Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2862: Why Your Bulk Is Making You Fat (And How to Fix It)

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

In this episode the guys break down exactly how to bulk and build muscle without gaining excess body fat. They cover how to find your maintenance calories, how much of a surplus to eat, where those extra calories should come from, why sleep is the most overlooked factor in a bulk, how protein helps minimize fat gain, why junk food will derail your bulk even if the calories look right on paper, and why staying active with daily steps actually speeds up muscle building rather than working against it. MAPS MACRO Find your macro targets in under 5 minutes: ⁠⁠https://mapsmacros.com⁠⁠ SPONSORS Troscriptions (methylene blue) — ⁠https://troscriptions.com/MINDPUMP⁠ Code: MINDPUMP — 10% off first order MAPS 15 BOGO — ⁠https://maps15bogo.com⁠ Buy 1 get 1 FREE — limited time (all 7 MAPS 15 programs same price) LINKS Mind Pump Store: ⁠https://mindpumpstore.com⁠ Maps Fitness Products: ⁠https://mapsfitnessproducts.com⁠ Instagram: @mindpumpmedia 0:00 - Intro 1:51 - How to bulk without gaining body fat — the full breakdown 5:57 - Step 1: Find your maintenance calories (two ways to do it) 9:44 - Step 2: How much above maintenance to eat — 300 to 600 calories 11:54 - Where should the extra calories come from — protein, carbs or fat? 13:42 - Step 3: Train for strength — compound lifts are the priority 15:03 - Step 4: Sleep consistently — how poor sleep skews everything toward fat gain 18:32 - Step 5: Bump protein even higher — why protein is the fat-burning macronutrient 20:12 - Step 6: Avoid junk food — the 20% FDA labeling loophole that will wreck your bulk 21:50 - Step 7: Keep your daily steps up — why movement speeds up muscle building 24:13 - Tip: Eat smaller more frequent meals when calories are high

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast in history. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, had a bulk or build without gaining body fat. We explain it all to you. By the way, if you want to know, you want to get an estimate of how many calories you need to eat

to build or even lose, go to Maps Macros.com. It's a free site, enter some information, less than five minutes later, you're going to have your targets. Again, it's Maps Macros.com. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Troscription. So this is medical grade supplements. These are the pioneers in like Methylene Blue, right?

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why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstor.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstor.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Bulking is the process by which you're trying to gain size and strength, but it's muscle you want to gain, not body fat.

This is the struggle. People bulk. They end up gaining more body fat than muscle. What's going on? We're going to break down how you can bulk without gaining body fat. Let's make it all muscle. Let's get into it. This is cool because this is a lot of our reverse diet strategy, which is a bulk.

That's right. Rebranded. It is. Yeah. Reverse dieting, I think, is just a safer term used by coaches and trainers to not scare people away that do not want to get bulky or put on much way. But it's the same concept. We're slowly going to increase calories over time. to help build muscle,

speech of metabolism up. And so the steps that we're going to go through right now are very similar to the steps that our coaches take our clients through in order to help them reverse diet or to bulk without putting on a bunch of body fat. Yeah. And the benefits of bulking are great. This is actually what most people should do at least part of the time if they're strength training.

Because the goal... Especially when they first start. Yeah. Yeah. The goal with strength training is to build muscle. That's what strength training does. It makes you stronger and it builds muscle. Now, you could be strength training for fat loss.

But again, if you're trying to strength training for fat loss, the goal is to build muscle. The reason why strength training can be so powerful for fat loss is it can move your metabolic rate in a positive direction. So it can, you know, for lack of a better term, speed up your metabolism. It also preserves muscle when you inevitably go in what's called a cut, when you drop your calories below what you're taking in. so you lose body fat.

So the goal with strength training is to build muscle. So bulking, the process of bulking should be something that everybody whose strength trains should employ at some point during the year. And of course, depending on how much muscle you want to gain or how strong you want to get, that plays a role in how often you do this. But if you never do this, if you're strength training and you're like, you're never get in a bulk, here's what's going to happen. You're never, it's going to be very difficult to build muscle.

