Caloric Surplus Question

Doss

Doss

Member
I'm wondering if, during a bulk, it makes a significant difference to eat more than 500 kcal above maintenance. I know you can grow with a surplus of 500 kcal, but I'm wondering if you'd grow faster if you took in say 1,000-1,500 above maintenance. Or would that just be stored as fat?

Interested to hear what your opinions are.
 
IMO thats too much of a surplus. In simple terms, that would be stored as fat. Considering at 1,500 kcals per day over you'd gain a pound in just two days; 3 pounds in a week etc. Its far reaching to expect the body to be able to make a 3 pound gain in muscle mass in just a week.
 
Is there an ideal surplus to run? In the past I've usually tried to get ~500 over maintenance, and I've had good experiences with it, but I've heard about people taking in 6,000-9,000 kcal daily during a bulk and I wondered if there was a benefit.

You kind of reinforced my initial hypothesis which was that it would just be stored as fat.
 
It's all relative and individual. If your maintenance is 5000kcals, then a 500kcal surplus is mild compared to someone with a 3000kcal maintenance. One thing I would like to point out, though, is that having a high (+15-20% over maintenance) will support strength gains quite well, which could indirectly help with hypertrophy.
 
It requires approximately 2500-3000 kcal's for the body to biosynthesize just one pound of muscle. How that works out to what you need over maintenance on a daily/weekly basis is going to vary based on a number of variables...training, the amount of degredation during training, hormonal aspects, etc.


Br
 
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