i patched bulking

Bulking isn’t any better than maintenance.

Some more mind blowing facts for you:

• You will gain weight at maintenance 

• You should only bulk to gain fat

• You don’t have to lose muscle on a cut

I don’t want you to spend hours reading so I’ll make this as concise and simple as possible.

I might not cover all of the three bullet points above here but I’ll give you everything you’d need to understand them.

You might have seen some people talking about this recently.

Problem is, they don’t entirely understand the reason why, they just saw one study where it was the same. As not everyone out there understands nutrition, and more importantly biochemistry, I’ll take this explanation.

None of this works if you aren’t training properly. If you need a surplus to get stronger, something’s wrong.

Checkout my other content if you need help with your training. Here’s a good place to start.

So let’s dive into how I patched bulking

You should know by now what causes a signal for muscle growth.

Motor Unit Recruitment (targets muscle fibre) + Mechanical Tension (the signal for growth)

What I haven’t spoken about too much here is what lets this growth. In order for the signal to actually result in gains, you have to have the right building materials. Protein, and Energy.

It’s no ground breaking news that you need protein to build muscle 🤯

The news that might be ground breaking for you is about the energy side.

Let me show you how much energy it takes to build muscle.

If you’re reading my newsletter you’ve already got a lot of newbie gains.

You’re likely 1/2 years into the gym.

Even if you weren’t, it doesn’t change much. Beginners are able to get away with skipping out on the surplus just because of how detrained they are.

You might be able to gain 10 lbs of muscle in a year if you do every single thing right.

This is 12.4g of muscle a day.

We’re literally talking in grams here.

It takes 6,300 to build 1kg of muscle.

That’s 80 calories a day to build that muscle.

This amount of energy is very very low, being in or not in a surplus has no effect on this. 80 calories of energy can be drawn from body fat. Let’s not forget the normal surplus recommendation is 250-500…

Looking at this we know it can’t be an energy problem, so let’s take a look at the other two parts of growth.

Motor Unit Recruitment and Mechanical Tension

Anything that reduces these two will result in less growth.

A surplus has no hypertrophic physiological differences to maintenance, but there is one nuanced mechanism.

See the body is very efficient.

• When there’s a high amount glucose in the blood, your body stores it in the liver and muscle cells (as glycogen).

• These two storage places have two separate uses.

  • The liver acts as a bank to top up the blood with glucose if there’s a low amount in the blood (if it has enough)

  • The muscle acts as a bank to have quick access to energy for intense conditions

• The pancreas is in charge of telling the body to break down fat, but the liver stops it from doing this if it have enough glycogen stored.

• When the liver doesn’t have enough glycogen, the pancreas tells the body to break down fat into glucose.

• This then goes into the blood and some of it will be stored in the liver/muscle.

Checkmate in 5.

1. The glucose will always be divided between the muscle and liver.

2. When glycogen stores are full, the excess is stored as fat.

3. Bulking means you’ve filled up your glycogen stores, and then storing fat.

4. When a muscle’s glycogen stores are lower there’s more fatigue and less stimulus.

“Oh Fletcher you just showed why a bulk is better.”
WRONG 🙄

Check.

5. With proper nutrition programming you can max out the glycogen stores.

Checkmate.

I’ve helped you a lot with workout programming, this is where nutrition programming lies.

Programming a diet has little to do with the amount of macros and micros you have and more to do with timing, methodology, etc.

Two parts: overall daily nutrients, timing.

For your daily nutrients keep your fat as close to 60g as possible. Get 0.7g of protein for each lbs of bodyweight, and have the rest ALL CARBS.

That’s all that matters here ^

Now for nutrient timing. I patched the anabolic window.

Yeah, I brought it back 😼

The anabolic window was always real, but there’s one change.

The anabolic window isn’t about protein to increase muscle protein synthesis (building new muscle).

The anabolic window is about carbs, to increase glycogen synthesis (storing glucose) to reduce fatigue.

Here’s what you need to do to maximise glycogen synthesis in your muscle.

Do this and at maintenance you’ll have the same growth.

This might be one of the most original, high value, coincidentally timed to a trend, informative newsletter I’ve wrote.

A lot of people are speaking about this, but no one is saying why quite yet.

They’re giving out pieces of nuggets and hoping people go out and figure it out on their own, which they don’t...

So follow this lesson, and let bulking be a tool for one thing. Gaining fat.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. A large part of “maingaining” has been clowned on in recent years is because people aren’t programming their diet right. They’re just focusing on calories and protein. Perfect way to have low glycogen stores and also low carbs!