It's be very difficult to move your metabolism in the right direction. Yeah, the crazy thing is, is like we've recommended, too, whether you're trying to lean out or lose weight or build muscle, like building is the first step, building your body up and making sure it's healthy and ready, you know, to maintain or build upon the amount of muscle you have. I'm glad you said that, Justin, because I want to make it clear that even if you were somebody

who needs to lose 30, 50, 100 pounds, and you're getting started on your fitness journey, this is the process at which I would start you. I still would start you in this quote-unquote bulk. And what I'd probably say is reverse diet, so I don't scare you away because somebody who goes, I need to lose 100 pounds as a trainer when you look back at him and go like, all right, we're going to start bulking you.

It doesn't have to be super aggressive. Right. Freaks them out. And so we would say, hey, we're going to reverse diet. The steps are the same, right? The same concept. And it's such a good strategy when you first get started. because most people, even people that are trying to lose a bunch of weight,

are coming from a place of probably somewhat sedentary, not eating the best diet, probably highly processed, more than likely, like most people missing their protein targets and goals. And so structuring them in a way where we feed the body what it needs and add some good calories while also lifting weights, sets them up to build muscle and sets up the weight loss journey for success. Yeah, so trying to build muscle without going on a quote-unquote bulk will result in very little to no muscle. So this, what we're talking about here is pretty much necessary.

It's paramount. Towards building muscle, speeding up the metabolism to set you up for better fat loss. Or if you want to get bigger and stronger, obviously you've got to move in this direction. So we're going to start out with figuring out your maintenance, okay? In other words, you need to figure out how many calories your body's probably burning on a daily basis. basis. Now, why is this so important? Because I don't know where to go if I don't know where you're at. Okay. If you don't know where you're at, then bulking tends to look like this. For the person who's afraid, who's so afraid of eating more calories, they don't go in a bulk. They eat a little bit more,

but then they cut back on other days and it ends up resulting in nothing. For the person who's just so eager and excited, this was me as a kid, like I just want to get as big and build as much muscle as possible, as fast as possible. A bulk turns into an excessive. of bulk. Yeah, into a journey bulk. Yeah, where I'm gaining lots of body fat.

I remember the first time this really hit for me. I was in my 20s. I was managing a gym in South San Jose. We had actually grand opened it. And I had a fitness manager and an assistant manager that worked for me. And all of us were super into lifting weights.

We're super into strain training. And so we had a contest. And we said, let's see who can gain the most weight. We should have said muscle, but we said the most weight in 60 days. I think it was, 60 or 90 days. And so me being competitive, me also not fully understanding what we're going to talk about here. And also coming from an insecure background of feeling like I was too skinny, I went crazy. And when I say I went crazy, I mean it.

Like I ate a bucket of chicken from, you know, KFC. All you can eat pizza, hamburgers, cheeseburger, fast. Highest amount of calories you could. Anything that was calories. Yeah. I went after it. and I got my body weight up to 240 pounds, which for me is incredibly heavy.

That's like a really heavy body weight. Just for people, for reference, right now I weigh about 220 pounds. So I got up to 240 pounds and I was definitely bigger for sure. And then I remember we did a body fat test. This wasn't a part of the bet, but everybody was like, let's just go see what's going on. My body fat percentage had gone up so much that of the weight that I gained, and I believe I gained close to 20-something pounds.

So I put on quite a bit of weight in a very short period of time. The vast majority of it was body fat. It was like, it was like I gained four pounds of muscle. And it was like 18 pounds or something like that of body fat. And I remember feeling so deflated. It defeats the purpose. Yeah, and I was like, what did I do wrong?

