How to Navigate a Bulk Without Getting Fat: How we take our clients through a calorie surplus phase.

How are we all feeling? Good, yep, sore, very sore. So we all have an interest here in, of course, hypertrophy. Yeah, that was yesterday's workshop, the topic. Not only for ourselves but also for the clients that we train, right? So muscle hypertrophy is one of those key elements that marks an incredible transformation, right? You see the before and afters, they're gaining lots of muscle mass. How does that happen? Okay, so with my topic, I'm going to be going through comprehensively how to take someone through a surplus phase, right? And it's my hope that by the end of this presentation you guys have all the tools to, uh, one, identify who this is suitable for, how to take them from start to finish, and troubleshooting along the way. Okay, so there are some of our learning outcomes today. And ultimately how to create the masterful transformations that really leave you, uh, awe-inspired. Okay, um, so I'll present a question to you guys. Who here has done some form of a surplus phase, uh, in the past? So intentionally increasing calories? Yep. So what was your strategy here? Yeah, yep. And how much success did you have like over that course? Yeah, right, right. Anyone else here? No one? Okay, so, uh, what we can see from example is that we know that energy availability in some form of excess is very valuable for increasing our muscle mass, right? So Many, many benefits. I just want to go through some key terminology. If it decides to load— oh, there we are, cool. So I'm going to define a building phase as a dietary phase dedicated to maximizing muscle growth through a controlled calorie surplus, and the keyword is controlled, okay? So oftentimes when people think about gaining, there are certain connotations that come with that. We hear things like bulking, right? The connotation is— you're smiling, so what comes to mind? Just eating whatever you can. Yeah, so eating ad libitum. There might be questionable food choices involved to hit a caloric target. There's not really an approximation of when you're ending or how much progress or how you're tracking things along the way. It's kind of just eat, uh, in some excess, train hard, and see what happens, right? But oftentimes what can happen is without the right parameters, we do the uncontrolled eating, right? There isn't a particular direction around when we want to stop or what measures are in place, uh, gain excess body fat, often diet all the way back down, and then you look the same. And now you've just lost basically 10 kilos and 10 months and you look the same. So we want to avoid those pitfalls. Um, so when done correctly, a building phase is a very important strategy, especially for someone who has kind of exhausted that novice training effect. So when you think about the first year of training, I'm sure many of you can relate, you're progressing very quickly. You're just eating well, even at maintenance, you're recomping, gaining muscle mass, losing body fat at a exponential rate, something that's quite unprecedented and definitely the fastest rate of progress you'll get in your entire training career, right? As we get more intermediate and advanced, we need to utilize different strategies to take us from not just A to B, but from B to C, and that would be continuing our muscle growth progress. Okay, and there are various applications to why we want to increase muscle hypertrophy. Of course, the general population, many people have that as a goal. There are lots of health benefits related to that. Physique competitors in the off-season, even off-season athletes, right? So let's say you want to build up some muscle mass to then translate into strength or power, there's merit there. And even if someone is purely focused on strength, we know that muscular development does play a role in that, right? A bigger muscle is stronger muscle, as you would have learned yesterday. So many applications. But first, this is an interesting tangent that I learned while I was putting this presentation together. Which athletic population do you guys think has reached like peak fat-free mass? Fat-free mass? Sprinters? Sam? Endurance runners. Endurance runners. Cyclists. Cyclists. So we're thinking like muscular, lean. Swimmers. Swimmers. Anyone else? Think bigger. Tabloids. No, no, no. That'd be the least impressive. Think bigger. So think stronger as well. What's that? Close, up there. Warmer. Bodybuilders is kind of the— yeah, you think bodybuilders because again I said the sport is to get bigger, gain more muscle mass. No, interestingly, at least based on the research, Japanese sumo wrestlers. Right, so they have incredibly high fat-free mass. And yes, fat-free mass doesn't necessarily mean all muscle mass, but if you can approximate muscle mass, there's still a very high amount of muscle mass there. Now, when most people think getting jacked and muscular, that isn't what comes to mind. In fact, if clients got there, they'd probably be very upset with what you've done. But there is a lesson here to learn, and that is when you think about the guys with the Most amount of muscle mass: strongman, again, high-level powerlifters in the high weight class, sumo wrestlers. What's the common denominator here? There's very high energy availability, right? Of course, we don't want to bulk and look like that, and that's the purpose of this presentation, is how to not look like that but gain the benefit of the muscle mass along the way. Okay, so is a surplus, uh, necessary? Uh, ultimately it depends on the level of the client. Again, if someone's just starting, you probably don't need to just overfeed them, and they're going to progress regardless. It's just a new stimulus from a nutrition standpoint. You might just play around with their macronutrients, set them at baseline calories, and they're going to change. Okay, um, so is it necessary? No. Is it a highly valuable tool? Absolutely. So muscle hypertrophy can occur at maintenance calories. It can happen even in a modest deficit if our protein remains high and is that training stimulus there, right? A