With summer time nearly here I can almost see people gearing up on the cardio to get rid of this past winter’s bulk.

Which is why I decided that now might be the time to talk about the practice of bulking up, to build muscle.

In theory bulking up (for anyone new to bodybuilding, bulking up is the practice of eating more and training hard and heavy to help build more muscle, and usually this is done during the winter months) sounds good, after all, more calories plus hard training equals more muscle, right?

In a perfect world maybe, but there are plenty of factors to consider, the first of which is, how lean are you?

I will use myself as an example, when I bulked up I was a young man in my late teens and I could have been used as an anatomy chart by the local college.

In-other-words, I was as ripped as you possibly could get.

However, if you can barely see your abs I don’t think bulking up is the best strategy.

Because even with the best plan in the world, you are still going to gain some fat along with any muscle that you gain, so if you already have too much fat on you already, this, chances are, will just add to the problem.

I can hear some people shouting right now,

“But hey I’ve read that all the pros bulk up in the off season!”

While it is true that some professional bodybuilders bulk up in the off season, consider this, most if not all of them, have super genetics, which means more of the weight they do gain will be in the form of muscle—and not fat.

For the average bodybuilder out there, they might gain one pound of muscle for every two or three pounds of fat that they gain.

So packing thirty pounds in the winter will lead to a lot of fat that you must burn off come summer time.

Plus, due to all the fat that you’ve gained, there really is no way of knowing how much muscle you have really gained.

So by the time you diet down, you might only end up with five pounds of muscle for all of your work.

In part two of this post I will discuss how to go about gaining muscle without the need to bulk up in the traditional sense.

KEEP PUMPING!