This post is going to summarize my 11 months of bulking. Of course I had lifted on infrequent occasions prior to this and my weight fluctuated a bit but these 11 months are were I took things seriously. Firstly my diet was sloppy but my main focus was to eat over 4000 calories per day and never go over 4,500 calories. I usually ranged between 4,000-4,200 with the occasional day where I would hit 4,400. I won’t go too in depth with my diet but a typical days eating would be:
1litre of full fat milk,
500ml of soft drinks
1-2 weight gainer shakes
1 banana
3 poached eggs
200g of pasta
10 baby potatoes, 1 cup of gravy, 1 serving of veg, 2 chops or 1 steak, mixed veg
1 burger, 4 sausages, 2 burger buns
In terms of training I started off by doing bro splits: chest, back, arms, legs, shoulders.
After 6 months I switched to Push, Pull, Legs.
For bench, squats and deadlifts I did 5x5. I started off doing 30kg bench, 50kg squats and 70kg deadlifts. My strength increased as expected and after a few months I worked up to 70kg bench for 5x5 but then swapped it for dumbbells. My one rep max on squat after 11 months was 135kg, my one rep max on deadlift was 165kg.
My weight increased significantly as shown below
68kg @11% [60.5kg fat free mass]
90kg @15% [76.5kg fat free mass]
8kg fat gain
16kg fat free gain
22kg net weight gain
I averaged a weight gain of 2kg per month and my total fat free weight gain was 16kg. Of course I don’t believe this was all muscle, I grew 1-2cm in height while I was training and my frame may have also grown in width but I can’t say this for definite. Any day where I had to skip a few meals and went drinking and became dehydrated I would be 1-2kg lighter the following day so this suggests I was pretty bloated and holding a lot of water weight. My estimated lean muscle gain would be about 9-10kg.
If I was to do this bulk again I would definitely make sure my caloric surplus was a bit smaller so that I would gain less fat and wouldn’t become so bloated however the weight I gained did help me to fill out clothes and I went from wearing a small t-shirt to wearing a large.
I got into bodybuilding to develop a more aesthetic physique and because my waist size increased a lot my physique didn’t look very impressive. My arm size increased by 3” so it did help my to look more normal for my height but I’ve still got a lot of filling out left to do.
The pictures below show my progress and how I looked at different weights.
68kg
75kg
80kg
85kg
90kg
