Cutting and bulking has been a common practice among the bodybuilding community for years, but is it the best way to gain lean muscle mass? Let’s find out!

Cutting and Bulking Discussed in This Video

Let’s take a look at a prevalent means to shaping your body – the bodybuilding bulking diet. We’ll also talk about some tips and information for you if bulking and cutting is not for you, but you still want to build a great physique.

Bulking is that part of the strategy where an enormous surplus of calorie intake is included into the meal plan. This is simply eating a lot more food than your body can burn off. Cutting, on the other hand, is trying to lose the accumulated body fat from the bulking phase, with minimal loss to the muscle gained. If you think about it, this is based on good reasoning, because muscle can only be built if there are extra calories to build it with. Lots of bodybuilders have employed this strategy and got great results.

The issue here arises when we gain a lot of fat along with the muscles during the bulking phase. This is sure to happen, and is already an accepted thing with this particular strategy. However, recent studies show that many problems arise from this time-tested strategy. For example, do you know about fat cell hyperplasia? This is when our body is forced to create fat because there’s too much energy and calories coming in that can’t be utilized for the creation of muscle. The bad thing is – fat cells produced in this way never ever get removed from your body. These fat cells stay and won’t be burned off even if you get to the cutting phase of this strategy. This accumulation of irremovable fat cells makes our body more likely to store fat immediately whenever we mess our diet up in the future. This is the last thing we need – more guilt and shame whenever we binge on our cheat days.

More food doesn’t really translate to more muscles because your body can only build so much muscle and use only so much calories for doing so. Not believing this would surely end in a physique disaster for you. You also get another bonus from the bulking phase of this strategy: liver strain, pancreatic strain, cholesterol and blood pressure problems, water retention, thyroid and insulin problems, are just a few. Clearly, besides getting fatter, bulking up like this gives us problems for the future, in terms of acquiring that lean and healthy physique.

Good news, recent studies have identified other alternatives that you can take on to increase muscle without fat, and also avoid the negative health side-effects of bulking up in the traditional way. The simple answer is timing – give your body the surplus when it needs it, and make sure to taper off the intake when it doesn’t need the extra calories. However, since all human beings are different from each other, there’s no single answer that fits everyone. This is the reason why even the fitness pros still consult with licensed experts with regards to what diet works for them.

One tip that applies to most, though, is to take in your extra calories within 2 hours before and/or after your workout. Make sure to consume only protein and carbs for this window. This is how you can get started on gain muscle without gaining too much fat.
Just visit The Muscle Maximizer to see and learn more about how you can counter the negative side of the traditional cutting and bulking approach. Hope you’ve learned a lot from this! Thanks for reading!