The Cleaner Way to Get Ripped

"To eat 10,000 calories a day, you might try putting away a family-size box of Oreos, a box of packaged cakes, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, takeout from Five Guys and McDonald's, and many, many Reese's cups-all between your regular three meals. Dru Borden subsisted on this diet throughout his 20s and 30s. As a competitive bodybuilder-fans know him as Big Dru-he needed the calories. Since the mid-20th century, one of the core tenets of bodybuilding has stipulated that gaining muscle requires putting on weight, regardless of how. In Big Dru's case, it worked: In early-career photos, he appears to have been cobbled together from boulders."

"Body-composition researchers have established that a surplus of calories, plus resistance training, is required to gain muscle. The basic idea is that repetitive exercise causes muscles to break down, so the body needs energy and additional nutrients to build them back bigger and stronger. But spending months "dirty" bulking, as the ice-cream-and-burgers method is sometimes called, can also generate huge amounts of fat. Bodybuilders traditionally starved that fat off in the subsequent cutting phase, a period of caloric restriction that can last just as long as the bulk."

"But these days, Big Dru and his fellow muscle-maxxing enthusiasts are embracing a new approach: moderation. At a time when celebrities, wellness influencers, and the nation's top health officials are proclaiming the evils of processed foods, many bodybuilders-professionals like Big Dru, but also young, shirtless amateurs documenting their gains online-are leaving the old way of bulking behind. On gym-bro social media, the hashtag #leanbulk is ubiquitous. (So is #cleanbulk, used interchangeably.) The term broadly refers to working out while consuming only slightly more calories than the body needs to maintain itself, and getting those calories from healthy sources. A typical lean-bulking TikTok features a young man showing off a comically ripped six-pack and C-"

High-calorie, junk-food-heavy "dirty" bulks have historically been used by bodybuilders to gain mass quickly, sometimes consuming extreme daily calories. Muscle growth requires a caloric surplus plus resistance training because exercise breaks down muscle tissue that the body rebuilds larger with sufficient energy and nutrients. Dirty bulking often produces substantial fat that bodybuilders later remove during prolonged cutting phases. A newer trend emphasizes moderation: lean or clean bulking uses only a slight calorie surplus and prioritizes healthier food sources to build muscle while limiting fat accumulation, amplified by social-media sharing and hashtags like #leanbulk.

Read at The Atlantic