Nutrition
How to Make High-Calorie Bulking Smoothies (to Gain Weight)
A good bulking smoothie makes it easier to get into a calorie surplus, allowing you to gain weight and thus build muscle. We’ve used these smoothies to gain nearly 70 pounds each. We’ve also used them with thousands of clients, ranging from everyday people all the way up to Olympic athletes.
When you blend whole foods into smoothies, they keep their nutritional value, but they lose much of their bulk and hassle. That’s why they’re so popular in the fitness industry. Smoothies are the easiest way to consume several servings of protein, fruits, veggies, omega-3s, phytonutrients, and fibre.
Smoothies are even better for naturally thin people trying to build muscle. When you blend whole foods into liquid calories, you don’t need to cook them or chew them, and they won’t take up as much space in your stomach. You also break them into smaller pieces, helping them digest faster and leaving you hungry again sooner.
High-calorie bulking smoothies are nature’s weight-gainer. You just need to learn how to harness their power.
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How Much Protein Powder Can You Have Per Day?
One of the most common questions we get is how much protein powder is too much protein powder? One scoop of whey per day is probably fine, right? But what about 2 scoops? 3 scoops? 4?
I’ve seen dozens of muscle-building studies where the researchers give participants upwards of 60 or even 90 grams of protein per day for several months in a row, measuring what effects it has on muscle growth.
There are other studies looking directly at how much protein powder you can safely have per day.
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Do Skinny People Have Faster Metabolisms?
There’s a common myth in the fitness industry that skinny people don’t have faster metabolisms, they just don’t eat as much food. According to this line of thinking, there’s no such thing as a fast or slow metabolism. Rather, your metabolism is determined by your height, age, weight, lean mass, exercise habits, and activity levels. There are two problems with this line of thinking.
First, those variables can result in huge changes in metabolic rate. For example, in a study published by Science, they found that a 180-pound person could burn anywhere from 1,400 to 5,700 calories per day (study).
Second, even if you account for every single one of those variables, metabolisms can still vary greatly between people. Even when living totally average lifestyles, naturally skinny people often have unusually fast metabolisms.
Let’s go over the research and implications. Then we can talk about how to gain weight and build muscle with a fast metabolism.
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What Is Dirty Bulking? Are the Results Worth It?
There are countless weapons lifters wield against the skeletal armies of atrophy. One such weapon is the “dirty bulk.” It disregards standard nutritional recommendations, using whatever means necessary to get into a calorie surplus. Usually, that means eating plenty of junk food.
We’ve dirty bulked in the past. We’ve had clients do it, too. Most were everyday people, but some were college, professional, and Olympic athletes. You’d be surprised at what they eat to get into calorie surpluses.
Dirty bulking can be good for building muscle. It won’t necessarily make you fat, either. Some dirty bulkers gain muscle more leanly than some clean bulkers. The Devil is in the details, and we’ll delve into all of those details.
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How Many Carbs Should You Eat to Build Muscle?
Bodybuilders traditionally eat high-carb diets while bulking, getting anywhere from 50–60% of their calories from carbohydrates. Carbs are a great source of calories, they can be relatively easy to digest, they’re rich in nutrients, and they’re fantastic for building muscle.
In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits and downsides of eating so many carbs, cover the latest research, and then give you some modern recommendations.
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The Best Macros for Bulking: How Much Protein, Carbs & Fat to Eat
When figuring out our ideal bulking macros—how much protein, carbs, and fat we should eat—there are a few things we need to consider. First, we can look at the research to see which macros allow us to build muscle the fastest. Second, we can see which macros help us avoid gaining fat while bulking. Third, we can look at which macros make it easier to get into a sustainable calorie surplus.
But a lot of us care about more than merely building muscle. We also want to improve our general health as we do it. So we can also look at which macros have the best impact on our health as we bulk up.
So, what are the best macros for bulking?
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How Much Alcohol is Okay While Bulking?
Maybe you’ve heard that beer builds beer bellies, that alcohol can tank our testosterone production, or that drinking too much can impair muscle growth.
All of this is true. In fact, it gets worse. Alcohol can also disrupt our sleep, which can further reduce muscle growth, cause extra fat gain, and harm our workout performance.
Worse still, alcohol can slow digestion, making it harder for us to digest big bulking diets. It can also negatively impact our appetites, making it harder to gain weight.
