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Quick Wits: How Aggressive to Bulk for Building Muscle (and Minimizing Fat) · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Are you finally ready to spend some time building muscle?
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: If so, the rate at which you gain weight to gain muscle can definitely vary based on your goals.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Let's navigate through those options, from lean bulking to a dreamer bulk, and find your best fit on today's Quick Whits.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Whits and Weights podcast.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, phillip Pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: We'll uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Let's dive right in.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Today we are talking about how fast you should gain weight if you're trying to build muscle, and this is just one of many topics that I'm going to cover in detail on my upcoming free live training called how I Added 10 Pounds of Muscle at the Age of 43, my complete training and nutrition blueprint on Friday, march 1st at 12 pm Eastern.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: The link to sign up for this is in the show notes, and I encourage you to sign up because when you do, you'll, of course, get the Zoom link, but you'll also get the full replay, exclusive only to two people who signed up and you'll get a free guide called Muscle Building Nutrition Blueprint.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: That's going to have everything you need to know to put in place nutrition for a successful bulk, wherever you are starting from, as well as exactly how I did it in great detail, with all the fun graphs, the data, what I measured and so on, so you can get inspired to replicate something like that for your own muscle building journey.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: And if you're listening to this, after March 1st 2024, click the link anyway and you're going to get a special bonus.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: In the next few quick wits, I'm going to go over different aspects of building muscle.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Today is all about the rate of gain, so I've split it into four different rates of gain.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: There's the lean bulk, the optimal bulk, the aggressive bulk and the dirty or dreamer bulk.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: With the lean bulk, you are aiming to minimize your fat gain as much as possible by eating just above maintenance.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: This is the slow and steady approach, and I'm going to say slow as in very slow.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: It keeps you leaner throughout the process, but it's going to take a long time.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: It is not optimal by any means, but a lot of individuals who are either more advanced, where it takes time anyway to build muscle or they're not super interested in gaining a bunch of muscle fairly quickly in the optimal way and just want to kind of maintain their physique where they are but slowly but surely build up muscle over several years, might consider this approach.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Now you might have heard of the bros call it a maintaining phase, maintain lean gain, but I'm just calling it the lean bulk, if you've ever heard that term lean bulk or lean gain.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: So that is just above maintenance.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Then we have the optimal bulk.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: This is the sweet spot.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: This is balancing muscle and fat gain.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Here's how the body works.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: The more weight you gain, the more muscle you can gain, up to a point.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: So let's say, for you that's one pound of muscle a month.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: However, if you only gain one pound of scale weight a month, your body's not going to put all of that toward muscle.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: So it's going to be suboptimal, it's going to be less than a pound and of course you're getting less fat as well.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: But that's more closer to a lean bulk.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: If you, on the other hand, let's say you gain 10 pounds a month, you just go hog wild, gain 10 pounds a month, but your body's limit is only one pound a month You're still only getting one pound and the rest is going to be fat.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: So an optimal bulk finds that sweet spot where it's for a lot of people to around 50, 50 muscle to fat, which might be two, three pounds a month, something like that.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: And, by the way, the percentage of your body weight per week, those details and all the specific pros and cons of each, those are what I'm covering in the live training on March 1st.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So again, definitely use the link in the show notes to sign up so that you get the replay, even if you can't be there live, and I'll be covering all these.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So we've got a lean bulk which is barely above maintenance.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: We have the optimal bulk, which is the sweet spot Okay, as supported by the evidence for most people.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Then we have an aggressive bulk.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: So this is where you are okay gaining a little extra fat because you want to push it.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Either you're a beginner who actually can build a lot more muscle as a percentage of the weight gained, or maybe you're a late beginner, early intermediate who is perfectly fine gaining extra fat for the chance of gaining more muscle than you thought you could, and so you push that rate a little bit harder.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: So you're going to get rapid muscle growth.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: You're definitely going to hit your threshold, but you might get more fat than you bargained for in the process and you might be okay with that.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And then we have the dirty bulk, or the dreamer bulk.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: This is like the very first bulk I ever did, way back in what 2019, 20 time frame, where I just drank a bunch of milk, I ate all the high calorie foods I could eat, ate as much as I wanted.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: I gained like 50 pounds and probably I'll have to say probably 15 pounds of that was fat.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, 15 pounds was muscle and the other 30, 35 was fat.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: So it was nowhere close to 50-50, and that's as a beginner.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: So that was a very inefficient approach, but it definitely built as much muscle as possible, but it gained a ton of fat that I then had to work off later.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: So there's really no advantage to this strategy whatsoever, other than the tiny corner case of if you are trying to push you or maximal strength and all you care about is the weight on the bar going up, up up.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The caveat here and I talked about this with Bill Campbell he'll be dropping in an episode in March the caveat here, based on a recent study, is that beyond a certain point, it's not your relative strength that's increasing, it's only your absolute strength.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: So you're not actually getting stronger relative to your gaining, your size going up, it's just because of the extra fat and the leverages and the cross-sectional areas and all the science behind that.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: So I don't recommend a dirty bulk for almost anybody, unless you are actually just trying to increase one RM's.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: And even then, are you intending to compete?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Because if so, you have to worry about being in the right weight class.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: So if you're curious about how these approaches work in practice and the details behind them and how you can set them up, please join me for that.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Live training how I Added 10 Pounds of Muscle at 43, on Friday, march 1st, 12 pm Eastern.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: The link is in the show notes.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: We're going to dive deep into the strategies tracking how I did it and more.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Don't miss it.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits and Weights.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them and make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Until then, stay strong.