I’ve made two attempts to “bulk” over my lifetime of lifting weights. They were both poorly done, eating entirely too much food and creating a fatter version, rather than a more muscular version of myself. This time, armed with the knowledge and tools from the Henselman PT course (formerly known as the Bayesian Bodybuilding PT course), I embarked on my third, and much more successful bulk.
Besides the newly acquired know how from the course, I had the advantage of already being at the right level of body fat to start a lean bulk. Let’s face it, I did a cut years ago and stayed at that level of leanness for years, so I was primed and ready for some extra calories along with the improved training protocols for getting my swole on.
I had no illusions going in; after all I’ve been lifting a long time and am no spring chicken. But based on my measurements and FFMI data, I had achieved about 82% of what I could theoretically achieve, so I was hopeful.
Following the lean bulk guidelines I had, I took my calories up and set up a fairly aggressive training program with quite a bit of volume. Since more volume = more me, every three weeks I added some more sets. It was fascinating to see that every time I added volume, I started losing weight and had to increase calories again. I was eating upwards of 3100 calories a day, training 7 days a week. I measured my body fat with the Skulpt and calipers and all systems were Go.
I started noticing more muscle in my legs first, and it was clearly coming from the hamstrings. Powerlifting programs generally have way too little hamstring volume, so it’s not too surprising that they started to grow when I started to actually train them hard. The same thing happened to my lats and upper traps. They very clearly grew. I was stoked, so I added more volume and again, had to add more food to keep the scale moving in the right direction.
I’ll touch on the training briefly, as it was the most important aspect of what I was doing. Obviously more food is going to get one larger, but when more muscle is the goal, there has to be a muscle building stimulus, otherwise the caloric surplus is going straight to adipose tissue, aka blubber. My basic progression scheme was linear, with autoregulated volume and reactive deloading. Briefly, I set a target number of reps for each lift and tried to hit that target with the first set. I didn’t worry about how many reps I got on subsequent sets, as that’s the autoregulated aspect. On good days, I’d get more than on bad days. As long as I hit my target reps, I added weight the next time I did that lift. When I didn’t hit my target on that first set, I did a deload, which meant doing triples with about 65% of my estimated 1RM for however many sets I had left in the program. The next time that lift came up, I went back to the last weight I hit my target reps with, repeated it, and then started the progression again. Each set was taken to around 1 rep shy of failure, or at least as close as I could estimate that. I actually only failed one time on a bench press, when I couldn’t lock out the last rep of the set. While I certainly didn’t want to fail the rep, and I specifically avoid training to failure, I was glad it happened as it let me know my estimation of how close I was to failure was pretty solid. I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to get that last rep, but I didn’t want to not progress that week, and deload and have to go back, etc. So all in all, this was very intense training: More volume than I’d been doing, regular increases in weight, close proximity to failure on every set, and better exercise selection based on the actual functional anatomy of how muscles move. There’s a reason I was making progress in my swoleness: I was basically doing everything right.
I didn’t recognize this next issue right away, but it dawned on me eventually. Hypertrophy is a localized process. If you train a muscle, that specific muscle grows. The fact that I saw growth in my lats, upper traps and hamstrings is no accident. Those muscles are neglected in most strength programs, and certainly in the powerlifting programs I had been using for years. Combine that with poor exercise selection for those specific muscles and they were primed to grow from my new program. The muscles I’ve pounded away at for years, like chest, shoulders, triceps, quads and glutes, look pretty much the same. More on this shortly.
June 30, 2018 at 178.8 lbs. Look at those pretty upper traps.
The latest craze in the world of fitness is the evidence-based model, and there are lots of practitioners who’ve gained some notoriety. The reason for the increase in trainers and coaches who make training decisions based on available evidence, is that there’s a lot more of it today, with more coming along at a fairly regular clip. When I first started lifting, it was muscle mags one went to to get information. The internet created a new delivery system, and soon there were forums and websites dedicated to fitness. The eBook phenomenon came next, with seemingly every big, strong guy in the world putting out a book on how to follow in their often anabolically enhanced footsteps. This latest trend is a dramatic improvement in my view, as we’re starting to get some verifiable, if not always ideal, experiments into the world of hypertrophy and strength.
