Traditionally, if I ask you how to get bigger, you would reply "train heavy/heavier." Then, you would bring up the importance of eating a surplus of calories and protein. If I ask you how to get cut, you would reply "diet down." Then, you would bring up doing cardio and mantaining strength.
The opposite mindset goes something like this. I ask you how to get big, you reply "eat big." And what this means is that I start from the assumption that if I'm eating an excess of macronutrients, then I'm going to put on size. I then use my training to leverage the size difference so that it's LBM gains, not fat gains. That is, I view my body as a "food factory" and I use my training to flip the right switches in order to convert a lot of food into a lot of muscle.
If I ask you how to diet down, you reply "exercise often." That is, I use training to kick off different metabolic and nutrient partioning effects, and I eat adequately in order to keep the overall muscle, but trim down.
The DC program, or specifically Dante's thoughts on food and training, reflects this bulking mindset, which is again a different context than the traditional "training dictates diet" model (and misunderstood by those raised on functional/periodization principles.) So does Vince Gironda. Overall, the "eating dictates training" mindset puts even more pressure on your training, because you don't want to get fat and you don't want to waste the protein that you're eating.
So, let's go back to Andrew69's point of view. If you eat an enormous amount of food, what happens?
Well, the excess carbs will probably be stored as either fat or liver/muscle glycogen. The latter is good for various reasons. It improves your functional performance. It is anti-catabolic. Together, it improves mTOR response by increasing ATP efficiency, which in turn contributes to protein synthesis.
Excess protein will either wait around, be excreted, or be converted through gluconeogenesis into glucose, finally becoming a candidate for fat storage. Although it is most desirable to use as much protein as possible for muscle growth, a secondary effect of supplying yet more glucose has a secondary effect of improving LBM.
Excess fat will be stored as bodyfat or triglycerides in muscle. The latter is desirable because it creates a glyocogen-sparing effect during inactivity, and it can improve fluid volume. The former can be desirable when ingesting polyunsaturated fats, so to improve endocrine response in long-term.
If a person eats in a 1000-1500 caloric surplus with 2*BW protein, obviously there will be enormous potential for changes in the body.
The training question becomes "how do I plan my training to store as much excess carbs as glycogen as possible, make available as much available protein into protein, and keep fat storage under check?"
The 2nd part of the question is "how much can I realistically do and how does it limit how much food I can take?" That implicitly sets a ceiling for your food intake; just because you eat 10,000 calories doesn't mean you can exercise enough to use 8000 of it. But, it then influences for example -->
1) How frequently you work a muscle to switch on the food factory
2) How much cardio and what kind of cardio you do in order
3) When and how much you time macronutrients around exercise
4) What long-term physiological changes you need in order to be able to convert more food into more muscle
5) How do you trigger the right stimuli in your sessions in order to answer the primary question
6) What are your training limits
But all of the training issues becomes secondary to the food. Therefore, your true primary question is "how much do I need to eat to gain X amount of weight in Y amount of time?" And then the secondary question is "with those parameters I just set, how do I get the best LBM-to-fat ratio as possible?" That will influence
1) Carb intake vs. current glycogen storage
2) Protein intake vs. metabolic and physiological profile of muscles
3) "Acceptable" excess fat intake
4) Practical limits in terms of bodyfat levels
The key message is that the above becomes the most important thing. It is the first thing you plan, and it is the first thing you evaluate week-to-week. How much more carbohydrates your body can store. How much more protein against your average your body can process. How much more calories can your body use. How is your diet facilitating the training, so that you can keep going. How much fat you are gaining against your LBM. THEN, you look at the training variables.
As you can see, the above makes it inherently difficult to hand somebody a template training program. And, to be properly implemented, it requires an evaluation of dieting against body composition changes; there's plenty of articles covering this from a dieting down point of view, but not really from bulking. Also, it forces you to seek different interpretations from the hard science.
As a result, it's easier to work with the traditional perspective. It's what makes most sense in terms of training.
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