Is bulking dead?
Take-aways
A rate of weight gain of 1-1.5% of bodyweight per month for beginners and a rate of weight gain of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per month for anyone who’s been training more than a year seems like a solid approach to maximise muscle growth.
While beginners will often be met with endless advice to dreamer-bulk, the research is much less positive than you might expect.
By my count, there are four studies that have somewhat directly looked at the topic of bulking and attempted to determine what the ideal rate of weight gain was (1, 2, 3, 4).
Instead of painstakingly going through their methods and results, let me give you the TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) version.
These studies have generally found the most favourable muscle growth when gaining weight at a pace of around 0.5 - 1% of bodyweight per month. Going faster than this doesn’t consistently seem to increase muscle growth. There are some exceptions, though.
While the “dreamer-bulk” participants in the Garthe paper gained a bit more muscle (around 50% more), this was an indirect measurement, and, more importantly - those participants gained around 5x the fat mass, too. While this doesn’t sound too bad here, if you extrapolated this over a year, that would represent an additional 6KG of fat gained.
First, indirect measurements of muscle growth that encompass the whole-body (e.g. fat-free mass or lean body mass) and are swayed by water weight fluctuations typically report more of a benefit of bulking than direct measurements of muscle hypertrophy that aren’t impacted as much by water weight fluctuations (e.g. ultrasound of muscle thickness). A couple of studies by Smith and Garthe, for example, showed a slight benefit of bulking faster, but mostly when using indirect measurements. Direct measurements usually don’t find a benefit, and these measurements are generally more indicative of muscle growth.
Second, studies in beginner lifters (Smith, Rozenek) generally find more of a benefit to faster bulking than studies in more advanced lifters (Helms, Garthe). As a result, you may want to go a bit faster if you’re new to the gym (say, 1% of bodyweight per month or slightly more) and a bit slower if you’ve been training for a while. Likewise, if you’re in conditions that heavily facilitate muscle growth (e.g. taking steroids), you can probably bulk faster and benefit.
Why?
Bulking - and nutrition more generally - isn’t a particularly strong stimulus for muscle growth. Don’t get me wrong: bulking can help build muscle, but it’s mostly an “amplifier” of the stimulus presented by training. In fact, most overweight/obese sedentary people do not carry much more muscle mass when overweight/obese than when they were a normal weight, yet they’ve technically bulked.