And what I did wrong is I didn't know what my maintenance was. I didn't know how much to go up. And I made a lot of mistakes with my diet. And there's definitely people listening who've experienced it. So number one, figure out your maintenance. There's a couple of ways to do this. we could do this the super accurate, more difficult way, or we could do it with an estimate,

which is super fast and easy, we'll take you five minutes. So the more difficult but more accurate way is to track everything you eat for the next two weeks. So for the next two weeks, you're not trying to bulk, you're not trying to cut, get some kind of a food tracking app. And everything you eat, every single thing you eat,

enter it in. Weigh your food and enter it. Weigh your food and enter it. And over two weeks, you should have a general idea of what you're eating every single day, and then we'll call that your maintenance. So that's the very accurate, but time-consuming and difficult way to do it. And unfortunately, although I love when my clients would do this, it's difficult to get people

to do this over a couple weeks without trying to hit a goal. So if you're just tracking and doing nothing, it's very difficult to do. But that's the best way to do it. Second way to do this is to get a macro calculator. We have one. We have a pretty good one that'll give you an estimate of your maintenance. So what you do is you go to Maps Macro.com. Maps Macros.

So M-A-P-S-M-A-C-R-O-S dot com. You go there and you enter in some data. So it's going to ask you things you can height, your weight, your activity level, stuff like that. And then it's going to give you a number of what you should be eating. So you can enter in there if you want to gain weight or lose weight or whatever. And that'll give you a nice general estimate to play with so you know where you're at. The next thing you do,

is you want to go above your maintenance. For an effective bulk, now this is reverse dieting. Sometimes we do less, even though it's still a bulk. The reason why we do less than what I'm about to say is because people who are really afraid of gaining weight, we do this even slower than we need to. But honestly, if you want to go above maintenance to see muscle, it's going to be about 300 to 600 to 600 to love what you're eating. And the way I decide that is, you know, my female clients, I'd say 300.

My male client's 600. Yep. It's a good place to start. Yep. The more you're, the bigger you are, the more you're. Yeah. And obviously, that's a generic number. It's not precise.

But for most people, it'll fall right around there. It will. I'd say, I'd say most female clients, I started around a 200 to 300 calorie bulk. Most my men, I'd start somewhere between six to 700 calories. That's normally a good place to start most people, especially if you have a pretty good idea where your maintenance is. And if so, if you use like the gold calculator, the macro calculator, or even better, if you track it for a couple weeks and get an idea where that's at, this will give you a good

place to start. Now, you may read some articles or hear people talking about how little extra calories it takes to actually build a pound of muscle. That math doesn't work in real life. So if you actually look at the, you know, how much, how many grams of protein, how many calories are in a muscle, how much in a pound? How much does it take to actually build it? you'll come back with a really small number.

It's like, oh, you only need an extra, you know, 50 calories or 20 calories a day. It doesn't work in real life because although not all these calories or few of these calories actually go to the building of muscle, the extra calories go to the energy required to lift and train and push to build the muscle. And again, there's mysterious things that happen in the metabolism. I've never seen anybody build good amounts of muscle eating 50 or 70 calories above. maintenance. It's always had to be...

Body uses it for all kinds of different reasons. That's right. I think there's a perfect time for us to talk about, because I think the next question that someone has when I give this advice is, where should the calories come from? Yes. So, and we'll just assume

that you're in a healthy place on your fats, because I think that's the only time that this, I guess, would be changed for me a little bit. So women should be like 65, maybe 70 grams, a minimum guy's more like 80. Yes. So long as that is good, then we, and then also making sure that we hit protein, then it can come from carbs. It come from protein.

