There are several good reasons not to bulk up, at least not in the traditional manner. Here are a few:
1. Very few people will ever set foot on a bodybuilding stage. Those who have no aspiration to compete train mostly to look good. Is looking good two months out of the year what you're really after? Of course not. Most want to look good all year long!
I don't mean be stage-ready 365 days a year, but being at a body fat percentage where you look lean and muscular. In my opinion, someone who's training for aesthetic purposes should never go above 10% body fat. Trust me, 10% is actually not that lean! But it's a point where muscle definition and muscularity are sufficient to make you look very good. It also leaves you within four weeks or so of being in superb, super-lean condition.
So what if you're at 13% body fat and don't have that much muscle? Should you bulk up? No! You should go down to 10% then gradually increase your nutritional intake until you reach a point where you're gaining 1.5 to 2 pounds per month. This will allow you to gain muscle at your optimal rate while staying at 10%.
2. The leaner you are, the better your body becomes at nutrient partitioning. This means that lean individuals are more effective at storing the ingested nutrients in the muscle (as muscle tissue or glycogen) or in the liver (glycogen), and less effective at storing them as body fat. Simply put, leaner individuals can eat more nutrients without gaining fat.
3. The fatter you let yourself become, the more fat cells you're adding to your body. As we saw earlier, this will make it easier to gain fat and harder to lose it in the future, not to mention that the fatter you are, the less insulin sensitive you become. This is one of the reasons why fatter individuals are more effective at storing nutrients in the form of body fat than their leaner counterparts.
4. Building a good looking body isn't something that happens overnight. Many people have this distorted idea that within a year of training it's possible to look like a competitive bodybuilder. Not the case!
Building a great body is a 24 hour a day job. It isn't limited to the hour you spend at the gym; it's about the lifestyle. By eating good all year long, you aren't using a fad approach but rather changing your habits. It's much easier to lose fat when you're already used to eating well 90% of the time.
So Should I Eat Like a Bird?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you should eat a low calorie diet year 'round. I'm not against eating large amounts of food. In fact, to build muscle you must ingest more calories than you expend every day. However, the message is to use the correct amount of food to allow your body to build muscle at an optimum rate. You shouldn't stuff yourself trying to force-feed muscle onto your body.
The following table gives you an estimate of what your caloric intake should be set at depending on your lean body weight (total body weight minus fat weight. For example, someone who's 210 at 12% body fat has a fat mass of 25 pounds and a lean mass of 185 pounds.)
Caloric intake relative to lean body weight to support optimal growth (considering a normal activity level)
Lean Body Weight (total weight — fat weight) Caloric Intake to Support Optimal Growth
120lbs 2455kcals
130lbs 2634kcals
140lbs 2813kcals
150lbs 3037kcals
160lbs 3260kcals
170lbs 3440kcals
180lbs 3663kcals
190lbs 3885kcals
200lbs 4064kcals
210lbs 4244kcals
220lbs 4467kcals
230lbs 4646kcals
240lbs 4868kcals
250lbs 5091kcals
260lbs 5270kcals
270lbs 5494kcals
This caloric intake should allow you to gain around two to three pounds per month. If you aren't gaining that amount, slowly increase your caloric intake until you reach that rate of growth (add 250kcals at a time).
If you're gaining more than three pounds per month, you might be adding fat. If you're gaining a lot more than three pounds (like 5-7 per month), reduce the caloric intake.
Take Home Messages
• Don't get fat. In my opinion, no man needs to be above 10% body fat, and getting there isn't that hard. It can take time if you carry a lot of fat, but every man can get there and maintain this level.
• You can't bully your body into adding more muscle simply by overeating.
• You can limit your rate of gain by not ingesting enough nutrients. So adding good food if you're lacking in that department will help you gain muscle faster, but past a certain point, continuing to jack up calories will only make you fatter.
• Have realistic expectations. You won't gain 20 pounds of muscle in three months, not even in six months. Gaining 1.5 to 2 pounds of muscle per month is the most you can expect. And for most, gaining more than ten pounds of solid muscle per year (once they're past the beginner stage) will be very rare. However, gain 5-7 pounds per year for ten years straight and you'll be one huge beast!
• Being lean makes it easier to stay lean and to gain muscle through better nutrient partitioning. Getting fatter makes it easier to gain more fat and harder to lose it.
• Trying to gain muscle mass should never be a justification for eating crap. If you want to eat a junk diet, at least have the decency to admit it's because you like your food too much to give it up. Don't try to pass it off as a "bulking diet." Pizzas, Big Macs, and donuts don't have higher anabolic properties than clean food!
Conclusion
Somebody had to say it and it was me. I'm tired of seeing young kids with good potential, who are lean and have nice shapes to start with, ruin their bodies by following the bulking advice from self-proclaimed Internet "gurus" who advise them to eat as much food as they can, even junk food if it can help them jack up their calories. All this will accomplish is helping them add heaps of fat to their lean bodies.
I agree that a lot of young lifters don't eat enough to support maximum muscle growth, but eating junk or super-excessive calories isn't the way to go. The basic message is good: if you aren't gaining muscle, you're probably not eating enough. However, that doesn't mean you should eat too much and it doesn't mean you should eat crap!
Think about it.