Menno’s PT Course is perhaps the epitome of an evidence-based approach as his recommendations and those of his team are made based on the best available evidence, using a philosophy of probability to choose the best possible course, subject to new information that may come along. For example, we are now quite certain that muscles grow as a result of the application of mechanical tension on the fibers. If enough tension is applied, the body reacts to this stress by producing a stronger, and larger, muscle fiber to resist this stress when it encounters it again. Gone are the concepts of metabolic stress and muscle damage as drivers of hypertrophy, although you’ll find plenty of folks who aren’t keeping up with the literature still suggesting these things play a role in hypertrophy. A healthy amount of data now exists around how best to manipulate volume and frequency to maximize muscle growth, yet plenty of controversy remains. Generally though, we know that training a muscle with relative frequency is better than training it infrequently. For example, if you train your legs today, your body will go through an adaptive process to recover from the training (assuming you trained hard enough to stimulate the need for adaptation in the first place), and be better prepared for the next bout. If you wait too long though, without applying a similar tension load to the muscles, the effect will dissipate. If you train too soon, you may not be recovered and will not perform as well. Finding the sweet spot for volume and frequency is no easy task, and it’s really why one would have a coach or a trainer in the first place.
Anyway, back to my bulking process and how I applied this evidence to keep progress moving along. There are several approaches to creating an overloading event on the muscles that will require them to adapt and grow. One is to slowly increase the total amount of work being done, sometimes by adding weight to the bar, but sometimes adding more sets of work instead. A popular approach is one assembled my Mike Israetel of Renaissance Periodization. He uses a ramping up of volume from a minimum effective dose, up through a maximum effective dose all the way up to a maximum recoverable dose, followed by a dramatic reduction (a deload) to allow fatigue to dissipate, and then starting again, hopefully with more weight on the bar. There are lots of periodization schemes, but I want to stick to volume manipulation as an overload technique for the moment. Menno’s take on it is that it’s much more efficient to find your ideal training volume, a maximum effective dose to borrow Dr. Israetel’s terminology and use weight as the primary overload mechanism. The reason for this is that in theory, if you are training at less than the ideal effective volume, you’re unnecessarily delaying your muscular adaptations. This rang true for me, so I set out to find that level of volume from which I could recover and still progress.
This brings me to a point of contention in the literature which has gotten pretty heated in the small niche of hypertrophy fans. In practice, one would find their individual volume target by slowly adding more sets each week, or every two weeks, etc. until you found a level that started causing issues with recovery. Frequently failing to be able to lift more weight on a lift you use regularly, feeling beat up and unmotivated to train are good signs that you’re doing too much volume. So you back off some until you find that personalized sweet spot where you progress well, and enjoy training and don’t feel like you were beaten with a baseball bat when you wake up. Generally, most evidence has found a range of 10-20 weekly hard sets to work for most people except potentially very advanced lifters who may need more work to get any more growth at all out of their already well muscled frames. The point of contention is whether or not there is a point of diminishing returns. At some point, is doing more volume just not going to stimulate any more growth? Some studies certainly pointed to that, for example a study using a program known as German Volume Training showed that participants who did 10 sets of 10 on each of a handful of lifts, 3 times each week, did not get as much hypertrophy as participants who did exactly half that: 5 sets of 10, 3 times each week. So the group doing 15 total sets for each major muscle group per week grew more muscle than the group doing 30 total sets. Right in the middle of the generally accepted 10-20 sets, and a pretty clear sign that yes, there is a point of not only diminishing returns, but actually worse results.
5 months later at 183.4 lbs. Progress is slowing, but I look very trapilicious.
Then, a new study arrived on the scene, showing that not only was there no point of diminishing returns, but that there was a dose response relationship between volume and hypertrophy that continued up to a seemingly absurd 45 sets per week per muscle group. This study was conducted by none other than Brad Schoenfeld, who has done more to get studies conducted than anyone else in the hypertrophy field. However, this study generated quite a bit of contention among the top minds in the field, with noted bad guy Lyle McDonald protesting most vehemently as is his style. I’ll get back to that, but based on this study, the 10-20 set average and the general theme that more volume = more swole, I continued to add sets to my regimen. Menno cautioned his PT Course students to proceed with caution above 20 weekly sets, but the calculator from the course material put my ideal volume at 24. I was not going to settle for less than ideal.