It could come from fat. So it's like first make sure you hit your minimum amount of protein. So whatever your goal weight is, it's grams. So if you want to be 150 pounds, 150 grams of protein, male or female, like you said, grams of fat need to be there. Once you have those kind of minimums taken care of, then you can disperse the calories however you want. And what I've found works for clients is without radically changing everything. It's like if you like boosting carbs, then we add, you know, a half a cup of carbs. Whatever your serving size that you do, you boost a couple ounces of whatever that

carbohydrate is. If it's the protein, you add two ounces to your meats that you were eating. Real simple, instead of having to add another meal or change something radically, you can do that. Or other people, easy is adding a shake at the end of the day. So this is an example of where... 300-Callar shake. Yeah, I will advise using a shake because it just keeps the bulk easy.

Don't change anything. You're already hitting a good amount of macros. We're good. We know your maintenance out. Just add this shake on to your night every single night. That's also another way. Yes. Now, we'll get to protein because there's some great tips on protein

a little bit later in this episode. So some cool stuff on that. But next, the workout should be focused on getting stronger. One of the best correlates for building muscle is strength. Okay. So when you look at the data, they'll say it's progressive overload, which is a bit confusing for a lot of people. For something you can measure that's pretty black and white, it's strength. So throughout this period of time, if you're in a surplus and you're working out and your weight's going up, but you're not getting stronger, that's usually not a good sign.

Okay. That's not necessarily 100% you're not building muscle, but many times it means we're not necessarily building muscle. So you want to train to get stronger And the lifts you want to get stronger on The ones that matter the most of the compound lifts Okay, so it's cool to add weight to your leg extension It's fun to be able to leg curl more weight It's great to be able to curl more weight

That's great But if you add weight to your squat If you add weight to your overhead press Or a barbell row or a deadlift or a bench press The weight you add to those lifts has much more far-reaching effects when it comes to muscle. You know, I could add 70 pounds

on my leg extension. I'm not going to see major gains in my quads. I add 70 pounds in my squat. My legs are definitely... It's going to translate to pretty much every other lift. I'm going to see my legs get a lot bigger. Okay? Next up, you want to get really good sleep consistently.

What's interesting about some people tend to skip over this one. But what's interesting, when you look at the data on sleep, this is true for both being in a deficit or a surplus. Poor sleep. skews everything towards fat gain and it skews things away from muscle gain. So in studies on calorie deficits, you'll see people lose a similar amount of weight,

people who don't sleep well versus people who sleep well. But the people who don't sleep well will lose twice as much muscle, half as much body fat. When you see people who gain weight through a dedicated and structured bulk with strength training, when they gain weight more of his muscle, less of it is body fat, if they sleep well. Sleep really does move the needle

on what kind of weight you gain on the scale. So get good sleep and you got to do it consistently. I say consistently because we tend to try to sleep well Monday through Thursday, Friday night, Saturday night. We all like to stay up late, try to sleep in the next day. We end up getting jet lagged every Monday. And that switching of the circadian rhythm, even if it's just a couple hours, actually translates into not great sleep.

So it's got to be consistent. Seven days a week, same bedtime, same weight time. this makes a huge difference. It's a huge difference and it's overlooked so much that a lot of my clients saw great results just simply making an attempt at this. In other words. And changing nothing else. Right.

Like just making an effort to actually try and be consistent with the time or, oh, I'm going to start shutting my phone down at a certain time or I'm going to make sure I have my last meal by like six o'clock before, you know, instead of eating at eight or nine like I was before. So just making some sort of an attempt to improve your sleep quality and consistency, my client's got great results from that. Because this is one of those areas that either you're somebody who's really into this and you pay attention and you try and you care. Usually it's when you're like, you know, over 35. Yeah. Yeah. Or you just totally like whatever about it.

And I feel like the people that are whatever, if you want to supercharge your results, focus on this. Or, and if you want to make it really difficult for yourself to see results, don't give two shits about it. Because I think that's the quickest way for you to plateau or stall is not getting consistent, adequate rest. A lot of times it seems like this was the one thing that unlocks everything. And with a lot of my clients, it's that accumulation of stress that is just, the bias is just holding on. And then all of a sudden you give it permission to fully recover. All of a sudden now it's like, okay, muscle building mode. Yeah.