good example is say populations with higher body fat percentage. Recomp is, muscle mass can increase substantially there. What sets a surplus apart is the rate of muscle growth, okay, compared to other caloric states. But with that in mind, it is a very metabolically expensive process, right? There's a lot that has to occur in the body for you to synthesize new muscle tissue, not just say, reveal existing muscle mass by getting leaner, or say just reducing your body fat, which is a much more efficient process. And it can also occur at a faster rate. So to illustrate this, I've just got a chart here of all the processes involved with creating new muscle tissue, the energetic cost of all of that. So let's say we want to— we're in the pursuit of building muscle mass. Okay, now we have to feed for the purpose of the actual cost of the training that we're doing, and And if we're training very hard, we're gonna need extra food, right? There's also the increased energy cost of all the protein turnover occurring. So that's the protein synthesis or creation and also degradation. When we eat, there's also compensatory mechanisms happening. So for example, if we increase our food, for example, also protein, there's gonna be more thermogenesis involved with that as well. So that involves a caloric cost. And also other elevations in our expenditure, right? So examples would be, let's say, maybe you guys can relate to this, you eat a bit more food, but then now you want to shake it off. You walk more, you're more fidgety, you're more animated. That is like one mechanism through which your body is trying to maintain body weight by just shaking off excess calories by increasing your output. Right? So it's very metabolically expensive tissue and active tissue. Consider the example of, say, like a 70-kilogram male client, right? They have the potential to put on 10 kilograms of muscle mass in their entire lifetime if they do the right things. It's very unlikely they're going to main gain or eat at maintenance and reach their peak potential. In the case you mentioned, you put on 10 kilos in all your time training, like, that 10 kilograms of mixed human tissue has to come from somewhere, right? And that comes through some form of surplus over the years that you've been training, whether that was voluntary or involuntary. There has to be increased energy availability. Makes sense? Another example of who this would benefit greatly is if you have clients who quote-unquote have that skinny-fat body type. Let's say they lean more towards the skinny side of it. At some point they're going to have to be in a surplus because they just need more lean body mass to increase in size, right? Like, you can diet them down, get them leaner, But beyond that, where do you go from there? They have to get bigger, and that's going to create a more astounding result. Uh, the benefit also of introducing a surplus to a client who it's suitable for is exit a dieting mindset. So this is very common. Many clients can have this idea that they need to be in a deficit year-round. Maybe it's because they just attached to being completely lean year-round, and there's certain expectations or validation that comes with that, but it can be very inhibitory to their performance in the gym and their long-term progression, right? So repurposing their food and shifting towards, okay, we're going to eat more, but we're going to utilize that food to basically get you as strong as you've ever been and put on as much muscle mass as you ever have been able to. Okay, so shifting that mindset away from having to be chronically in a deficit. And of course, larger muscle, bigger muscle. A larger muscle is a stronger muscle, sorry. So I'm going to break this down into 6 steps to basically give you a template of how to take someone through this entire process in a very comprehensive and strategic way. Number 1, prerequisites. Number 2, mindset. Number 3, timeline. Number 4, size of the surplus. 5, nutrition strategies. And number 6, how to track progress. So prerequisites. Now the initial body composition of a client is very important. If someone is, say, male, above 20% body fat, do you want to put them into a surplus? Very unlikely, because by definition their weight will go up and their body fat will also increase. Yes, they will still gain muscle mass, but it means that there's a lot more body fat to lose eventually when you diet down. So my recommendation is take your client through that initial fat loss phase if you deem that necessary, get them to under 15%, for females, again, roughly around under 18, under 20, uh, to set them up well for the subsequent months of gaining. I highly advise that your client already has good nutritional literacy, so they have good structure to their day of eating, predominantly whole foods. All these foundational nutritional habits, if they're already in place, it makes adding that surplus a lot more easy, but it also means that they have the right frame of mind. They're not simply rotating all their foods out for processed foods just to basically hit the caloric intake. We're basically just extending upon what they're already doing, and it prevents them from, say, excess, right? I also recommend that they have some idea of monitoring their food or tracking their food. So whether that's food portions as a system, or preferentially they understand how to track things. Okay, so learning to track your foods can be a very important tool in terms of building your nutritional literacy. Foundational health. So best case scenario, someone has good stress management strategies. Including consistent sleep and no underlying gut health issues. Again, these are foundational considerations because if they are experiencing, say, extremely high stress, their sleep is very poor, and they're getting things like indigestion, like simply overfeeding them and expecting them to grow, you're going to encounter a lot of friction along the way. Okay, so sort those things out first. Get healthier before you start to prioritize building muscle mass. And of course, a long-term mindset. This isn't something that's gonna improve them in