really boost up their lean muscle mass, and you see them go through the peeling down process in the cut, and you find out they literally only gain maybe one pound of muscle through that entire process from the beginning. This is like months in the making, and it's just got to be so frustrating. I went on this crazy bulk once. I gained, I think I weighed almost 240 pounds, which is, that's really heavy for a guy, for my bone structure. I mean, right now I'm heavy. I'm about two, maybe close to 215, so throw on another 25 pounds, and I remember I went through this crazy bulk, and I was so proud of myself. I got to the highest weight I'd ever gotten before, and then I got my body fat tested, and I subtracted the fat mass that I had gained, and I had gained like six pounds of muscle. I mean, it was such a small percentage of the total. All the hard work, and everything you put in. And I remember thinking to myself, like, dude, I got myself to gain so much body fat. Now I got to go back and try and lose this body fat, and there's no way I'm going to keep that lean body mass on my body, and sure enough, when I cut back down, I went right back to where I was before, so it literally went nowhere. All I did was got myself... I did a similar thing, Sal, too, with the height. That was the beginning of this for me, but it didn't come full circle until I actually truly competed. Like, competing really changed this, how I communicate to clients this now, because when I did the same thing as you did, I did this aggressive bulk. So I did it hydrostatic way, right? So where you get in the water, and they test all this, and they tell you that, and it's one of the more accurate ways to do this. And the goal was to put on as much, you know, mass as I could, as much lean body mass as I could. And I did, I put on like 20-something pounds also, and I was stoked. Like, I couldn't wait to go get measured again. And when I saw that I had literally added like one pound of muscle, you know, all those 25 pounds, and so my body fat percentage was through the roof, like all of that bulking and aggressive training, all for one pound, like that is just ridiculous. That was the beginning. Then when I started competing, and I started... I mean, I was tracking sodium, I was tracking carbohydrate intake, I was tracking water every single day. And I was watching how much I would fluctuate. And then I was also, because this was back when I was tracking on Instagram and YouTube, I was taking these selfies first thing in the morning and at night and like really paying attention. So even though this part we're just talking about the scale, there's even a mental fuck with the visual, because when you're loaded up with carbohydrates and you load up with water, it fills the muscle bellies up too. So there was this other part, not only did the scale mess with my head, but then like, so I'd be listening, you guys tell me this advice right now and I'd be like, I don't give a shit what you say, I'm looking at myself and I look full. I look smaller with all without, without that water, without the carbohydrates in me. And that would really scare me. It would scare the shit out of me. Not only did I see the scale go down, but I'm looking at myself in the mirror and I look way smaller. And for somebody who's trying to bulk and put size on, it really messes with your head. And it wasn't until I was tracking at that level to really see how much that can be manipulated. And by the way, this is, this is, it's manipulated even more the leaner you get. So if you're a really lean skinny kid who's trying to build muscle, this really fluctuates up and down. It does, it does fluctuate quite a bit. So here's, here's my recommendation. My recommendation is to use, if you don't have access to something that can test your body fat, and you can do the electronic impedance, although that's not very consistent. I prefer calipers underwater weighing is the most consistent you'll get. Test your body fat so you can see the, what kind of weight you're gaining. If you don't have that, measure your waist. So for guys, you could put a tape measure around your waist for girls. You can also use your waist, but you can also measure things like your hip, your thighs, your upper arms, and then watch what your, what your numbers do. So if the scale goes up 10 pounds, but you notice you also simultaneously gain an inch and a half around your waist, you probably gained a lot of body fat. But if your scale goes up 10 pounds and your waist measurement doesn't go up at all, or barely, then you probably gained a lot of lean body mass. Here's the number that I ended up with later on when I would do my bulks. I would, because gaining body fat is a part of bulking, by the way, I'm not trying to say that you only can gain lean body mass and gain no body fat. That's almost impossible, especially if you're an all-natural lifter. So here's the number that I started to work with later on. I would allow myself to gain a pound of body fat for every two pounds of muscle. That was it. So I wouldn't even do a one-to-one, where I'd gain five pounds of muscle, five pounds of fat. That was even too much. I would say, okay, if I gained six pounds of muscle, then I would be okay with gaining three pounds of body fat. Now here's the deal. It's a slower process, but that's because gaining muscle is a slow process. That's the whole, that's why it's slow to begin with. Gaining body fat is fast, and it's easy. So that's something that you need to pay attention to. It is going to be a slow process, especially if you're trying to gain muscle mass to fat at a two-to-one ratio. Now the next thing was a big one for me that this one took a lot longer. It took me a while to get wise to this. Was that I just wouldn't prepare for