Muscle building

A typical body building cycle used to involve both bulking and cutting, but this is now an outdated training model. How wants to go through that cutting phase anyway. And who wants to look soft and bloated. The ideal is to gain the maximum amount of muscle without losing your abs. In my own training I don't purposely try to bulk up anymore. Usually when someone says they are bulking up, it's pretty much an excuse to get fat. I really don't like this mentality of packing on as much size as possible as quickly as you can. I'd rather try a moderate approach and instead of forcing your body to grow, provide it with the correct nutrition it needs to grow in its own time.

Basically what I'm trying to say is to make sure to create yourself a sound nutrition plan. Some of the basics include eating every two to three hours during the day, taking in a minimum of a gram to a gram and a half of protein per pound of your body weight, getting all your nutrients, carbs, veggies, vital nutrients, essential fats, all of that necessary nutrition. And on top of that, you need to be training hard with progressive overload so you're doing everything your body needs for it to grow.

Doing it this way puts demands on the muscle to grow, you're also providing it with the correct nutrition, but then you're just letting it grow by itself. Don't try to force your muscle to grow. Some guys will just get on the scale and think they're not gaining weight, so they'll use that as an excuse to eat more food, although not the best kinds. I can't even count how often people I know have gone on diets of pizza, burgers, fries, ice cream and other junk like that in their mass gaining efforts. This will definitely get more calories in your system, and you will gain weight, but it's just going to be excess fat around your waist. The food choices are so poor that the muscle growth beneath the fat is very limited.

What you should be focusing on is clean, quality nutrition, and to repeat, just let your body grow. Get enough fuel, rest, and enough stimulus so that your body will grow, but don't force it. You'll find a lot of times, especially with beginners or people at the intermediate phase, that once they start this type of healthier diet program, they start gaining mass and losing body fat at the same time. So if they kept track of their body composition, they may not see a huge change on the scale, but they would definitely start to see major changes in their lean mass to body fat ratio. With this in mind, the scale can really be misleading.

If someone were to switch their goals and focus on getting lean, not the skinny guy trying to bulk up, but the overweight guy who's trying to trim down, you would do the same sort of thing but focus mainly on fat loss. You would do all the same things to let your body lose extra fat. Eat a clean diet with a small caloric deficit so that you're tapping into your stored body fat, and you would just let your body naturally lose the fat. You don't want to starve yourself and try to force the fat off, just be patient and let it happen slowly and steadily.

When it comes to any kind of body transformation program, whether it's mass building or fat loss, people tend to overestimate how hard and complicated the process is really going to be and how long it will take. The key is to just get the basics down and let it happen on its own, don't make it more complicated than it really is. Remember that it's not a race, it should be a slow and steady process and this will really make it work for you in the end.

So do you need to have a bulk up or cut cycle? No, but you do need to customize your nutrition and training plans to your goals. If you want to get bigger, you need a caloric surplus and if you're overweight, you need a caloric deficit to trim down. So you still need to focus and customize your training and nutrition plans to these goals, but don't try to force it to happen, just get the foundation down.

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