a week or 2 weeks. It's gonna take time. So you want to really instantiate the idea that, hey, like, we're gonna put aside 6, 8, 10, 12 months for the purpose of this specific outcome. We're gonna lay it out month to month, set some checkpoints, and And it's going to generate more patience along the way and a sense of direction. If there's a mismatch of expectations of, okay, I'm 3 weeks into this and I don't look that much different, in fact I've just lost my abs, you're probably going to disappoint someone, right? So expectations and the long-term mindset is very important. So here's an example of just taking someone through that kind of preparatory fat loss phase. Again, this is my client Sonny, so he could have came in at 25%, I could just put him in a surplus, but that wouldn't be very good because he might finish at 30 and there's like 15% to lose on the way down and most likely gonna extend the dieting phase plus lose some muscle mass along the way with having that much weight to lose. So get him leaner get him in a better physiological state, more insulin sensitive, uh, to basically begin his gaining phase. And now I can feed him at 13%. As he grows, I can also just have better visual understanding of how he is progressing over time. Okay, so don't skip that first prerequisite. That was 10 months. Yeah, so we broke down his diet phase into blocks with some maintenance phases in between. Okay, of course he gained muscle mass along the way. Like I said, you can gain muscle mass in a modest deficit, especially if you're starting from high body fat and you play around with macros. And of course, importantly, train hard, right? So Nutrition is largely permissive to growth, not strictly causative. And what I mean by this is we cannot simply overfeed someone and expect optimal muscle growth, okay? Training is the primary stimulus. So that, um, none of this matters if they're not training hard. And you would have learned a lot about this yesterday and the importance of that. Any questions so far? Good. Okay, mindset. So before beginning this phase, it's important that we educate our clients on what this involves. Okay, so the common concerns that you may be met with are that fear of weight or body fat gain, right? Undoing visual progress. So let's say they've gone very comfortable with the idea of being completely lean and they don't want to lose any of that. Um, and also a bit of FOMO. So again, the social appeal and validation of remaining like highly lean year-round, right? Um, but in the interest of long-term progress, and if you're trying to maximize muscle growth, there has to be a sensible level of fat gain along the way. It's just reality, right? Oftentimes what this can result in is, okay, I've committed to doing this process. There's an initial increase in weight gain. Let's say it's a kilo in the first week and you've only put them on a 5% deficit. They see, oh well, I've gained a kilo in a week. If I extrapolate that across 24 weeks, I'm going to be like, what, 20 kilos heavier? People freak out and then they stop the process to go back into a deficit and they've just squandered time. Okay, so in this instance, education. Okay, so educating the client that, hey, it's normal to experience a bit of a weight increase just because, one, you've got more food in your gut, that weighs something. You've had more carbs, that invites water. You had more sodium. There are other factors that have affected your scale weight. Don't freak out, it's part of the process, it'll settle. Right, so providing that reassurance, redirect their focus towards again long-term mindset and prioritizing performance. Your performance while you're gaining will be a key barometer of how, how much confidence you can have in that you're gaining muscle mass, not just weight for weight's sake. Again, the purpose of this isn't just to gain weight for weight's sake, it's to gain muscle mass. So set expectations and educate. So moving on to the timeline. All right, so my recommendation is you want to spend around 3 to 4 times longer building than you want to do dieting. Okay, so muscle hypertrophy is inherently a longer process than, say, oxidizing body fat, and it makes sense that you want to allocate more time to that process. That could be anywhere from 4 months to as long as 12 months. It is quite a broad range I've provided here, but it does depend a lot on, say, if you're working with any deadlines, right? Or say maybe, you know, you only have a client for X amount of time before I don't know, they travel, whatever, they're away. Uh, less than 3 months I would consider to be insufficient. The reason why is you just interrupt training momentum. By that point they've got a good groove with training, they're hitting their personal best, increasing their 5 to 10 RM on all their lifts. You don't want to suddenly interrupt that process and get back into a deficit too soon when you're client is progressing very well. And assuming that you've gaining at a sensible rate, you should definitely be able to move beyond 3 months at a time. If you are setting aside more than 3 months of a surplus, you can split this up with like mini deficit or maintenance phases in between, just like you can phase it out. Like, um, in Tyrone's presentation, he would have spoke about like blocking things, having phases for, say, a fat loss timeline. The same thing can be done for a surplus phase. Those maintenance weeks or deficit periods in between can be very helpful to resensitize the client physiologically and mentally to this process. Uh, having start and end dates allows for setting of achievable outcomes. Such as, okay, what weight do you want to roughly be by the end of this entire process? What are the key checkpoints? And it maintains intention throughout, so you're not just meandering through. There's checkpoints. Example, there's an example of a 12-month competition prep. In this case, example 1, They'll be more towards a leaner individual, so maybe we don't have a whole lot of body fat to lose initially before we start building, and then we do a prep phase where we get them diced and shredded, right? But notice how