However, these aren’t the effects of drinking, these are the drinking too much. As with most good things in life, it’s the dose that makes the poison.
Maybe you’ve even heard that having a drink or two per day is better than having none. Is that true?
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How to Eat More Calories (to Gain Weight)
To eat more calories, eat more often, focusing on dense foods that are easy to chew, lower in fibre, or lower in water. Think of foods like trail mix, ground meat, smoothies, yogurt, milk, bananas, and dark chocolate.
Even then, though, many skinny guys still have trouble eating enough calories to gain weight. There’s a good reason for that: we often have faster metabolisms and smaller stomachs. Unfortunately, the only way to gain weight is to get into a calorie surplus. I know that’s a tough bite to swallow, especially if you’re already stuffed to the gills, but there’s no way around it.
To make matters worse, we aren’t just trying to gain weight, we’re trying to build muscle. That adds a few other considerations. Protein is very filling, but we need to eat enough of it. Fat is very calorically dense, but we need to make sure we aren’t overdoing it. And we can’t rely on junk food to boost our calories up. That makes gaining weight much harder.
So what we want to do is design a diet around calorie-rich foods that improve our digestion and make it easier to build muscle quickly and leanly.
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How Much Sugar is Okay While Bulking?
Sugar is often criticized for causing weight gain. It’s technically a calorie surplus that causes the weight gain. But sugar can certainly make it easier to get into a calorie surplus, and so increasing our sugar intake can indeed lead to weight gain.
What if we’re trying to gain weight? For a lot of us hardgainers, the idea of sugar causing accidental weight gain sounds like a potential benefit, and it can be. In fact, when Marco first started helping me bulk up, one of the first things he did was have me add some sugar (dextrose) into my workout shakes. It’s a common trick that strength coaches use with high-level athletes to help them get into a calorie surplus. Marco cut his teeth by helping college, professional, and Olympic athletes build muscle, so it was the first thing he thought of when I told him that I was having trouble gaining weight.
Look at drinks like Gatorade, designed for the Gators from the University of Florida to keep them fueled up while playing sports. It’s full of sugar. Or look at the recovery drinks we see at the supplement stores. Again, full of sugar (or starch). The same is true with weight gainers. Their main ingredient is usually either maltodextrin or dextrose—both of which are quickly broken down into sugar as soon as we drink them. Sugar is the main ingredient in bulking supplements and sports drinks.
In the general public, though, most skinny guys take the opposite approach. They’ve heard that processed sugar will raise our blood sugar levels and can lead to various health issues, including, of course, fat gain. So when they start bulking up, they intentionally try to reduce their intake of processed sugar. Now, there’s certainly no problem with that, and most health experts recommend keeping our sugar intake quite low anyway—often limiting sugar to 25% of our total calories but sometimes as low as 10% of our total calories (study).
However, the idea of limiting our sugar intake to 25% of our calories is based on the idea that eating more processed sugar can lead to nutrient deficiencies. If we eat more candy, that can mean eating fewer fruits and veggies. But that’s not all that relevant to us skinny guys who are intentionally driving ourselves into a calorie surplus to build muscle. It’s especially irrelevant if we’re getting that added sugar from sources that are rich in micronutrients, such as from fruit, fruit juice, honey, and milk. In that case, even though our sugar intake would be increasing, we’d be consuming more micronutrients.
Furthermore, sugar has a different impact on skinny guys who are underweight and exercising than it does on people who are overweight and sedentary. We don’t have the same issues controlling our blood sugar levels, removing most of the downsides to our general health. And, when combined with a good lifting routine, raising our intakes of sugar can lead to leaner muscle gains than increasing our intakes of fat.
So, what effect does sugar have on skinny guys as we bulk up? How much added sugar is helpful. How much is harmful? And how can we make it easier to bulk up quickly and leanly?
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How to Bulk on a Vegan Diet (Plant-Based Bulking)
Vegans can build muscle just as quickly and effectively as anyone else, provided they eat a proper plant-based bulking diet. Vegans tend to be healthier than the average person (study), and plant-based diets lend themselves quite well to building muscle. After all, many of the best bulking foods are plants: bananas, oats, rice, legumes, leafy greens, carrots, garlic, and so on (study).
We’ve been helping skinny guys bulk up for over a decade now, and our vegan members have always done just as well as everyone else.
Still, there are a few common mistakes vegans make. And there are some extra considerations to keep in mind. Let’s go through all of it.
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