The mass building nutrition fallacy
Here's what you need to know...
- Gaining mass by increasing body fat will reduce insulin sensitivity and hinder muscle growth.
- The more fat you build, the more you change your physiology in a direction that favors fat storage over muscle growth.
- Most people will only store fat in one area such as the abdomen or love handles when building mass, making it harder to get leaner in that area.
- If you build too much fat when bulking, then your muscles will become softer as the body will store excess calories not only in subcutaneous fat but also in muscle tissue.
- Repeatedly building up body fat in the off-season followed by fat loss will lead to metabolic damage and stubborn fat deposits.
- You need a caloric surplus to build muscle, but gaining 5 pounds of fat to build a pound of muscle is a bad idea.
Weight on the scales: the old barometer of mass-building success
The rules for building mass in the off-season used to be simple: eat every two to three hours and eat until you're full. Even though "clean" foods like chicken and brown rice were the ideal, no one was deducted points for slipping a pizza into their diet during the "window of opportunity" after a workout.
As long as the weight on the scales went up, that was all that mattered. The weight on the scale became the yardstick by which the success of mass gain was judged.
This was usually not a pretty process. Let's say you wanted to get down to 120 kilos by Christmas. Pants started to get tight at 110 kilos? Buy more pants. Do your suits no longer fit? Make every working day a casual Friday!
The idea was to just keep eating. When the scales showed 120 kilos, you had won.
But did you really win? You've put on 15 to 25 kilos in four or five months. You may be moving heavier weights on squats and bench presses. You may have hamster jowls and a lower back that will give out if you do a single set of shoelace tucks.
But have you really gained anything by bulking up regardless? No. Here are seven reasons why:
1 - Muscle growth is a slow process
Building muscle - real contractile muscle tissue - is a painfully slow process for anyone training past the beginner stage.
For an experienced exerciser, a gain of 1 to 2 pounds of pure muscle mass per month would be excellent. This would add up to 10 pounds or more during a single off-season. However, very, very few bodybuilders manage to build muscle at such a rate, and 10 pounds is a far cry from the 40 or 50 pounds you put on during your mass-building phase.
2 - Insulin sensitivity decreases
As you build mass and body fat levels increase, you gradually reduce your insulin sensitivity, which can hinder your muscle growth. Insulin is a signaling protein for both muscle and fat cells to use amino acids and glucose.
Ideally, insulin-sensitive muscle cells will readily take up glucose and amino acids when they are signaled by insulin to open their gates. However, with increased body fat levels come increased insulin levels and this can desensitize the muscle cells to the signaling effects of insulin.
If you reduce insulin sensitivity then your muscles will not use glucose and amino acids as efficiently and as it is less 'costly' from a metabolic point of view to store fat, your body will convert more of the excess calories into fat.
The more overweight you are, the more you change your physiology to favor fat storage over muscle recovery and growth.
3 - You develop anabolic resistance
This physiological phenomenon, where protein synthesis is inhibited and fat storage is increased, is known as anabolic resistance - and is pretty much the last thing you want as a bodybuilder.
The fatter you get, the more likely it is that any excess nutrients you eat will be stored on your stomach and butt rather than your quadriceps and biceps. And the less likely it is that your training will result in any actual muscle growth.
Of course, there are always exceptions. I know guys who can gain 50 pounds during the off-season and get bulkier in all areas. However, exceptions prove the rule and just because the top guys can get away with a mass building strategy doesn't mean that strategy is a reasonable option for the majority of us who are less genetically blessed.
4 - Brand new fat cells, accelerated fat storage
Once you reach a certain body fat percentage, you accelerate fat storage. The average exerciser will store most of their fat during the mass building phase in just one unsightly area such as the abdomen or love handles.
Not only is this unhealthy (abdominal fat directly correlates with heart disease and high blood pressure), but it can also lead to the formation of new fat cells, which will make it even harder to lose the built-up fat after the bulking phase. This process is called adipogenesis and occurs during periods of intense weight gain and calorie surplus.