most of the time is spent building. Uh, number 2 example is a 12-month skinny fat transformation. Um, 5-month building, 1-month mini deficit just to pull the skin calipers of body fat percentage back, resuming building, and in a 2-month deficit. Okay, so consider the end goal, then work backwards and set checkpoints along the way. As a coach, it'll also mean that you don't have to plan things month month or make decisions month to month, you've done that work and paid it forward before this process has begun, right? Of course, you can always course correct if needed, but in broad strokes, have a plan. Here's another example of one of my clients. So we essentially did the second example. So we did predominance of your build, and then, sorry, initial fat loss phase, a surplus phase, and then a deficit phase. So right now, this client of mine is still dieting down. We're about 1 month into his deficit, so he'll be even leaner by the time we get to that end point. But so far it's worked a treat for him, okay. In this example also, there were maintenance weeks throughout, things that we couldn't quite account for— travel, work, sickness, whatever it may be. In those periods, I didn't specify that he had to keep being in a surplus. It was just maintained. If you're enjoying this presentation, make sure you hit subscribe on our YouTube or follow us on our podcast, available anywhere where you listen to podcasts. I tend to favor If suitable for the client, a more aggressive deficit if they have more to lose. Uh, also if they're training, it's a new stimulus, so they're still going to gain along the way. From then we got to that 15-ish percent, it was back up. I think the high this client got was about maybe 18, 18-ish, and then back into a deficit. So generally speaking, when someone has a bit more body fat to lose, I would start a bit more aggressive and then taper it down. The leaner you get, generally the slower the approach you want to be, just because you don't want to risk things like muscle loss as you start to approach, say, low teens. Or not that most people would be under 10% or venture into that realm outside of competitive purposes, but you want to go slower when you hit that point. Okay, does that answer the question? I think it's more how you, when you set your timeline to reach that point, yeah, how that would be, I guess, calculated if it's not through a flow deficit. Yeah, so his measurements initially, so I can work backwards from his measurements. Let's say I is what, uh, 19%, right? Oftentimes also with skinny fat clients, their calipers and their body fat percentage will actually be a bit higher, not necessarily because they have a large amount of body fat on their body, but more so because of their low muscle mass. And so if body fat is a percentage, the percentage is going to be higher because of that. Um, so if this client Again, around 20%, I believe. I wanted to lose roughly about anywhere from 0.7 to 1% per week. I just worked backwards from, I want 2 months to do this, what does that look like on average per week? So, yeah, correct. So photos month to month were very important. But this is what I mean by working backwards. So if it was 20%, I want to get him to 15. And I have 2 months, so that's 8 weeks. That's 5% to lose in 8 weeks. You just do the math. What do I want to hit on average each week? It won't be linear, understand this. Like, some weeks you'll drop more or gain more. Other weeks you'll just be stagnant. It's about the averages across the weeks and the overall trend. So don't get too caught up in like, oh, like this particular week there wasn't as much of an increase or decrease compared to the other one. Allow the plan to fully manifest, ensure there's adherence to what you're actually prescribing before you make any changes on paper. Yeah, so yeah, some form of like calipers is very important for keeping sensible body fat ranges. Any other questions? Yeah, just on— if you can go back a slide, just when you were giving the examples on the second example where you go the more— the one month fat loss phase in between, is that just something that you do to like strip off that excess a little bit of fat before you go into your next build? Or is there— would you do that with every client, or is it just client on client? Uh, I wouldn't do with all clients. It depends on where we're starting their phase first. So, uh, in this example, I just pulled him back to 15. Now he's not like ultra lean, he's just like Healthy lean, right? So if someone is like just genetically quite lean and their accumulation of body fat along the way is quite minimal, then there's no need to, to do that, right? You can just carry on, right? And that's why you'll have measures in place. So you're checking up on the calipers or whatever measurement tool you're using You're checking in on how's their training going, is the weight coming up, but like, do you see any stagnation in their training? Are there other factors? Um, what's— how are they holding up in terms of mentally? Are they becoming lax in any way? So even if from a body composition perspective they don't need a maintenance period in between, there's still a lot of merit in incorporating that. Because if you leave someone in a gain phase month and month at a time, they can become lax. See, Hemming knows this. So with Hemming, we used a number of maintenance phases just to keep him in check and to get him introducing key nutritional habits that he may have lost along the way by being too slack. So from a behavioral standpoint, just as important as, say, a body composition condition standpoint. Uh, generally fortnightly. Sometimes I might extend that to 3 to 4 weeks. It depends on what I see in terms of progression. Like, if I know that, uh, there's someone who's just generally going to progress slower, or I need their accountability to keep them from overspilling, its measurements a bit more frequently. If they're a lot more autonomous and I see visually they're not gaining a whole lot of body fat, then you can afford to go 3 weeks, sometimes 4 weeks, right? Any other questions? How aggressive do you make an initial