A stressed body wants to store body fat and does not want more muscle. And here's why. More body fat is more insurance in case of historically. It was always a very stressful thing for people, which was not getting enough food. So anytime you had under stress, your body's like store up. So it's like, think about it with money. Stressful job market out there. Things are looking crazy.

Honey, we're not going to spend as much money. We're going to save more because it's going to make me feel more secure. This is what your body does with body fat. It doesn't want to build muscle when you have a lot of stress. stress, like from not sleeping well, because muscle is expensive. It costs way more resources than body fat does. So your body's like, why would I want to increase my resource demands when we're when things are stressful? So it's like pro fat anti-muscle is what poor sleep produces. Okay, let's get back to protein now. So here's what's interesting about protein. When you eat more,

when you look at comparable diets that are both high protein. They're both good. Both of them are in a surplus. But one of them is even higher protein. You see less fat gain. And there's a few theories as to why. One of them may be the thermic effect of protein. Protein in a gram per gram basis, even calorie per calorie, it tends to burn more calories to have protein than it does for carbohydrates.

So it requires more energy to basically process it and break it down? Yeah, I mean, I hate to say this because this is so. I know. It's kind of a small. So click- this is so click-baity, but protein is the fat-burning macronutrient. So when you're, if you're doing everything great, you're getting essential fats, your protein's already high, and you want to bump your calories more. And you're like, you know what?

I think I'm just going to eat even more protein. Not a bad strategy, especially if you don't want to gain. Especially if you're somebody who is trying to do this and you find yourself still hungry. Yeah. So if you are trying to, this is like getting back to my, you know, point I was making with the 300 or 600 calories, like where do they come from? There are some different coaching tips and strategies based off the person. Like, I'm asking questions like this.

Like, if you're somebody who, maybe you hit what you need protein-wise, but then you're like, man, I'm constantly hungry. And we're already in a 600 calorie surplus. Protein might be the place that we get that. That'll help. Yeah, it'll help. So, you know, some people are like that. Other people will be like, man, I feel like I don't have a lot of energy in my workouts.

Well, then I might bump from carbohydrates. So there are different strategies. Point is that you can go in any direction on any of those so long as we're hitting the bare minimums of what we need. but depending on what the client says back to me, it might depend on what macro nutrient we use. Yeah. Next up, avoid junk food and candy. So here's why, if your mindset is already,

I'm going to gain. So this is especially for people who want to build. Like they're not just trying to build so they can get leaner. They just want to get strong and big. Eating junk food and candy is a fast track to going into super bulk mode. Okay. Those foods are very easy to overconsume. You're already in the mentality of when I get bigger.

and they're going to make you go way above the 300 to 600 calorie surplus. Not to mention those foods tend to affect digestion poorly, and they tend to affect water retention, which can skew what's actually happening on the scale and what's happening. Not to mention, too, all those packaged foods can be up to 20% off too. So it's hard to gauge. So it's hard to gauge. You start eating a lot of things that are processed,

even if it's not junk food and candy, just processed. You come in a box and a wrapper. You do a lot of stuff like that. You know, it's interesting about that. It's such a myth, right? You would think that if I, if I, I'm here tracking my macros. I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to hit, you know, 400 calories above maintenance. It seems so easy to get a box of something because it's all calculated.

Yeah, it's all labeled there specifically. And you're like, oh, cool, extra 300 calories from this box of whatever. But what Adam said, this is actually, this is, this is allowed. The FDA allows food companies to be 20, up to 20% off. Which is substantial. Oh, I mean, 500 calories turns into 700 calories. no problem. Yeah.

Just because, uh, the, so weighing real whole foods is far more accurate than reading what the box says in terms of calories. Uh, next up, keep your daily steps up.

