Dirty Bulk vs. Clean Bulk: What is the Best Muscle Building Diet?
Bulking Diets
Gaining mass, including healthy weight, requires a calorie surplus usually in addition to higher protein intakes, adequate weight training and recovery periods. And while eating more food may sound like a dream come true for many of us, it is difficult to just gain lean muscle without any additional body fat accumulation.
Diet certainly plays a role here. How much you eat and the type of food you eat overall can have an impact on the type of weight you end up gaining fat vs. muscle. So how can you tip the odds of more muscle mass in your favor?
There are two main types of muscle building diets a clean bulk or also called lean bulking, and a dirty bulk. A dirty bulk typically involves eating a lot of extra calories from high-calorie foods, including junk foods, to promote quick weight gain. A clean bulk uses a more moderate increase in calories in addition to healthier food choices.
To help you decide the best way to gain weight, we've put these two muscle building diets head to head. When analyzing each approach we looked at:
- Rate of Muscle Growth
- Potential Fat Gain
- Nutrition
Rate of Muscle Growth
The more calories you eat, the more weight you can gain quickly hence the desire to do a dirty bulk. But let's take a look at how fast muscle gain in particular can happen on either diet. Is there a limit to the speed at which you are able to support muscle growth?
One study looking at trained athletes and rate of muscle gain, included a nutrition controlled group and ad libitum group.The nutrition controlled group followed a macro controlled diet plan aimed to promote weight gain of 0.7% total body weight per week or roughly a 500 calorie increase per day. The diet included high protein 1.4 to 2 grams of protein per kg body weight and less than 30% of calories from dietary fat, and suggested 5 to 7 nutritious meals throughout the day. Post workout nutrition was also included.
The ad libitum group did not receive any nutritional counseling and were asked to increase their intake on their own accord with the same weight gain goal of 0.7% body weight gain per week.
While protein intake remained similar in both groups, calorie intake was actually higher in the nutrition controlled group, and thus resulted in more weight gain - 0.4% body weight per week compared to 0.2%. And nearly 72% of total weight gain in the nutrition controlled group was muscle mass.
While increased calories were a clear supporter of increased mass in this study, protein intake is also important to consider. Protein plays a crucial role in gaining lean tissue because amino acids are the building blocks of all muscle and without adequate protein, muscle gain is difficult to achieve.
Potential Fat Gain
Because any weight gain ultimately includes some amount of fat gain in addition to muscle, effects on body composition are an important factor when deciding a bulking meal plan. Even if you are able to promote rapid lean tissue growth, if you end up gaining a large amount of fat along with it, you'll likely need to cycle through a fat loss diet (cut) soon after to achieve the end result you are looking for.
In the first study mentioned above, higher caloric intake promoted an increase in total lean body mass, but also resulted in a significant amount of weight gain from body fat.
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