phallus phase depending on how much fat they have? So let's say their body fat's at 25 or 20%, what would the deficit be? Oh, so it could be as much as like 30, could even go a bit more depending. Like when it comes to aggressive deficits, uh, physiologically there are— and time-wise it's advantageous, but you also have to consider where's the person in terms of the actual lifestyle. Like if they've got a bunch of stressors then, and their energy is already in a poor place, or like quality of life, like subtracting their food a fair bit while it works well on paper and hits your numbers along the way, look at the person in front of you. Can they afford to do that either mentally, behaviorally? Um, those are just important because ultimately adherence is the biggest thing, right? Uh, but yeah, if, if they're ready to go and things are set up from a Lifestyle foundational health standpoint, 30%, maybe a little bit more. Um, you can lose like a percent of their body weight per week if they're starting at what you said, 25%. You could go quite aggressive. Just again, ensure that their protein is high, um, and you're still looking out for things like training performance. If at any point there's a decline in training performance, whether they're dieting, maintenance, gaining, like flag that. Look into it. Okay, does that make sense? Okay, so the size of the surplus. All right, so what I've got here is kind of a scale from beginner to novice to intermediate. To advanced, right? Also very lean or just lean. So what you will observe here is if someone is, say, very, very lean, and that would be, say, under 12% for males, under 15% for females, or they're a complete novice and/or both, you can afford to go a bit higher with their surplus. There's lots of evidence to suggest that beginners, when they start resistance training and you feed them, like, they just grow like a weed, right? And most of the weight gain that you experience in those first couple months is just muscle mass, right? It's rapid rate of progress. It makes sense then over time you get diminishing returns. Right? We all experience this year by year. Progress can get a little bit slower as we kind of reach our— I don't want to say limit, but we get closer towards our maximum potential. It makes sense to go slower, right? Because there's diminishing returns. So someone has been training for a long time, 10 years, they've accrued a lot of muscle tissue along the way. Like putting them in a 20% plus surplus, like they've only got so much left to gain. So what's that excess going to be? Body fat, right? So I've got as a guide average weekly body weight gain, right? As you're beginner, you can go a bit more aggressive. As you get more advanced, you want very small increases in weights in the intentional building phase. If they're ultra extreme, you might not even look at weights as a measure at all, right? If someone's like almost maxed out, um, you're not— and they put on 200 grams of muscle in like a year of training because they're just so advanced, you're not going to see that on a scale, right? You probably just want to look at how they're looking visually, calipers. Those are more reliable measures. In terms of their muscular progress, as well as like look at their training performance. Cool, any questions from that? Yep, excellent. So with that in mind, there is recent research that looks at 5% surplus, let's say 15% surplus. And when everything is controlled, a 5% surplus tends to work very well for maximizing the rate of muscle growth relative to accompanying fat gain, which is a great outcome. So basically, like, you're like, you're lean gaining, okay? But there are some practical considerations. 5% increase, if we say, take the example of an individual whose maintenance is 2,000 calories. 5% of that is what, 100 calories? Now, day to day, we probably fluctuate in our maintenance more than that. We might walk more one day, we might train harder one day, we might be sedentary the other day. So that 5% increase can easily be nullified by other variables our activity. Okay, so from a practical standpoint, it can be quite hard to do. And what I've found is oftentimes it's just a change that isn't quite observable. And if it's not observable, it's hard to track over time, right? You might find yourself just spinning your wheels and not actually being in a surplus phase, which is the whole intention of this process, right? So 10%. Yeah, again, go back to what I mentioned earlier. I kind of set the minimum at 10 for that reason. Makes sense so far? So just an example. So two examples: 26-year-old male, 65 kilos, Novice, so basically me. Lightly active, okay, maintenance calories 2,200, 15% surplus, roughly 2,500, right? Another example, female, there's her stats, moderately active, a bit more, a 10% surplus, right? And that'll just be a starting point. It's an estimation. Right, any sort of like, uh, setting of calories is going to be an approximation because there's so much variance and it's very hard to reliably assess an individual's maintenance just in there. Okay, so take it as an approximation. Macronutrients, so this would be your, like, your protein, carb, fat split. Once initial calories have been set, let's determine what it comprises of. So protein being the most important, again, minimum 2 times body weight per kilo. A lot of this you would be familiar with in terms of the macros from what you've learned so far, but protein you may find will naturally increase. Again, if the calories are higher, you're going to be getting trace amounts from other food sources. So So if you're having, say, a lot of carbs, those carb sources will have some form of non-animal protein in them, right? So day to day, they might actually be above what you actually set. That's okay. There is recent evidence to suggest that high protein, and high defined by 3 times to 3.5 times grams per kilo, can help reduce body fat accumulation during a gaining phase. I've only tried this with one client so far. Uh, actually, Heming's a good example. So I've done this with Heming mainly from a satiety standpoint. Like, there are other reasons why you