What is the best way to clean bulk? We all know that bulking means eating in calorie surplus while working out hard to gain weight and pack on size. However, there are two different ways to bulk up: follow a dirty bulking cycle (which I wouldn’t really recommend), or go the right way for a clean bulk cycle.
In both cycles, you should train hard and regularly. In both cycles, you eat in a calorie surplus. Nonetheless, the difference is that you eat in a calorie controlled surplus and only quality, healthy, unprocessed, and complex foods in a clean bulk. During a dirty bulking cycle, however, you can eat whatever you want, as much as you want. The problem with the latter is that it places a lot of stress on your organs, you’re likely to gain extreme amounts of fat, and it can compromise your health. That’s why you should bulk up like a pro, which minimizes health issues, and fat gains, and enhances your performance. You can achieve it with a clean bulk program.
So, in the end, bulking is a common cycle for anyone who wants to get buff. But nobody would love to get a lot of fat in the process. Getting fat is usually the thing we all want to avoid. That’s why a clean bulk is so helpful. It can help you gain muscle and get stronger in a sustainable, healthy way.
What is Clean Bulk?
As said, bulking is the plan when you train hard and eat in a calorie surplus, so that surplus will transform into muscle. It basically means that you should eat more calories than you burn. The aim is to gain weight in the form of muscle, and maybe a bit of fat, but minimizing the fat gains. At the same time, this should be done alongside high intensity resistance training to rocket those gains.
A clean bulk, however (AKA lean bulk), means that you pay close attention to the exact calories you eat and to the type of foods that you have, with a good balance of macronutrients in order to avoid excessive fat gains, while speeding up your results. This means that during a clean bulk, you should limit the calorific junk food, create a great balance of macros, and make sure you eat healthy and nutritional foods that can promote lean muscle growth.
There’s just one downside of clean bulk vs dirty bulk = you may not gain weight as fast. Since you eat less, the clean bulk can be slower. But you get quality weight (lean muscle tissues). Well, the other disadvantage is that you should pay attention to the calories (amount of foods) and macros (types of foods) that you consume.
However, it is always worth it. Why? Check out below.
Clean Bulk vs Dirty Bulk
So, when you go for a dirty bulk, there’s basically nothing that you can’t have. And you can have as much as you please. You can eat whatever you like, packing on as much weight as you humanly can without concern for fat gain or whatever other issues.
This is an advantage, alongside another advantage that you may bulk up faster than when attempting a clean bulk. That’s why a dirty bulk may be incredibly effective for lots of people like a dream come true, and allows you to gain muscle and strength fast. Nevertheless, there are side effects that you should take into consideration. Some notable ones are:
- Excess fat gains (that is harder to get rid of later)
- Feeling sluggish (because of constant high insulin and blood sugar levels)
- High cholesterol levels (because of foods you eat)
- High blood pressure and blood sugar levels (because of the types of foods)
- Much harder to recover from this cycle, and change to a cutting cycle
So, clean bulking promotes a controlled calorie surplus with less fat gain. You pay close attention to the type of foods that you eat.
How to Start a Clean Bulk Diet
To kickstart your clean bulk, you will need to know your maintenance calories first. This is the number of calories that you should eat per day in order to maintain your current weight. This number greatly varies from one person to another, depending on your age, height, weight, and weekly activity level. There are online calorie calculators that can offer you an estimation of that number.
Once you find your maintenance calories, you simply add about 10 to 30% more over that number, to create a calorie surplus. As an example, a guy weighing around 180 pounds, being moderately active, would add 250 to 500 calories a day over his approximately 2,500 maintenance calories. This means he should eat 2750 to 3000 calories per day for a slight calorie surplus. But remember this is just an example and an estimative number, it can vary quite a lot from one person to another.
Besides calories, you need to keep an eye on your bulking macros. In order to support your muscle growth, you must aim to get around 1 gram of protein per day per pound of body weight. That would make up around 30-40% of your calories. The rest of your daily calories should come from fats and carbohydrates. Focus on around 20-30% of fat (healthy fat) and the rest (30-50%) to come from carbs (healthy, complex carbs).