So just keep daily activity up high. You don't need to do cardio. Uh, that's, you know, I know some people will use that as a strategy in a bulk, um, which is okay, but a lot of cardio,

especially if you're pushing, uh, intense cardio makes it makes your body not want to build muscle. It's a competing signal. I mean, if you really have like, uh, like a really sedentary job and like you don't have opportunities to move a lot.

That's where like, you know, that designated time for, you know, movement and cardio might make sense. But like if you could just move around all day long, that goes so much further. Yeah. Even then, like if you're someone like that, like the time on the elliptical or treadmill is walking, right? I just want you to move. Yeah.

Because we're right now, we're really focused on building muscle. I mean, the goal of this bulk is to build muscle, to build your metabolism. And so we want to do everything pro. that. And even though cardio has its health benefits, it has benefits when you are trying to lose body fat, it is not a great strategy for a bulk and focusing on building muscle. Not to mention high protein junk food is typically way above the calories that you're looking for. So if I'm looking for 50 grams of protein and I'm going to junk food, I'm also going to get along with it 80 grams of fat and a bunch of carbohydrates. And so now I'm, you know, easy 1,250 calories above, you know,

what I'm looking to do. So stick to whole natural foods in this bulk and help control what you're eating so you're not going too far up. And then the steps. Here's the deal with steps. Here's what I notice with steps. I build more muscle when I'm active than when I'm not active. And that sounds crazy because I may be burning more.

It's your, facilitates recovery. Movement. This is a big deal. I noticed this a lot with, you know, bodybuilding and stuff like that, especially since when I was younger, I had this idea of like, lift really hard and then just lay and do nothing. And it's like actually moving around speeds up the recovery process, speeds up the muscle building process.

Makes you healthier. You're moving your blood. You're promoting your digestive system working better. You're moving oxygen, food, nutrition throughout your body. Like all that facilitates recovery and helps and speed up the process of building muscle. So movement is a really good thing. sprinting, running, trying to burn a ton of calories. Not a good strategy, but actually staying very active is a really, really good strategy.

It's a great intensity with it. Now, last, this is just a tip. You don't have to do this, but in my experience, it works out better. Let's say you're trying to eat a decent amount of calories. Let's say you're a guy listening right now. You want to go in a bulk. You've got a relatively fast metabolism and you figure out, oh, my gosh, I got to eat 3,500 calories or 4,000 calories.

You're going to feel better eating that in smaller, frequent meals than in less frequent large meals. It's just eating 3,500 calories in three meals. I mean, that's, you know, it's like 11,100, 1,200 calories each meal. It's just pretty filling. Yeah, you get bogged down. It doesn't feel good. But if I split it up into five meals, it's much easier to adjust. Small meals throughout the day was pioneered by bodybuilders who all had to eat a significant amount of food to build muscle. So, and it just tends to feel better for people. So it's not necessary, but this is a tip that I'll add that I think will help. I agree. It's not necessary. I know the science has been out on it for quite some time now that there's no real health benefits or fat burning benefits or even muscle building benefits.

But psychologically and behaviorally, I think there's a lot of benefits. I think that to your point and digestively I'd make that argument too, to Justin's point, I think that eating, you know, like when I was hitting a lot of calories, if I was only eating three meals a day, I'd be eating some of these meals would be 2,000 calorie meals, which is just ridiculous and stressful to eat that much food, much easier to eat some of it. smaller, more frequent meals. I find it too. It keeps cravings down. It's just, it's easier to be more controlled. You have less bad habits. It's just, it requires more prepping, which I think is also beneficial to you. So I'm very pro small, frequent meals, not because it scientifically builds more muscle or burns more body fat. But in practice, it tends to work. But in practice, it seems to work a lot better for our clients. Right. So again, I'm going to point to maps, macros.com.

So when you're getting started out and you want to find out what you need to eat in order to bulk and build without gaining body fat, you want to get that number and you don't want to go through the process of tracking everything for the next two weeks just to get started. Go to Maps Macros.com. You can also find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump media. We'll see you this. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our digital. Check out our discounted

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