could go higher with your macros or certain macronutrients. That comes down to just client preferences and ease of adherence. If you can make something easier for people to follow, make it in line with their, with their preferences, assuming it's a sensible request Then it makes things easier for your client, makes things easier for you, less friction along the way. Does Heming have any sensible requests? Not really. Very rarely. Yeah, yeah. Carbohydrate, again, strength training is our primary activity here to drive progress. Minimum 4 grams per kilo. It's a glycolytic activity, right? We don't need a massive amount of carbs because it's not something that's as expenditure as, say, an endurance activity of that nature, but we do want to be sufficiently carb-fueled. Fats can fill in the gap. Calories may need to be adjusted over time. So what we've seen is is sometimes when you overfeed someone, they expend more. So now their maintenance has just increased. You can observe this in people who say have been under eating beneath their baseline, their projected baseline. Now you increase their food, but then their weight stays the same, right? And it's just like this, okay, food increases, activity increases, energy's better. And you hit a certain point where that just keeps happening. So that's just our bodies again, our body's response to overfeeding. Our body is very good at trying to maintain, uh, homeostasis, right? So if we're dieting down and we reduce our calories, at some point our metabolism can adapt to that— metabolic adaptation. The same thing can happen in reverse. Of course, there's an upper limit to this, right? We can't just keep climbing our calories and our body just keep adjusting it. At some point you hit a ceiling. But that can account for why we may need to increase calories over time gradually. So use the weekly or monthly averages as a guide. If there is true stagnation, you can just go up or down 5%. Let it settle. Expect that initially when you make a change, there might be a big jump. Again, as I mentioned earlier, It's just having more carbs in your body, more food in your GI tract. Um, it's not something that you should be alarmed of. Okay, you're still checking things like their calipers, so you know from various measures, not just one measure, where or how they're progressing. When not to increase calories. Number 1, If you notice a decline in training intensity or performance, right? So I mentioned this earlier, it's the key driver of a successful gaining phase. High lifestyle, lifestyle stress or poor stress management, decline in sleep quality or recovery, and adherence. So if you're under-recovered or not training with sufficient intensity, that more of that surplus will be partitioned towards body fat gain. Right, which we don't want, right? Because as I mentioned earlier, the purpose of a build phase is not to gain weight for the sake of gaining weight. It's to maximize muscle mass in a calorie surplus with minimal fat gain alongside that. If training stimulus and recovery is compromised, then the surplus will not be partitioned towards muscle gain, right? A lot of people experience this both ways on the way up Poor training intensity or parameters, and on the way down, again, insufficient intensity because they're dieting, they go lighter with their weights, and you just end up back where you started, just with less time. So, but understand that it does take time. Our rates of muscle growth is highly variable, right? We all have a different affinity to our rate of progress. Here's an example of my, of one of my clients, Dasha. So started at 49 kilos and she was eating very minimal food. She actually came with, came in with the goal of wanting to lose weight. It was the thing that she always aimed for, trying to get leaner. So she was doing multiple hours of cardio actually per day and eating She was already good with tracking, so she was eating anywhere from 1,000 to 1,200 calories. And I verified this. Like, where do you go from there, right? But this is what I mean. It might seem surprising, but again, as a coach, we might see that as, that's nonsensical. But people will have this expectation that the goal is to get leaner when clearly it might not be the case for them. The way forward for her to actually get her goal physique and progress through her weight training and her physique goals— eventually she wants to compete— is to gain more muscle mass. So we gradually built up her food. She's currently eating 2,500 calories consistently throughout the week, no split. And she's, yeah, she's progressed well, right? So clearly she's a bit bigger. Like, she's not like the outstanding transformation just yet where she's like got abs now and capped delts we're building things up first before she eventually diets down. But again, it takes time. That was like 8, 9 months. There were maintenance phases in between because of life stresses and things of that nature, but it's still in line with the initial plan that we set. Okay, again, Raph came in at 68 kilos and just thin. Uh, he has a triathlon background, very cardio intensive, had some experience with weight training, but again, not on the level that you would have experienced here by any stretch. So I'd consider him a beginner, right? Dasher's a bit more of a novice, completely new. Raph's a beginner. Uh, so we just finished his first building phase and we're currently in a mini deficit to split things up, as I mentioned earlier. And he's just a bigger human being, right? 