When someone goes through an extreme bulking phase, the excess calories are all eventually converted into glucose, which is basically sugar. Glucose is used by both muscle cells and fat cells to meet energy needs and for storage.
But if glucose levels are continuously high and you have more glucose than you need for your muscles, then all the excess glucose is stored as fat. This is the reason why intense and rapid "unclean" mass gain rarely leads to large gains in muscle mass.
Over time, as you carry out further mass-building phases, you make the same areas of your body fatter and fatter. This makes dieting all the more difficult. If it's already hard to lose the fat in that one area, building up even more fat in that area means you could be setting yourself up for 12 weeks of hell.
Even worse, the higher your body fat levels go, the greater the risk of developing anabolic resistance. Losing the fat in this stubborn area will also affect other areas and make them appear emaciated. As a result, this can negate any muscle gains.
5 - Softer muscles
Fat storage in muscle tissue makes things worse. Because the body is flooded with excess calories, excess glucose and excess triglycerides, it begins to store this excess not only in adipose tissue, but also in the muscles.
This is called intramuscular triglyceride storage and contributes to a "dirty" mass build-up leading to a soft appearance of the muscles.
This is not just a visual problem. Intramuscular fat can inhibit protein synthesis and therefore muscle growth.
You've probably seen bodybuilders who got really bulky during the bulking phase, but lost all their soft gains during the subsequent diet. Intramuscular fat storage is partly responsible for this.
6 - A sluggish metabolism
Getting fat again and again can make getting leaner more difficult each time.
If you get too fat and have to half-kill yourself to diet down again, the body will cling to its fat more tightly the next time you diet.
This phenomenon is somewhat related to the concept of metabolic damage, where there is a reduction in metabolic rate over and over again at rest. This can go so far that at a certain point fat loss becomes almost impossible and weight gain can be caused by even the slightest excess of calories.
Although metabolic damage is often associated with competitive female athletes in the figure class, male bodybuilders can also experience the same effects, but to a different extent.
Imagine a male bodybuilder who increases his weight to 300 pounds during the bulking phase in the off-season, but has to diet down to 250 pounds for the competition. This corresponds to a 17% reduction in body weight. The resting metabolic rate will begin to drop whenever there is a reduction in weight of 10% or more, meaning that this bodybuilder is reducing his metabolic rate during his diet.
If he hasn't done a "clean" mass-building phase, then he's likely struggling with anabolic resistance on top of that. If he repeats this "dirty" mass-building process after the competition, then he will reinforce the increased fat storage and anabolic resistance he has already experienced before.
This will make it harder for him to diet down for the next competition and each time he performs a mass building phase, he will be less and less likely to build new muscle mass. He may not experience metabolic damage in the classic sense, but metabolically a lot of things will still go wrong.
7 - You probably can't get away with it
What the absolute top guys do is often the result of what they can get away with because of their genetics or the use of steroids and the like. It's not necessarily a model that everyone else can follow. If you are looking for a longer competitive career, then you should take a more conservative approach.
Bodybuilders have worked for decades with mass-building phases and subsequent diets. This includes a number of Mr. Olympia winners. So it would be foolish to say that this approach doesn't work.
But what you don't hear about are the thousands of exercisers who have done mass-building phases, gotten too fat, thrown their insulin sensitivity out of whack and never reached their true potential in terms of mass or definition.
Think about the guys who got off to a great start and looked great in a competition or two, but never regained that level of definition and muscle fullness later on.
You need to know when to stop
Deciding whether or not you should do a mass-building phase comes down to knowing your body. You need a calorie surplus to build muscle, and it's hard to eat just enough to build muscle without accompanying fat gain. But gaining five pounds of fat to build one pound of muscle is a bad idea
You'll almost certainly lose that pound of muscle mass again if you try to diet off those five pounds of fat.
For most exercisers, there is no reason to exceed a 12% body fat percentage. I personally prefer to stay under 10%. It will depend on where you start to lose insulin sensitivity - you'll know when you get to that point as the pump will diminish and your muscles will start to look soft. When this happens, you should take it as a sign that it's time to end your mass-building phase.
By John Meadows | 04/15/14
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/bulking-diet-delusion