3487: [Part 1] The Dirty Bulk: Five Reasons To Do A Clean Bulk by Eric Bach of BachPerformance on Muscle Building

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[00:01:00] This is Optimal Health Daily. The Dirty Bulk. Five Reasons to Do a Clean Bulk. Part 1 by Eric Bach of BachPerformance.com. And I'm Dr. Neal Malik, your very own personal narrator. Don't forget, we have a bunch of shows narrating blogs. Just search for Optimal Living Daily to find all of them. Now, today's post is a bit longer than what I typically narrate. So, as I normally do, I'll read the first half today and then finish it up for you tomorrow.

[00:01:29] So, with that, let's get right to it as we optimize your life. The Dirty Bulk. Five Reasons to Do a Clean Bulk. Part 1 by Eric Bach of BachPerformance.com. Of all the dumb fitness ideas out there, the dirty bulk is one of the dumbest. That may seem like an extreme statement, but trust me on this one.

[00:01:56] After all, I used to guzzle weight gainers mixed with ice cream and had more stomach rolls than abs. Following a dirty bulk will leave you with too much fat and leave you feeling frustrated, not jacked, and feeling confident. The problem is that a dirty bulk involves eating as much as you can. You devour calories like a malnourished hyena. When you follow a high-frequency muscle-building program, you do need extra calories to build muscle. There's only so much your body can handle.

[00:02:25] When you eat with reckless abandon, you'll be rewarded with too much body fat and not bolder shoulders and defined arms. Isn't the entire purpose of this to look better naked, to feel strong, confident, and powerful? You want a body that earns the respect of others and, most importantly, fills you with confidence. You want to build a strong, lean, and muscular body. So, here are the top five reasons to avoid the dirty bulk.

[00:02:54] 1. Dirty bulk downgrade. Caloric spillover. Calorie balance is still king when it comes to building muscle. If you're going to put on lean muscle, you need to be in a caloric surplus. Calories in. Those are calories from food. Calories out. Those are the calories used for daily activity and bodily functions. Caloric surplus. That's when you take in more calories than your body burns each day.

[00:03:23] Calorie. Seems simple, right? Well, it is. But problems arise when you fall into the trap of believing more is always better. Too many lifters are misled by the diets of professional bodybuilders. They try the same ideas without chemical enhancement, ahem, steroids, to back it up. This is a huge problem for the natural lifter. Steroids allow a user to drastically increase protein synthesis or making more muscle.

[00:03:50] This makes it much easier to eat an excessive number of calories and use them directly to accelerate muscle growth. While a bodybuilder may be able to eat a caloric excess of 1,000 calories and gain insane amounts of muscle, the same plan applied to a natural lifter only leads to a main course of body fat with a side order of subpar muscular gains. Like it or not, there's a limit to how fast you can build muscle as a natural lifter.

[00:04:19] I'll dig into how much you need to eat shortly. But for now, understand a surplus of 300 to 500 calories is all you need to maximize muscle growth. 2. Dirty bulk downgrade. Fat hyperplasia. When you overeat, your body increases the number of fat cells your body stores. It's a survival mechanism. This is called fat hyperplasia and it makes it more difficult to lose fat going forward.

[00:04:47] The big kicker here is you can't eliminate fat cells. You can only make them smaller. When you follow a dirty bulk, you're increasing the number of fat cells in your body. You'll gain weight in the short term while also making it easier for your body to store fat in the future. The result? You get stuck in perma-bulk mode. You gain more fat than muscle. And you may have one heck of a time getting ripped once beach season comes around.

[00:05:16] 3. Dirty bulk downgrade. Decreased insulin sensitivity. At any given moment, you're either burning fat or building muscle. The switch behind this? Insulin. Insulin stimulates protein synthesis, inhibiting the breakdown of protein, and is an extremely powerful muscle-building hormone. If you're a naturally skinny guy like I am, having high insulin sensitivity is one of the best weapons in your arsenal.

[00:05:44] When you're sensitive to insulin, your body effectively burns stored body fat and breaks down your food into energy. Better yet, it's easier to build muscle without getting fat. When you're overweight and have a gut to lose, you're not as sensitive to insulin. Heck, most people aren't. And it's near impossible to add lean muscle without adding a spare tire on the side. Instead of the classic dirty bulk, you want to play the long game and add muscle slowly.

[00:06:14] This allows you to maintain higher insulin sensitivity and keep fat gain to a minimum. Nutrition partitioning is how well you break down your carbs, fats, and proteins into usable glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids. It is related to your genetics, hormones, and yes, your insulin sensitivity. 4. Dirty bulk downgrade, poor nutrition partitioning. When you gain body fat and decrease insulin sensitivity from

[00:06:42] mindless eating during a dirty bulk, you impair your body's ability to break down food into its usable parts. The result? It becomes easier to gain fat and more difficult to build lean muscle. 5. Hear that on tomorrow's episode. You just listened to part 1 of the post titled, The Dirty Bulk. 5 Reasons to Do a Clean Bulk. By Eric Bach of Bachperformance.com.

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[00:08:39] To get a 20% off packing coupon and for full details, visit the upsstore.com slash packing. Dr. Neal Malik here for my commentary. What's great about listening to this podcast is that, through this show, we can save you a bunch of time and heartache. You can learn from the best and avoid some of the early mistakes the authors of the articles and I have made. We give you shortcuts. So, in the spirit of sharing previous mistakes, I'll admit,

[00:09:09] I've been guilty of the dirty bulk. When I first got into resistance training, my buddy and I both bought Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. In it, Arnold provides sample meal plans. Now, all of this was before I started my master's and doctoral program, so I didn't know much about nutrition. So, without knowing any better, my buddy and I followed these meal plans and ended up eating a lot of food. Thinking that eating more calories each day

[00:09:38] would somehow lead to a body like Arnold's. Oh, how naive we were. For dinner, for example, I would eat an entire medium pizza and cap it off with a 1,200 calorie chicken bowl. My snacks were peanut butter milkshakes. Well, I didn't end up with a body like a bodybuilder. Instead, my waist went from 32 inches to 36 inches in no time at all. My blood cholesterol levels were above 200 and they should be closer to 150.

[00:10:08] It then took me years and a lot of hard work to get back to a healthier 32-inch waist and to bring my cholesterol levels back down to normal. So, please learn from Eric's post today and my experience and consider adding muscle slowly to help your body properly adapt to these changes. Trust me, it will save you time later on. All right, that'll do it for today. Thank you for listening every day. Thank you for sharing this show with someone. I'll be back here tomorrow to finish up this post,

[00:10:38] so I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits.