Bigger and Badder

We’ve all been there at one point. Every bodybuilder who’s really hardcore about putting on serious muscle mass has done it: the over-bulk. It’s all fun and games at the time, too. Ordering pizza every second night. Eating a half gallon of ice cream afterwards, while saying you need to get that scale to move … even though you’re already at your all-time heaviest by 15 pounds. You’re so busy stuffing junk in on the back end of every meal, you don’t really know what you’ve done until it’s time to start contest prep. Now at this point, you’re thinking, “Okay, let’s go! Sixteen weeks of prep and I’ll be shredded.”

Then you get to six weeks out, and you realize you aren’t where you figured you’d be. You need to floor it and go down another 10 pounds, because you now realize where you went wrong.

You got too fat in the off-season. You didn’t gain 30 pounds of muscle. You gained five pounds, plus 25 pounds of extra water and fat. The shitty part is that because you’re a bit behind, you’re gonna have to diet so hard that you’ll probably lose the five pounds of muscle you did gain in the first place!

I’ve made that mistake. I’ve also made the mistake of eating too clean during the off-season and not really making any gains at all! Both suck when you realize what you’ve done.

This is all unnecessary and avoidable. Bulking hard isn’t the best way to grow, while chronically dieting isn’t going to bring on the gain train either. You need to eat enough to create a surplus to grow, but you still want to look like a bodybuilder year-round. My advice? Don’t aim to get so heavy. If you were ripped at 220, your off-season weight shouldn’t be 280. It should be more like 240 to 250. It’s not so much the advantages of staying lighter that count, as it is the disadvantages of being super bulked-up.