8 kilos is, is a fair bit of weight over time. Again, it's very gradual, you know, maybe minus a kilo from like just water retention, food in his gut, but he's grown. And ultimately, if the goal for him is to step on stage, I I can't just keep him at maintenance and expect that he's gonna be that 75 kilograms lean, right? Okay, strategies. As food increases, appetite will likely decrease. Not all the time, some people like Hemming again. He's happily eating whatever calories he went to, 3,500, and he was still hungry. But most times, you know, in sensible people, there'll be a decrease in calories, sorry, in appetite. Why? Well, our body increases leptin, which is our quote-unquote satiety hormone, during overfeeding, hence suppressing appetite in an effort to maintain body weight. So if we think about leptin as curbing appetite and then ghrelin as a hormone that helps with meal initiation, right? So when we diet down, our ghrelin goes up, makes us hungrier so that we don't starve. It's all just our body's cues of maintaining, um, a similar range, right? A comfortable range. So appetite has decreased, what do we do? We still need to be in the surplus. Strategies: we can select foods that are more energy dense, right? So this could be— well, we're definitely not eating pumpkin anymore, right? We're having white rice, we're having, you know, your honeys, your maples, more calorically dense foods that don't occupy as much space in your stomach, right? Because if we have a lot of food volume in our stomach, that creates stomach distension, that signals fullness, and now we cannot eat further and we don't hit our targets, right? So energy-dense foods. Food viscosity. So food viscosity is just, think about it as how solid a food is. So if you think about a food that involves a whole lot of chewing, That's a long time eating. It'll probably make you more full along the way. On the other end of that, if something is, say, liquid calories— let's say that someone has made a smoothie or a shake of some form— it's going to be less appetite suppressing, right? We can leverage palatability. If there are foods that they find easier to eat and enjoy. Well, we can just leverage that. Hey, can you just have more of X food because you enjoy it? You're still having your 80-90% whole foods. Can we just squeeze that in to get the extra, extra 5%? And composition, macronutrient composition. Let's say they don't want to eat more carbs. Okay, can we just increase your fats a little bit? Fats, more calories per gram. So would you rather have an extra cup of white rice or just a spoonful of peanut butter? If they're not hungry, that spoonful, less size, more density, less fullness. Meal frequency and timing. So this goes back to they already have good structure to their day of eating. If you can start feeding them earlier in the day, that can help depending on how high their calories are. Starting earlier in the day can be more beneficial because then you don't encounter the issue where, hey, it's 4 PM, you've got 2,000 calories left to go, and it's just a struggle, right? You're gonna get stomach distension, a bit of bloating. We don't want— you want to avoid those situations. Start your days earlier. So meal timing and frequency does matter from an organisation standpoint. Also, oftentimes if your client hasn't— like, they've backloaded all their food, they're more likely to make poor choices to fill the gap. All right, so I think peri-workout nutrition, or pre and post Nutrition is the most important meals of the day. If we consider that your training is the main stimulus for growth, then it makes sense the meals that precede that or follow that play an important role in fueling performance and recovering adequately. You want to prioritise carbohydrate pre- and post-training. I recommend lower fibre moderate to low fat, high carbohydrate meal pre and post. Okay, so you wouldn't have, say, a high fat meal after training, high fiber and less carbs, because now you've got slow digestion because fats and fiber do that, and you haven't got enough carbs, and the carbs that you do have are just really slowly entering the bloodstream because of those accompanying fibers and fats. So we can use the composition of our meal to facilitate glucose uptake, or how fast we can take in that— those carbohydrates for the purpose of recovering, right? Sorry, what would be your take on the increased metabolic output to the body absorbing nutrients? So like thermogenesis in regards to food? Yeah, so it is a factor. If you go back to that wheel that I showed you earlier around here are all the forms of output and energy cost of doing this whole process, it is a factor. How much of a factor compared to everything else? It would be more on the smaller side. From a practical standpoint, to the extent that it affects or stagnates your progress, you'll know that by all the measures. So it for sure does have an effect, especially if someone is, say, having higher protein. We know that a higher protein has a bigger thermogenic effect, right? It takes more calories to break down protein than it does to break down your fats and your carbohydrates. So that incurs a cost. I think it was more in and around the workouts. Obviously that would boost metabolic output. In terms of timing of those meals? It's also how much before training. Yeah, it's when you're training, that increased metabolic output, uh, how would that affect? Yeah, so like it's kind of, um, metabolic— trying to think of the word. Yeah, yeah, it's just came to mind. Yeah, so generally like I'd have the pre-training meal half an hour to an hour before And after training, within the hour is best. Like, ah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so do we know what the metabolic window is, or loosely speaking? It's this idea that, you know, some people finish their training and they want to eat right away, and there is truth to that. I don't think that window is as short as some people make it out to be. I think as a rough guide, if you're getting your post-workout nutrition within the hour you should be good. Again, it's like, how long was your session? What was your pre-training meal looking like? A good example is this: if you're training in the morning, some people don't like to eat in the morning. They train fasted and then they eat. Uh, it matters in that instance because the last time they ate was like 8 hours ago. If they had their pre-training meal they've still got those amino acids in circulation, they still got carbs in the body, there's not as much urgency. Surplus every day or split? I recommend where possible just even. If someone has ultra high days and then like just low days, again, if you have your massive days on Saturday, Sunday, you train on Monday and Tuesday, you've