How To Bulk Up By Building Muscle Mass Without Getting Fat And Losing Your Muscular Definition!
If you’ve been bulking up steadily, the chances are good that you’ve added some excess fat. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred accumulate a little extra fat during the building up process. It’s a normal thing, and nothing to worry about.
The only problem is what to do about it. As I have explained before, you can get rid of fat in two ways. One, the old fashioned way, is to start a program of very high reps and follow a low calorie diet. You simply starve off the fat. The trouble with this method is that you also starve off a lot of muscle. It’s not a satisfactory way to trim down.
The best way to trim down, the modern way, is to vary your calorie intake slightly and prevent the accumulation of the fat in the first place. I call it staying lean. It’s a fairly new concept in bodybuilding and we’re going to talk more about it. Before we do, though, let’s take a quick look at the route towards a muscular physique.
It used to be thought that the best method of bodybuilding was simply to bulk up thirty pounds or so above what you hoped to eventually weigh in muscular condition, and then trim down once and for good. This concept proved faulty in two respects.
The first flaw was that some men simply couldn’t bulk up that much without becoming purely fat men. The second flaw was that some of the men who did bulk up enough never succeeded in trimming down properly afterwards. They’d accumulated too much extra flab and they’d carried it too long. For a complex combination of physiological and psychological reasons they never did reach the appearance they wanted.
It’s now known that the best way to build up is in a series of jumps. You don’t just zoom up to your top body weight. Your increases should be gradually ascending plateaus rather that in a straight climb. Let’s make that simpler.
If you want a herculean physique, you do it like this: Keep increasing your body weight with bulk and power exercises until you start looking too soft and weight begins to accumulate on your waist and hips. At this point you should stop gaining weight for a while. Train back down ten pounds or so, or until you look hard again. You don’t have to look like an anatomy chart, but get in fairly solid condition by cutting back on your calories.
Now hold this reduced body weight for a month or two and work hard on your showy muscles, such as arms, pecs, deltoids, and so on. After a couple of months you start bulking up again from your new base by slowly increasing your intake of calories.
Never let your body accumulate too much fat. It’s too hard and time consuming working it off again. Keep careful watch on your condition. As soon as your waist gets to the point where it’s spoiling your appearance, work off the flab, sharpen your overall appearance, and then start bulking up again.
If you train this way, bulking up and then trimming down periodically by controlling your calorie intake, you’ll make better progress in the long run and you’ll end up with a much better physique. Your aim should be for a herculean body, not a fat one. Don’t confuse muscle with blubber. You’ll notice that even the big bodybuilders maintain some definition all year round. Not as much, perhaps, as smaller men, but still enough to emphasize their muscular development.
Let’s assume now that you’ve bulked up to the point where your general appearance is smooth rather than defined, and your waist and hips are getting just a little too big for good proportions. If you’ve been training properly, most of you should be at this point by now.
What you’re going to do now is trim the extra weight off your waist and hips and cut your body weight until you look hard and solid all over. You won’t reach a highly defined state, just looking solid is good enough at this point. You’ll hold this look for about two months and then start bulking up again.
The key point to remember is that you don’t want to lose weight all over. You certainly don’t want to lose any muscle. All you want to do is trim your waist and hips. Any loss of fat off your arms and legs should be compensated for by increased muscle in those areas. The end result should be that your muscular measurements remain the same or increase slightly while your waist and hips reduce drastically.
If you do this properly, you can look for a revolutionary change in your appearance. You’ll take on a polished, highly trained look. If you train hard and diet conscientiously your appearance will change practically from day to day. You’ll improve more in two or three months than you would in two or three years of normal training. Do this several times and you’ll own an outstanding physique.
Remember – this isn’t the end of your bulking up. You’ll continue highly effective bulk and power training again after you harden up. Each time you trim down to a solid condition you’ll start up again from a greatly improved base. Each time you bulk up you’ll be able to carry a lot more body weight without looking sloppy.
* Note: If you have written me for training advice and I have not answered your email, it is because (a) my email program tagged your email as spam or (b) your question was impossible for me to understand and therefore unanswerable. If you would carefully include a subject line, and write clearly there should be no problem.
Posted by: Mike Buckinson
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Any Hard Gainer Can Build Muscle And Make Fast Gains By Using This Basic Bodybuilding Truth!
Every so often we have to come back to the basics. Technique, it seems, outstrips performance. New discoveries pile upon old. Claims beget counter-claims.
John Doe develops the ultimate training system and Sam Smith improves on it. Super-duper programs – long, low, improved models – hit the scene in blinding succession till the trainee stands astounded, blinded by the brilliance of it all.
And going, as a rule, absolutely nowhere.
He becomes unable, as they say, to see the forest for the trees. He loses sight of several basic truths. Like the careless climber he gets snowed under, buried by an avalanche of confusing information.
A friend asked me about it the other day. And it’s one question, worded in various ways but frequently asked of me. It goes a little something like this:
You continually stress the necessity of working hard with heavy weights. You say repeatedly that hard work is a must for effective gaining. Yet I know of a title holding local bodybuilder who doesn’t work hard at all. He trains easy and makes fabulous gains. How come?
Here’s my reply to that question: The information in my mini-course – and this whole website, for that matter – is geared towards helping the average trainee. That’s the gentleman who needs help, the guy who has trouble gaining, who sweats buckets for every fraction of an inch and lies awake at night wondering if it’s all worthwhile. For him, hard work and heavy weights are essential. He won’t gain without them. He’s got to shovel coal every foot of the way, and anyone who tells him otherwise is lying to him.
A few people, however, are more fortunate. They’re different from us lesser mortals. They’re what we call easy gainers and they’re luckier than the devil. You can admire these people all you want. You can envy them if you’d rather. But don’t make the mistake of trying to train like them. You’ll wipe out for sure.
Easy gainers can break all the training rules and still make big gains. They can wave light dumbbells around and grow arms like Ronnie Coleman. They can live on tutti-frutti ice cream and still win the best abdominal award at the muscle show. People like this have to be endured if only because it’s against the law to poison them.
One of the best physiques I know trains for half an hour at a time and never took a supplement in his life. He’s too lazy to squat and gains fine without them. But the point you’ve got to remember is that this type of guy is unusual. You can’t use him for statistics. He’s got the particular chemical balance or genes or metabolism or whatever that enables him to grow bulging muscles with practically no effort and even less thought.
Very, very few men can train that way and still make gains. If you can – if you’re an easy gainer – then you’re wasting your time reading this blog. You don’t need help. If you’re not an easy gainer – if you’re a hard luck apple like the rest of us – then don’t get confused and don’t get misled. You can’t train like the easy gainer and still succeed. He’s got natural advantages you don’t have.
If you’re an easy gainer – a natural, in other words – you’ll soon know it. You’ll grow like a baby whale no matter what you do. But if you’re not an easy gainer, and chances are you’re not, then figure on working very, very hard. It’s the only way.
Posted by: Mike Buckinson
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