Then you adjust from here. Adjust your calories or macronutrients based on your goals, how you react, and so on. For example, you increase daily calorie intake by 100-200 calories if you see little progress or manage to gain weight and need to increase calorie intake to support the growth. Or you could decrease calories (or become more active, or both) in case you notice fat gains along the way.
Work Your Nutritional Intake
In order to put on weight, you need to increase the calories you consume. Eating more means adding more weight. So, you should keep track of your calories. However, it is important to remember that calories (foods) are broken down into protein, carbohydrates, and fats. If you master the nutritional intake (types of foods, or quality of foods you consume), you will master the weight type you add.
More calories means more weight. But the macronutrients will dictate the weight type (fat vs muscle) that you gain. With incorrect balance, you may gain too much fat and not enough muscle. With a correct balance, however, most weight you gain can come from lean muscle tissues.
That’s why it is important to pay attention to these three macronutrients and have a proper balance. They will also help keep you healthy, look good, feel good, and so on. So, making smart choices and seeing food as fuel that enhances your health, your workout, and your recovery will help you a lot. In a clean bulk plan, you need to track your macronutrients and calories (because too much surplus can lead to too much fat gain). So, a clean bulk involves paying attention to your nutritional intake in fine detail.
A clean bulk macronutrient breakdown of the quality and healthy foods that you should eat daily should look like this:
- 40% protein
- 30% carbs
- 30% fats
That’s out of 100% of foods that you daily eat, which should be 110-120% of your maintenance calories. Then you can adjust the calories and the macronutrients, but they shouldn’t be too far away from the example here.
Clean Bulking Foods…
The combination of healthy fats, lots of protein, and carbs will offer your body energy, strength, and recovery – the key elements for achieving your fitness goals. You could have slow-releasing carbs before a workout to keep you full and energized for your training, offering your muscles what they need to perform best. Some examples – brown rice or sweet potato.
On the other hand, protein is key for muscle growth, so you need to ensure you get enough of it (especially post-workout) to support this process. So, carbs offer you energy and protein for muscle growth while fat is important for supporting your organs, and muscles, and further supports your muscle growth, energy boost, and recovery. Example of protein – chicken breast and fish. Examples of fats – fatty fish, nuts, and avocados. You should make sure you get a healthy mix of all these three macros.
Moreover, a clean bulking food example focuses on whole, unprocessed, and healthy foods. You may have a small amount of high-calorie, processed foods during a clean bulk plan. But their amount should be minimal. Needless to mention you need to avoid high fat, high sugary, and junk foods. Check the types of foods you should eat and the ones you should avoid during a clean bulk plan.
The Ones You Should Eat:
- Healthy fats such as avocado, nuts, olive oil, various seeds, and various fish types
- Proteins such as fish, chicken, turkey, pork, greek yogurt, eggs, tofu, and protein powders
- High quality complex carbs such as quinoa, oats, whole grain pasta, white potatoes, and rice
- Fruits such as bananas, various types of berries, oranges, apples, pineapples, and kiwi
- Legumes, veggies, and dark leafy greens such as all peans, broccoli, spinach, and cauliflower
- Drinks such as sugarless tea and coffee and, of course, lots of water.
The Ones To Avoid:
- Limit any junk food that is highly processed such as fried foods, sausages, salami, fast food, canned soups, full fat ice cream, cakes, cookies, candies, packaged pastries, and numerous others. Pizza, burgers, and sandwiches are a no-go.
- Proteins with high fat amounts such as fatty cuts of pork or beef
- Saturated fats such as oils, margarine, butter
- High sugary foods
- Lots of drinks such as tea or coffee with sugar, soft drinks, anything with sugar, and others
Top Tips For Clean Bulk
Get lots of sleep during your clean bulk plan
Do you know that you’re growing muscles when you sleep? We grow thanks to the foods that we eat, but the process of growing occurs during sleep. That’s why rest periods are just as important as food or training for muscle growth. Usually, that’s something that happens without you paying much attention to it (because we all sleep, obviously). However, this piece of information is oriented towards those who do not appreciate the power of sleep or do not get enough sleep and you should make some changes in order to get more sleep. Also, focus on quality sleep.