just missed the opportunity to recover from those sessions earlier in the week. So this is why I'm not a big fan of like having high, high days and then the average just being the same. You can do that when you're dieting down, not ideal when you're building. This is just an example of why meal frequency matters. Yeah, so if you have 160 grams of protein to hit a day, you'd not want to just have one meal of 160 grams of protein. Try and split it up. The reason why is because We don't have a mechanism for storage of amino acids in our body like we do, say, carbohydrate. So protein balance is this thing of— we go up and down. We want to spend as much time in positive protein balance and not negative protein balance, which is what happens when you don't eat for a long time, right? Supplements. It's not simply what you eat, it's what you assimilate and absorb for reparation and growth. So what I found to be helpful for clients to have high food is things like digestive enzymes, right? Uh, can also use apple cider vinegar, half a teaspoon in half a cup of warm water, 5 minutes pre-meal, right? Minimize the effects of any potential indigestion, bloating, gasness that they may experience. Okay, again, more relevant depending on how high their food is. If additional support needed, zinc, potassium, vitamin B1, uh, help promote healthy stomach environment. Training intra-workout, carbohydrates can be very good, especially with training for harder sessions. If you have more carbs to play around with, use them when you need them intra-workout. Dextrose, for example, also more calories if they need it. Creatine and electrolytes. Yeah, we're familiar with this. Tracking: increase their 5 to 10 RM on any indicator lifts. Yeah, we want to make sure they're getting stronger. Monthly physique photos, calipers, and of course weight averages. It's difficult to practically measure exact muscle mass over the period of time, so my, my advice is just focus on the proxy measures. Focus on the consistency of the actions that build muscle mass, and the rest will follow. All right. I spoke about mini deficits, which is basically a period of just reducing body fat, resensitizing the body to a surplus. Resume that phase in the leaner states. If there are holidays, away periods, can be very useful just to maintain, or if training's interrupted. Behaviorally, again, clients may become lax with nutrition habits months into a gain phase. Prevent excess. And also physiologically, potentially recent size to carbs, insulin, testosterone, less inflammatory issues being high body fat, right? We don't wanna get to sumo level status and keep building. So Hemming is a good example of having maintenance periods. If he stayed in it for too long, he would start to get takeout. He had a lot of calories to work with, he'd start to do that. So very useful for Hemming from a behavioral standpoint, right? So maintenance phase, we use, I think, one major mini cut, and then throughout the, like, maintenance weeks, if I was checking on his habits and he was reporting hitting his calories but making questionable food choices. So prevent him from overspilling, which again did happen early on, but we learned. A very valuable tool. As you can see, he's come a long way since beginning with us. Coaching considerations, patience. Yeah, we know how long this takes. Train harder than ever. Adapt to your training, don't just recover, right? You see progression in their lifts. Numbers aside, look at the person in front of you. What are they reporting? Yeah, that subjective feedback is very important, not just the numbers. Use the right strategy for the right client. I've given you quite a granular approach of like, here's the numbers, here's the checkpoints, calipers. This is important for you to know as a coach, but you don't want to overwhelm them. If you provide them a simplification of, hey, this is all you need to do, I'll worry about the backend things. They don't need to know everything that you need to know. Questions? I'm going to hand around the slides while you have any questions for Jacka. I've got one. It might be a silly question. It might be something earlier. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, so Vicky asked what's the difference between fat loss and a deficit. So you would, um, a deficit would be a reduction in calories to create a fat loss effect, right? So we're getting leaner, our calipers are going down. What does a meal kind of look like? Yeah, so pre-training meal, uh, again, depending how far their training meal is from their actual training, let's say it's an hour beforehand, meal would be, say, a leaner cut of meat, uh, chicken, lean beef, turkey, uh, low fiber, so white rice, right? Don't be a whole lot of vegetables. It could be, say, pre-training oats, right? Some sodium, whey protein, right? Post-training would look quite similar. Someone else has a question. You. So how would you deal with, or how did you find dealing with female clients during this building phase with, uh, maybe like increasing weight for a certain period? Yeah, yeah, so data's helpful in that regard. Because if there are other factors like menstruation that affect weight, you don't want to attribute that to, I only kept your calories the same or a little bit and now you've just— weight's gone high. So I think one, they know their body best. If they have any diet they've tracked with, or you can information— gather information around historically how much does your weight go up and down, when, that can inform what you should expect when they're menstruating, right? But that's just a conversation you're gonna have to ask them about. Hey, what is your experience? How's your weight behave? How do you perform in the gym? It's highly variable female to female. Dasha, for example, it wasn't— there wasn't too much variation. Thanks for listening to the Enterprise Fitness Podcast and watching the full presentation. If you've enjoyed this, remember to hit subscribe and leave us a comment wherever you're listening to this through, or a review would be forever grateful. Till next week, train hard, eat well, and supplement smart.