This article is written by Roman Winter on behalf of Monkey Nutrition.
Monkey Nutrition: A new kind of beast that believes everything is capable with a well fueled, healthy body.
Winter is here and when you are a bodybuilder, it’s time to bulk. It is a time to enjoy fine foods as well as not worrying about the shred that is needed for the summer.
But remember that bulking is not an excuse to become fat, unhealthy and lethargic.
People believe that “dirty bulking” is a way to make quick gains and add weight on instantly, but they couldn’t be more wrong. To add weight and to remain healthy, you need a carefully selected, regular diet plan.
Dirty Bulking
Believing any amount of calories is good for you and your diet is wrong.
If you have an intake of 1000s of calories per day with little nutritional value, it will eventually do more harm to your body than benefit. Knowing it offers a chance to put on extra weight, you’re simply adding more and more fat into your body.
There should always be a certain amount of consideration taken when you go to the gym and you figure out your diet. Clean bulking provide the essential nutrients needed to feed your muscles to grow, repair and develop.
Dirty bulking cannot monitor the amount of macros that enters your body and it eventually means that there is an unbalanced amount of fats, compared to carbs, protein and fiber.
A major factor in dirty bulking is the effect it has on your body. When you eat something high in fat and low in nutritional value, it takes energy to divide the foods into nutrients and left over fat becomes stored, making you feel lethargic, lazy and unhealthy.
When you begin to feel like this, eating more health foods will give your body more energy and make you feel better and maximize your workouts. Dirty bulking will often make you have to work harder with little to no result.
Clean Bulking
Clean bulking is always going to more beneficial than the whole dirty bulking approach.
People are quick to forget that there is a limited amount of lean muscle in any day regardless of what you do differently or the same.
A common mistake, which is often a costly one is that people believe that, because dirty bulking gives your body a large amount of calories (regardless of whether they are good are bad) it will give your muscles the gains they require to get big. You could not be more wrong.
Your muscles have limitations and stuffing your face rather than changing your diet to compliment your workout is not the way to gain muscle.
Any more calories that are consumed after that will simply be stored as fat and will start to make you gain weight and not through your muscles.
If you dirty bulk for long, you are guaranteed to gain fat around your belly which can become increasingly difficult to shake off.
Once you become used to cutting out calories, your body will become a lot hungrier and you will have a lot less energy. That means you will often feel depleted and not able to retain the muscle you have tried to gain for so long.
Ultimately in order to gain and retain weight you need to find the right balance of meals.
Eating regularly with a balanced, high protein meal will give you the muscle that you desire. Remember that dirty bulking may be good for the short-term, but in the long-term it brings an unbalanced and unhealthy weight gain, which will have little to no benefit.