When you hit the gym and lift heavy, you could find yourself overtraining and feeling fatigued. This is going to make you feel tired and overworked, which will hinder your gains, not having what it requires to keep on growing. Not only that but when you feel tired it can also make you more tempted to eat unhealthy foods such as processed, sugary foods.
Not only that, but sleep, as you may already know, is an extremely important part of our daily lives due to various reasons. So, what you should aim for is to get quality sleep. There are various ways to do so. Needless to mention you should aim to get at least eight hours of sleep every night to get your body time to recover. Those who work out intensively may even require more than that, such as nine, ten, or even more hours per day. In short, what I’m trying to say is that doing heavy weight training requires regular rest in order to make sure that your body has time to grow muscle and repair itself.
Cardio and clean bulk
Many people associate cardio with staying fit or losing weight only, but cardio can be beneficial for those who are searching to bulk up too. While it doesn’t help you grow muscle, it helps promote cardiovascular health.
It is quite obvious that during a bulk plan, you should avoid high intensity cardio so you won’t use the energy your body needs to repair muscles and grow. However, you could go for low intensity cardio in order to warm up or finish your gym session for a bit of cardiovascular health boost.
Avoid cardio altogether if you can’t eat anymore but you still struggle to gain muscle. But you must add some form of cardio as long as you seem to gain too much fat along the way. Cardio during clean bulk helps you burn excess fat. Moreover, studies prove that it helps you aid recovery post-workout, improving muscle mobility. It helps keep you generally pretty fit and healthy, with great cardiovascular health improvements.
Add compound movements
Well, compound movements are extremely important regardless if you’re dirty bulking, clean bulking, or even cutting. They help grow muscle and preserve muscle. And while a lot of us want to target certain muscles to grow muscle in certain places we want the most, compound movements are extremely important. Isolation lifts are perfect as accessory workouts, but compound movements are crucial during a clean bulk. Compound exercises will train multiple parts of the body in every lift, and will allow you to train with heavier weights. This will support muscle mass growth. Moreover, it helps you burn more calories too as you have more resistance during compound movements.
Don’t bulk for too long
A clean bulk involves eating healthy complex whole foods with a proper balance of macronutrients which means that you have mostly a healthy bulking diet. Nevertheless, a bulking cycle simply cannot go on for too long because it is hard to sustain. Moreover, you need to allow time for your body to adjust to the new weight. Moreover, as you continue to gain weight because you eat more, your body’s insulin sensitivity is likely to decline. This won’t only hinder your gains making it easier to gain fat, but it can become unhealthy. Therefore, the point is to bulk for a limited period.
Clean Bulk Benefits
- Limits excess fat gain. You control your calories although it is in surplus. You also limit junk foods with a proper macro balance. This will help avoid fatty gains.
- Reduces health risks. As you have a varied and healthy diet, it will lower the health risks commonly associated with consuming too many calories, junk foods, and adding fat.
- Feeling great. During a clean bulk, you get lots of vitamins, fiber, minerals, and phytonutrients which will make you feel and look great.
Clean Bulk Downsides
- Slower progress. Comparing a clean bulk cycle to a dirty bulk – you get fewer calories. Despite being in surplus. This difference could make you progress slower in your weight-gaining journey. Additionally, you aim for 300-500 extra calories per day, usually. It can be easy to misjudge your calorie needs and take less, stopping your muscle growth process before you even know it.
- Quite strict. A clean bulk involves a strict eating pattern in terms of the amount of calories you eat and the macronutrients you get. This means that there are a lot of foods that you can’t have. This makes it harder for some people to stick to their clean bulk program.
How To Clean Bulk Conclusion
A clean bulk diet could appear pretty restrictive, but it’s actually not that bad. You are eating in calorie surplus which means that you offer your body more fuel (energy in the form of calories) than it needs. Moreover, you offer it a great balance of macros and lots of micronutrients – everything you need to feel great, perform great, and look great. You may not progress as fast, but you know that you only gain muscle tissues, not fat. Also, in order to stay away from those hard to resist cravings, you could find a perfect balance between a clean bulk and a dirty bulk. Such as getting around 90% of your total calorie intake from healthy, unprocessed, and whole foods. While allowing for only 10% to come from processed, junk, high-fat, or high-sugar foods.
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