Bulking Bulking Bulking!!!

Summer has been officially over for a few weeks but with classes starting today and The Office season premiere tonight, fall is here. So what does that have to do with Bulking? Everything. Fall signifies the beginning of the season where gym rats gain massive amounts of muscle and the truly dedicated use holiday eating to their advantage to gain inches in their arms, chest, shoulders and legs.

Of course I just can't tell you what you can do right? What help would that be? You want to know how to do it, right? Well besides resistance training and following the weightlifting tips from Ryan H. and Turo along with one of our many NSCA Certified Personal Trainers; you'll have to follow some basic rules of nutrition.

Well first of all we have to understand that when the human body has a surplus of energy (calories) the body does a few things with it. It either A. stores it as fat and/or B. stores it as muscle. There are also a few other things that I wont mention such as replenishing glycogen sources but telling you why and how this happens is beyond my scope of knowledge. We can just ask Katie a bunch of questions when she's on shift.

One misconception or a mistake that people will make is that they will eat massive amounts of food that are way beyond the necessary caloric surplus to achieve muscular hypertrophy. This is because our body's ability to build muscle is limited. If this were not the case everyone would pack on 50 pounds of muscle overnight and only have to workout for a day, assuming they had enough calories to support this growth. According to the NSCA's Essentials of Personal Training a caloric surplus of 350-700 Calories (big 'C') will support a "1 to 2-pound weekly gain in lean tissue as well as the energy requirements of the resistance program." (134) Protein requirements are also estimated "to be 1.5 to 2.0 grams per killogram of body weight per day" (134). And just for clarification a caloric surplus means that you are eating more than what is required daily for your body to maintain its weight. Check out www.freedieting.com to figure out what your caloric needs are. It is also important to note that everybody is different and these are only estimates.

So if a 150 pound person would like to gain some lean tissue mass how much protein would he/she need?
150lbs = 68.18 kilograms and then
1.8 x 68.18 = 122 grams of protein.
2 x 68.18 = 136 grams of protein.

So the answer is between 122 to 136 grams of protein a day. But weight (spelled wrong on purpose) there's more. One cannot eat 135 grams of protein and expect to gain muscle mass. He/she must also have an adequate amount of calories coming from carbohydrate and fat sources to have energy for the body to function normally as well as use extra energy to build muscle. Which was explained earlier.

So there you have it. Bulking broken down without all the broscience. Feel free to comment. I don't write blogs but I do now.

Thanks for reading.

Noel C.
NSCA-CPT