Bulking Diet for Bodybuilding
In the old days when bodybuilding first started most competitive bodybuilders would gain nearly 30 or 40 pounds in the off-season bulking routine but today things have changed. Sports science has taught us a lot about how the body reacts to hard training and we now know what works best when the specific objective is to gain good quality muscle and not fat.
It is pointless going on a bulking diet where you eat everything you can see as often as you can because that will only result in fat gain, which does not help muscle gain. Even the typical hard gainer will not gain good quality muscle just by increasing his/her body-fat.
Making sure that you always have a controlled increase of your macronutrient intake when starting on a bulking diet is important. If you can ensure that the quality of nutrients you eat is very high you will put on less fat. For example only eating highly complex low GI carbohydrates and taking in proteins that have high quality fats will ensure muscle weight gain is at the optimum level at all times.
If you cannot see your abs then you will have a body-fat that is more than 10% which means you already are holding too much body-fat even before you start the bulking diet. Any good bulking diet will increase your body-fat percentage because when you take in more calories than you burn extra fat is added.
The first rule when creating your own bulking diet is to increase the amount of protein intake to 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight. The second rule is to increase the carbohydrate intake that you are getting to 1.5 or even 2 grams of carbs for each pound of bodyweight.
The third rule is to increase the intake of all good fats that you normally have which is easy when eating a little bit more protein than you normally do.
The last rule when creating a bulking diet is to consider your training routine that you do. If you have been training for more than a year then your workouts should never be longer than an hour and should always be done with extreme intensity.
Another point is the consideration of adding a few vital supplements like Vitamin C and amino acids to help speed up recovery. Your rest and recovery is vitally important if you want these well selected extra calories that you are taking in your bulking diet to work for you.
