Bulking is all about your diet, not your training
It's that simple. Force feed yourself and you will gain weight. Train hard and you will gain GOOD weight.
You need to eat way more than you do now. You have to eat two of everything and wash it down with a protein shake. Forget about health, fat gain and all that. Go out and eat a Big Mac with a chocolate shake, then go do 10 sets of squats. BULKING means getting BIG and you get BIG by EATING, EATING, EATING.
I trained as hard as I could for months and only gained a lb or two. But I started eating like a horse and put on weight. It's not as easy as it sounds, it will take ALOT of work. Lifting is the fun part. Making food constantly and eating constantly is f*cking tough. Make sure to buy a bottle of Tums or Maloxx because you will have some serious heart burn going on from your increase in calories.
But that's how you get big, plain and simple.
So, the solution to one's inability to maintain a normal weight is to eat junk food, put on bodyfat, and generally be as unhealthy as possible?
A few years years from now, people in the athletic community are going to look back through the lens of history at these "massive bulking" protocols and see them as a clear indication of an ignorant and primitive time. Let me tell you, gentlemen, this kind of talk won't reflect well on us down the road.
Here's why:
As an underweight person, I am compelled to reveal a secret that those of you who are at or above normal weight will never figure out on your own. Ready for this? Here we go:
A person's natural weight is dictated less by how he eats than by his unique hormonal and genetic makeup.
Scandalous isn't it? Here's the kicker: The proponents of "massive bulking" tend to be self-professed "former skinny bastards" who supposedly "came to see the light" when they adopted said protocols. Many of them freely admit that, before they gained their newfound mass, they never put any serious effort into eating, and this is what kept them skinny. It is precisely at this stage that the bulking doctrine suffers it's most critical flaw. To wit:
If you weren't eating any significant amount of food prior to going through your "transformation", then you were never a "hardgainer" in the first place -- you are nothing more than a normal person who was eating below average,, and once you normalized your eating habbits, you went up to a normal weight!
How much clearer does it need to be? You are NOT a hardgainer, and never have been, until you have had an above-average caloric consumption
relative to your weight.
In my case, this means having to consume 3,000 calories per day to maintain a dry weight of 136 lbs. at a height of nearly 6'. I require 22 calories/lb. to maintain my weight, and experience has taught me that I need to take that up to about 26 in order to be able to put on any weight. Now replicate those calculations using your own statistics, current and former. Get the picture?
So, if someone eats normally, yet still maintains a below average weight, what should be done about it?
The bulking proponents have no viable answer to this question other than to offer their standard remedy:
"If something isn't working, simply throw calories at the problem".
No matter how much a person is already taking in relative to his bodyweight, he is simply told that it isn't enough and that he must increase his consumption even further. Pretty irresponsible, if you ask me. It's an impractical solution covering for a bad theory.
A lot of people who've never been underweight are under the impression that underweight individuals are necessarily lean and that they can "eat anything they want without putting on any fat". This is
WRONG. Allow me to correct it: Underweight individuals can "eat anything they want"
without putting on any weight. Many of us are perfectly capable of putting on fat, thank you very much, and that's exactly what happens when we try to force-feed our bodies with junk foods on a dirty bulk. The scale doesn't change -- the person in the mirror DOES, and it isn't for the better.
So, what are my goals and how should I achieve them? I simply want to be able to maintain a normal weight, relative to others of my height. I don't want to risk developing gastrointestinal problems, insulin resistance, and other documented health issues, not to mention decreased longevity, all of which are triggered as result of sustained, hyper-caloric dietary protocols.
The answer, for individuals such as myself, lies within altering the hormonal/physiological state of our bodies in order to "upwardly adjust" our
natural weight. This is accomplished through a variety of means, many of which have only recently come to light.
For instance, hard gainers are prime candidates for hormonal supplementation with steroid compounds. In the future, the wisdom of this practice will come to be accepted by mainstream medicine.
Metabolic Typing is the wave of the future and it is already here, folks. It's no coincidence that cutting edge sports coaches such as Charles Poliquin are centering their training protocols around these principles.
But wait, your 60-year old GP has never heard of metabolic typing? Damn, it must be a crock in that case. Or not. Wake up people: It's high time the athletic/performance-oriented community got unhitched from it's mildly retarded brother, also known as Organized Medicine.
To conclude, I will point another gaping hole within the logic of the conventional bulking argument. Here it is:
You expect me to supersize my portions, neglect my health, and stop caring about my bodyfat level, just for the sake of putting on pounds. Fine. Let's say that I go through with it and succeed in putting on some weight.
Now what? That's right, I'm asking you what to do now.
You didn't actually think that I was going to go on eating cheeseburgers on a daily basis for the rest of my life, did you?
Exactly how many years were you suggesting that I force-feed myself almost to the point of gagging? 5? 10? 20, perhaps? Surely, by now, the utter insanity of this proposal is coming to light.
And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, "Throwing calories at a problem," never solves one. This has got to be most idiotic protocol ever dumped on the bodybuilding community. Dump the old ways or you'll end up getting dumped with them.
