Thread: micro bulking (day at a time)

During my cut, if I get overcome by the urge to do extra volume at the gym and end up sore the next day, then that day becomes a bulk day. Soreness goes away faster when I eat more food.

I read from clean/lean bulking articles that bulking only needs to be 200-400 calories above maintenance. Your goal should be to gain 0.5-1 pound per week, half of which will be muscle and the other half will be fat. Eating more won't grow you faster but will get you fat faster and require a longer cut later.

Armed with that information, I only up my daily calories by about 200 today. I'm not that sore. Before I had this information, I would have eaten more than that to try to get over soreness faster. As soon as the soreness passes, I'll be back to cutting. I'm afraid to cut and be sore at the same time. That just makes me think protein burning maybe.

Good to know!! how long have you been doing it? Any good results?

Originally Posted by illpinoise

Good to know!! how long have you been doing it? Any good results?

I don't have enough data to know for sure. I woke up a bit sore this morning, ate breakfast, was still sore 3 hours later, and decided to micro bulk. I noticed 6 hours afterward that my soreness was gone. I don't know if eating sped up the recovery or not. I also took the day off, so maybe that was the bigger factor. I actually did more than micro bulk. I went on a day trip to look for morel mushrooms and bought some crackers at the store, which were 1000 calories, plus bought a sandwich. So I likely hit 2800 calories today. At least my glycogen stores are likely full now.

So, who knows what caused my recovery, but I micro bulked in hopes of recovering, and I recovered. So I'll try it again next time.

I recall pigging out a day I was very sore. No help that day it felt like, but the soreness was mostly gone the next day. I think stretching helped.

I also recall from previous cuts that the less I eat, the easier it is to get sore, especially when I did 1500 calories per day. I needed half an excuse to get sore when I ate that little. So I won't do that again.

The problem is that your metabolism doesn't turn on a sixpence.

The difference between an efficient mass gain vs. fat loss environment is partly determined by your levels of glycogen. These take several days to reduce even with a large deficit and the same is true in reverse.

Not saying what you are doing is wrong but the effects are likely to be no different to running the same average calorie intake over the same period (i.e. probably a small deficit) - a.k.a recomping.

As always, the key is to monitor gym performance and if you are unable to make progress then recomping is not working and it's better to maintain and stick to a deficit - or increase calories and focus on mass gain.