the next day. Now when I was trying to get lean, I would prepare more often. I would measure things out and figure out what I'd eat, but when it was bulking, I was just like, I'm just going to eat a lot of food. Yes. Not going to be a problem. The issue with that was sometimes I would miss a meal, in which case I would be screwed, or I'm at work, and I normally would be able to go out and buy some food, but I got a meeting. I only have 15 minutes. My food's not with me, or I'd wake up late and I'd miss breakfast. Prepare your meals just like if you're dieting to cut. Same thing when you're trying to bulk. I feel like protein is the most crucial for that. It's not just really easy to find a quality version of protein just easily accessible. So to really make that point of having those sort of prep days, and people talk about this, but I've gone through that where it really makes a big difference if you take at least one day on the weekend, and you grill up a bunch of meat or different options for you to then be able to store and use it for your breakfast, use it for whatever meals that you find appropriate for it, it helps tremendously. This conversation is really fun and interesting for me. It's like as we're doing this, I'm thinking back. Reminiscing. I am. I'm reminiscing of my whole fitness journey and just how a lot of things that I believed to be true, that I took a hard stance in, and a lot of that stuff has evolved and changed. Once I figured out what a difference prepping made, that was mandatory for me. If I trained clients, you had to. I was super staunch about that because it forever changed my results. I remember up until this point, and it was a long time, at least a decade of training with no real serious prep, not like what I got into later on. I started to dedicate Sundays to all prep day, and I would say I would have 75% to 80% of all meals mapped out for the entire week. I always left some leeway there because what I found is if I prepped 100% of meals, I would waste. I learned to prep about 75% to 80% of all meals I'll be eating, and then I can use fillers like bars or shakes, or be able to go get something eating out that's a healthy choice to fill that in. But it made such a difference on my results. Not only getting to my goal, but how fast I got to my goal, knowing if I didn't, why I didn't, because it's all weighed, measured, and tracked. So it became something that I made all clients do. You had to, to learn about your macros, to learn, because there's all kinds of research around people when they estimate their own calories and food. They're always way off. So until they weigh out what six ounces looks like, or what 30 grams of something, you have to have a baseline. Right. And so that was something you had to do. Now where I'm at is I want my clients to do that. I wouldn't force them to do that. And ultimately, we talk about it on the show all the time that intuitive eating is the place that we want to get to, right? To where you don't have to weigh, measure, do all this, but I think it's, but if you're chasing a goal, yes. Yeah. Then planning is crucial. Yeah. It's so crucial. Yeah. Intuitive eating is great for maintaining, maintaining your health, maintaining general fitness. But if you're trying to cut or bulk and you don't plan, it's gonna be, it's good luck. In my experience, it's almost impossible. Well, yeah, because you're behind the A-ball. It's inevitable that you're gonna have, you're gonna have a hard day where just you don't have time to make those meals in the day. And so having it ready in the refrigerator already, where you just have to heat it up, that's, that's so crucial to making sure that you have, you have success doing this. Yeah. Now here's some, here's some staple foods that I used to love for bulking that are easy to prepare. Ground beef, very, very easy to prepare in bulk. Chicken thighs, you can grill up a ton of chicken thighs and they're really, really good warmed back up. And rice. There you go right there. You got your proteins and your carbs and your fats. Super, super easy. And then for vegetables, if you, another easy food to prep is you could buy frozen broccoli, frozen asparagus, you boil it up, put it in a big container. And it's very, very easy now to portion that out for your four meals or five meals or whatever to hit your calories. Those are my favorite things. Now the last one, this is a big one. Okay. This is a big one for a lot of people, especially when they're focused just on the scale and how much weight they're gaining. You got to train properly. Okay. Not just hard, not just beating yourself up in the gym and getting sore, but if you're bulking, you better be getting stronger. This is a big one. Like if you're bulking and gaining weight and your strength is not going up consistently, you're probably gaining body fat. It's a bad indication. Yeah, you're probably gaining body fat. Really, you got to understand one thing here. When you're trying to gain lean body mass, eating more calories, eating more protein will do nothing for you if you don't have the right signal that's being sent. If your body doesn't want to build muscle, then all those extra calories, extra protein, all that extra prep and planning, all that stuff, you're just going to gain body fat. It's not going to go anywhere. But if you send the right signal and your body is primed to build muscle, it's like a dry sponge ready to soak up all that protein and all those carbohydrates and all those fats and calories, and you end up packing on muscle. That's why I keep stressing digestion through this whole thing. It's such a vital portion of all this stuff. If you're not digesting your food properly, it's going to affect when you go into the gym and you're all gassy and bloated