Food factory training part 5

you have roughly two different schools of the clean bulk.

The conventional thought, which is correct, is to carefully assess your caloric intake and LBM increase. The key here isn't to obsessively take BF measurements in order to know when to step, but to understand how timing, macronutrients breakdown, and solid training can help keep fat gains in check. Simple things include varying carb+calorie intake between days you exercise and days you don't, making most of the caloric surplus in protein instead of fat or carbs, timing your carbs after the workout, adding additional cardio sessions, and so on.

You accept that you have to eat a lot, BUT you then carefully leverage your diet so that you don't gain a lot of fat. 3 steps forward, one step back. But you're moving forward.

The other school is to turn your body into a food factory. The thinking is different, in the sense that it argues that calorie excess is a "challenge" for the body to store it in some form other than bodyfat. That's not to say that you go to the buffet every day, but the careful penny and parcel pinching of the conventional school doesn't really apply. It essentially argues that, within reason, a given calorie level is a mandate for the activity level required to make use of it. This sensibility is more common with the old school programs, and it's the primary bulk model for DC training. I personally like this school myself, but it's inherently more complex than the more conventional thought, because it requires a lot of knowledge of training variables and tolerance. The latter happens to be where a really good personal trainer can help you, whereas the former is something you can pick up for yourself.

In this model, you see the training as a means to take all that food and make it muscle. Your body is your chips; your training are the cards; the food is the pot. The clean bulk reflects how well you play.