3 Essential Lean Bulking Tips for Muscle Growth

Maximize your muscle growth in the wintry months.

Last updated on November 15th, 2024

On social media, Gen Z calls it the “winter arc” — the period between the end of summer’s warmth and the following spring. It’s typically when bodybuilders embrace lean bulking.

• Lean bulking is a period of intentional overeating with a focus on minimizing body fat gain as much as possible, even at the expense of potential muscle mass. 

If you’re bundling up and buckling down to build muscle, lean bulking is one of the best ways to go about it. But it’s a fickle thing to get right; eat too little and you likely won’t make meaningful progress. Eat too much and you’ll potentially have unwanted fat to peel off afterward. 

These three tips can help you thread that needle.

3 Lean Bulking Tips

A bodybuilding-oriented lifestyle is no picnic. Managing your body fat through lean bulking takes a good deal of diligence. Here are three tips that might help you stave off unwanted fat gain while adding muscle: 

The Smaller Your Calorie Surplus, the Better

To build muscle, you need an energy surplus — spare calories to use as raw material. However, providing more raw material doesn’t necessarily encourage your body to build muscle faster. The general idea of lean bulking is to provide just enough extra energy to fuel hypertrophy. 

So, it follows that the smaller your calorie surplus is, the more likely it is that most of your weight change would result from added muscle instead of body fat: 

• the more conservative your calorie surplus is, the higher proportion of your weight gain will be muscle instead of fat,” BarBend Expert and PhD Dr. Eric Helms says. “However, if your surplus is too conservative, that can slow muscle gain.” 

[Related: Best Pre-Workout Supplements]

Dr. Helms recommends a 100-300 calorie surplus for anyone partaking in lean bulking. The more advanced you are in your gym career, the closer to the low end you should be. 

Go Deeper: Dr. Helms offered two bits of data to explain his prescription. Rozenek 2002 and Hall 2008 illustrate how beginners can get away with more aggressive calorie surpluses due to their extremely high sensitivity to building new muscle. (1)(2)

Set a Calorie & Macronutrient Range

If lean bulking is all about precision, the idea of a target range for your calories and macronutrients, rather than a specific number, might seem silly. However, we’d argue doing so affords you the luxury of flexibility. 

Giving yourself a 10- or 20-gram leeway in your macronutrient quotas won’t do any big-picture harm and should average out to a consistent value over the course of a week or month. In exchange, you have more flexibility in your food choices and don’t need to panic about, say, going a little bit over your carb threshold.

This is a form of what’s called flexible dietary restraint. Some studies have shown a flexible view of food can improve an individual’s relationship with food and lessen the chances of developing obesity. (3)

Weigh & Measure Regularly

For bodybuilders who embrace lean bulking, habitual and diligent measuring is familiar territory. This means keeping tabs on your weight and body composition. Before we dive in, remember that a fixation on scale weighing can be an indicator of body dysmorphia. (4)

• Regular weighing provides a reliable indicator of the general magnitude of your calorie surplus. In simpler terms, how fast you gain weight on the scale corresponds to how far above the caloric maintenance you’re eating. 

Let’s take Dr. Helms’ calorie surplus recommendation and apply it to an experienced bodybuilder in a lean bulking phase. A 200-calorie average daily surplus should lead to roughly less than half a pound gained on the scale per week.

This is why frequent weighing is essential for lean bulking — it provides more data to account for the daily fluctuations in scale weight that you can’t directly control, such as digestion. If you’re comfortable weighing yourself daily, in a fasted and unclothed state, do so and average the numbers together to get a sense of your weight change. 

Regardless, if you’re experienced and lean bulking, you’ll want to aim for, at most, one or two pounds of scale weight per month. You can also, imperfectly, keep tabs on your rate of fat gain by taking progress pictures in the mirror on a monthly basis or using a tape measure around your stomach. 

One big thing: Remember, fat gain isn’t inherently bad and not something you should let affect your self-worth, even if you’re lean bulking. The number on the scale is also, quite literally, just that.

More Bodybuilding Content 

References

1. Rozenek, R., Ward, P., Long, S., & Garhammer, J. (2002). Effects of high-calorie supplements on body composition and muscular strength following resistance training. The Journal of sports medicine and physical fitness, 42(3), 340–347.
2. Hall K. D. (2008). What is the required energy deficit per unit weight loss?. International journal of obesity (2005), 32(3), 573–576. 
3. Westenhoefer, J., Engel, D., Holst, C., Lorenz, J., Peacock, M., Stubbs, J., Whybrow, S., & Raats, M. (2013). Cognitive and weight-related correlates of flexible and rigid restrained eating behaviour. Eating behaviors, 14(1), 69–72. 
4. Kittler JE, Menard W, Phillips KA. Weight concerns in individuals with body dysmorphic disorder. Eat Behav. 2007 Jan;8(1):115-20. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2006.02.006. Epub 2006 Mar 6. PMID: 17174859; PMCID: PMC1762093.

Featured Image: Dusan Petkovic / Shutterstock