and you got to go to the bathroom like half the time. I swear to God, this happens when you're eating all this junk and so that's going to happen. Then the other days in between, I see a lot of times guys will, you know, well, I don't want to do any cardio or anything. So they're just laying around and they're not actually moving, which also promotes good digestion as well. And recovery and all these things, recovery is a huge part of actually gaining muscle. So to impede on all that, you're going to have issues. So there's a couple of things that come to mind for me when it comes to making mistakes when bulking and training wrong. And the first one that I find common, especially with the skinny kid who's trying to build, is what comes with that too is a lot of times the over application of intensity. As a young kid trying to build muscle, I figured the more I was hitting the weights, the more I was in the gym, the harder I lifted in the gym, the more muscle I would build. And that's not necessarily true. You still need good programming and you don't want to get cut in what Sal calls the recovery trap where my body is constantly breaking down, breaking down. I'm never giving it time to recover. The other thing is out training your calorie intake. That was another thing that I struggled with. I just was an active kid. I was moving around all the time. I played sports. I was outdoors a lot and I was lifting six, seven days a week. You're talking about somebody who was burning 4500 on a low day, 6000 calories a day in that range to eat that many calories day in and day out and to be in a surplus was just hard as shit. So one of the best things I ever did was to back off of a six, seven day week of a program and drop down to a three to four day week program. And I started to put weight on. Yeah. The best program that we have, the best two programs I would say that we have for mass gaining would be maps, enabolic and maps aesthetic hands down maps, enabolic for most people, maps aesthetic for more advanced lifters. Both programs really are tailored to stimulate muscle growth, like muscle hypertrophy, maps, enabolic in particular. And it's centered around three full body workouts a week. There's obviously much more that goes into it. And then there's trigger sessions on the off days. But when I started training like that, it was like I turned on a light switch. I'll never forget. I went from the crazy split and going to failure on every lift and the insanity with the workouts to a structure that was more like maps, enabolic. And it literally felt like I turned on a light switch like all of a sudden. And I felt it within the third workout like, whoa, I feel different. I'm stronger. What's going on? Now I'm eating these extra calories and it's going to lean body mass. It makes a huge difference. If you don't train properly, nothing else you do will matter. All you're going to do is pack on body fat. The training aspect is very, very important. The easiest way to measure this is are you getting stronger? If you're bulking, you should be getting stronger. You should not be maintaining strength. And you definitely should not be losing strength. And the other thing I think about too is what I did as a young kid is skipping out on all the big compound movements, man. Don't avoid those. Don't avoid those because they're hard. Don't avoid the hard exercises and stick to just machines. You absolutely want to have those big exercises in there. I know that a lot of young guys that I coached that were in their 20s or teens trying to put muscle on, they didn't like squatting. They didn't like deadlifting. They didn't like overhead press. Maybe they bench pressed, but a lot of those big compound movements. And so I would say maps enabolic just because I think that's where you start and then maybe you progress to aesthetic. I think most people would benefit with that type of program. Three days a week, full body routine. You're doing that. I mean, most young guys, and I know there's obviously girls too that are listening. Well, a lot of women want to bulk too. Right, right. There's a lot of women that are trying to build their butt. They're lower half and they're struggling to put size on. If you, three times a week, squatting and deadlifting and doing movements like that, which is enabolic, to me, that's going to promote more growth than aesthetic or any of the other programs that we do. Yeah, totally. I mean, bulking properly for men produces a more muscular, balanced, stronger looking physique. For women, it produces more firm curves, more glutes, more hamstrings, better posture. So bulking is definitely for both sexes. And proper bulking is really about gaining lean body mass and minimizing fat gain. And also, again, I'm going to emphasize this again, getting stronger. Again, if you're bulking properly and you're training properly, you should find yourself lifting heavier and maybe not every week, but you should be stronger than you were before you started bulking. That's probably the best way you can gauge your progress or whether or not your workout is successful or not. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. So you can come find us on YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on social media. You can find us on Instagram and now on parlor. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal, Adam at Mind Pump, Adam and Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. I was driving them to my house yesterday. And again, he's like, you gotta get PlayStation, don't get the Xbox. I'm like, you gotta talk to Adam, dude. He's the, he's the gamer of the group. So, so I called up Adam and Adam's like, Adam goes, look, I don't care what system we get. I'm going to kick your ass no matter what we play.