I recall being at the 15-set per week mark and honestly assessing how I felt. I felt good, I was clearly growing although the pace had slowed, so I took a stab at 18 weekly sets. Keep in mind, we’re talking about squats, romanian deadlifts, bench press, pull-ups, rows, overhead press and the like for the bulk of my lifts, with isolation movements for hard to hit muscles like the medial deltoid, the biceps, the calves and my new favorite, the upper traps. If you want your upper traps to grow, here’s a tip: look down while you do your shrugs with a wide grip, trying to shrug not just straight up, but toward your neck. The fibers on the trap muscles run horizontally to the neck, so if you simply shrug straight up and down, you’re doing a very partial range of motion. If you hold your head up, the traps are in active insufficiency (or maybe it’s passive, I get them mixed up) because the traps are trying to shrug and hold your head up simultaneously.
After three weeks at 18 sets per muscle, I decided I’d go to 20. I don’t recall exactly when it happened, but it was fairly soon into the 20-set week that I broke. Nothing specific happened, nor did I actually injure anything, but I became painfully aware of how many tendons exist in the human body. I ached basically everywhere. Not the muscles mind you, but the connective tissue. I had some perpetually sore spots in the hamstrings and quads, but not enough to cause any drop in performance. I auto regulated my reps on my “volume sets” after the first set, I deloaded at the lift specific level whenever I couldn’t hit my target reps, in other words I kept doing everything right, but my body was basically a series of small aches and pains everywhere.
I backed off a little, but it wasn’t enough. I eventually came way back to 10 or 12 sets and had to start leaving out certain movements that just aggravated my angry connective tissue. Bicep curls, lateral raises and pull-ups were the most egregious culprits, but so were my new favorite: snatch grip shrugs.
I continued along, but knew my bulk was nearing its end. The body fat was climbing and the calipers were telling me the weight I was putting on now wasn’t new muscle. So it was time to cut, and here’s where things took a bit of a turn.
End of the bulk: 188.4 lbs in front of a very dirty mirror.
Getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger isn’t particularly interesting to me. If what I wanted to do was look good without my shirt on, scroll back to the top: I already had that. No, my hypertrophy had an underlying mission, which was to build a bigger me to return to powerlifting in a better position to make strength gains and finally compete again. My initial plan was to follow a bulk and cut, basically from around 10% body fat up to 15%, then diet back to 10% and repeat, hoping to slowly but surely get closer to my genetic potential along the way. Doing a little more research has me thinking I may be as close as I can get for powerlifting purposes, because powerlifting is a weight class sport.
The FFMI is not a perfect method for determining ones genetic muscular limit, but it’s pretty good. Combined with joint measurements, it is about as good as we can get. I’m at a FFMI of 22.3, having reached 83% of a theoretical natural maximum of 25. My joints are very average in size, bordering on the smallish. At my current body fat level, continuing to try to bulk would lead to the balance of fat to muscle gain to shift to more fat, less muscle. I’d have to diet down to get lean enough to improve insulin sensitivity and move the p-ratio back toward the muscle building side of the equation. That would likely put me down into the low 170’s before I started another bulk. Well, the weight class limits are 181 and 198. At 55 years young, lifting for quite a long time, and a FFMI of 22.3, I am not getting close to 198 lbs at anything resembling a reasonable body fat level. I’ve been that heavy before, and I was fat. Granted, I wouldn’t be AS fat, since I’ve learned how to bulk more effectively and how to train for hypertrophy more effectively, but the fact is I am not in the elite camp of muscle building men. Lyle wrote some incredibly detailed analysis of the FFMI theoretical ceiling of 25 for natural lifters and I found it compelling enough to conclude it is a true limit in the sense that only a handful of probably natural lifters ever get there. The new muscle I’ve added being mostly in undertrained groups is more evidence that any gains I make from here will be minimal. Certainly not enough to get me into the 198 weight class where I envisioned my chiseled self to be in a relatively short time frame. No, I will diet slowly to 181 lbs (even though I could easily get to 181 for a weigh in from my current weight with a water cut) because I will look better at that weight and won’t have to deal with making weight when my first raw powerlifting meet comes along, which if all goes according to plan, will be in September.
By the way, I hit a 300-lb squat today in light Titan Knee Sleeves and belt. It moved incredibly fast in spite of my rather significant nervousness before the attempt. I did a competition style bench press of 201 on Saturday, so my strength is increasing as my bulkier self continues to look gravity in the face and say, not this time my friend.
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