Bulking after a cut
On this page
Hold at maintenance for a month or two first. Then eat about 5 to 10% above maintenance and gain about 0.25 to 0.5% of your weight a week, slower if you’ve lifted for years. A bigger surplus mostly adds fat.
What we’d do
Finish the cut, step up to maintenance and hold it until your weight and your hunger settle. Then add 150 to 250 calories a day and lift three or four days a week, adding weight or reps as you go. Keep protein at your number. Weigh every morning and measure your waist every two weeks. If your waist is growing faster than your lifts, cut the surplus back.
If you remember three things
- A big surplus mostly adds fat. In an eight week trial in lifters, a 15% surplus didn’t build measurably more muscle than a 5% one, and the people who gained the most weight gained the most fat.
- Gain about 0.25 to 0.5% of your weight a week. For a 170 pound person that’s about 0.4 to 0.85 pounds a week.
- Don’t bulk straight out of a hard cut. Your appetite is still high then, and the first weeks of eating more tend to go to fat.
Does eating more build more muscle?
The old gym advice was to eat everything in sight. Drink a gallon of milk a day, never be hungry, and the muscle will come. The opposite fear shows up after a cut, when people who just lost 20 pounds are scared of any weight on the scale and never eat enough to grow.
Muscle grows at the pace your training sets, and that pace is slow. Think of a building crew laying bricks. Deliver the bricks they can lay in a day and the wall goes up. Deliver three times as many and the wall goes up at the same speed, and the extra piles up in the yard. Extra calories beyond what your muscles can use become fat.
Small surplus or big surplus?
Maintenance, 5% over or 15% over
21 resistance trained adults, 17 finished, 8 weeks. Helms and colleagues, Sports Medicine Open, 2023
Everyone lifted three days a week. Muscle thickness didn’t differ between the three groups. The 15% group gained more on the bench press. Skinfolds, a measure of fat under the skin, rose more than at maintenance in both surplus groups, most of all at 15%. How much weight people gained predicted how much fat they gained, much more than how much muscle.
It was a small, short trial, cut short by the pandemic. The authors recommend a surplus of 5 to 20%, or gaining 0.25 to 0.5% of bodyweight a week.
What the off-season reviews say
A 2019 review of nutrition for bodybuilders between contests. Iraki and colleagues, Sports
A surplus of about 10 to 20%, aiming to gain about 0.25 to 0.5% of bodyweight a week, for beginners and intermediate lifters. Advanced lifters should use a smaller surplus and gain more slowly.
It’s a review of mostly short studies, many in young men.
We’d start at the low end. Gaining slowly makes it easier to tell fat from muscle on your trend, and there’s less to cut afterward.
| Your weight | 0.25% a week | 0.5% a week |
|---|---|---|
| 140 pounds | 0.35 pounds | 0.7 pounds |
| 170 pounds | 0.43 pounds | 0.85 pounds |
| 200 pounds | 0.5 pounds | 1 pound |
On a maintenance of 2,500 calories, a 5 to 10% surplus is 125 to 250 calories a day.
If you’ve lifted seriously for years, aim for the slower column or below it. Beginners can grow at the faster end.
Why not bulk the day the cut ends?
Your body is primed to regain at the end of a diet. In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the 1940s, young men lost about a quarter of their weight on six months of semistarvation, including about 70% of their fat and 27% of their lean mass. When food came back, they overate until their lean mass had recovered. By then they had put back more fat than they’d lost.
A normal cut is far gentler, but the pattern is the same. Hunger is high and your glycogen is empty, so the first weeks of eating more are when fat comes back fastest. Hold at maintenance for four to eight weeks first. The first pound or two will be water and glycogen, as the athletes in the ICECAP trial showed, and then the trend goes flat. Your maintenance calories after a diet shows how to find the number.
Should you cut or bulk?
| Where you are | What we’d do |
|---|---|
| Waist over 40 inches (men) or 35 (women), or carrying more fat than you want | Cut first. See the fat loss guide |
| Normal weight, soft middle, never lifted | Lift and eat your protein at maintenance for two or three months, then decide |
| Lean, new to lifting | A slow bulk |
| Lean, lifting for years | A slow bulk at the low end, or stay at maintenance and train |
| Just finished a cut | Hold at maintenance first |
The waist lines are the US ones. The NIH’s heart and lung institute says a waist over 40 inches for men or 35 for women raises the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
If you’re new to lifting or coming back to it, you can often gain muscle while losing fat at the same time. In a 2016 trial, 40 young men who trained hard on a large deficit with high protein gained about 2.6 pounds of lean mass in four weeks while losing about 10.6 pounds of fat. Elite athletes in a 2011 trial gained lean mass while losing about 0.7% of their weight a week.
How to bulk
- Start from a held maintenance. Four to eight weeks after the cut, with a flat trend.
- Add 150 to 250 calories a day. Mostly from food that helps you train, like rice, potatoes, oats, fruit and more of the protein you already eat.
- Keep protein at the top of the typical range or above it. That’s 1.6 g per kg of body weight a day (find yours). In a 2018 analysis of 49 trials, muscle gains from lifting stopped rising at about that amount, so more adds little.
- Train with a plan. Three or four sessions a week, adding weight or reps over time. The surplus does nothing without it.
- Check every two weeks. If your weight is rising faster than 0.5% a week, take off 100 calories. If it’s flat, add 100.
- Watch your waist. Measure it at the same spot every two weeks. If your waist is growing quickly and your lifts aren’t, the surplus is too big.
Home bodyfat scales are poor at single measurements but better at showing change. In a 2023 test of 15 devices, the error on a change over 12 to 16 weeks was about 2 to 3 points. Over a bulk, trust your waist, your lifts and the slope of your weight more than the bodyfat number on any one morning.
When to stop
End the bulk when your waist or your bodyfat has climbed to where you’d want to start a cut, or when gaining stops being fun. For most people that’s a few months. Then hold at maintenance again before the next cut. Each round of bulking and cutting should leave you a little stronger at the same waist.
10 sources
- Helms et al., Effect of small and large energy surpluses on strength, muscle, and skinfold thickness in resistance-trained individuals: a parallel groups design, Sports Medicine Open, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Iraki et al., Nutrition recommendations for bodybuilders in the off-season: a narrative review, Sports, 2019pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Morton et al., A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2018pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Dulloo, Jacquet and Girardier, Poststarvation hyperphagia and fat overshooting in humans, a re-analysis of the Minnesota Experiment (title shortened), American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1997pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Dulloo, Miles-Chan and Schutz, Collateral fattening in body composition autoregulation: its determinants and significance for obesity predisposition, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2018pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Garthe et al., Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength and power-related performance in elite athletes, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2011pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Longland et al., Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2016pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Peos et al., A 1-week diet break improves muscle endurance during an intermittent dieting regime in adult athletes: a pre-specified secondary analysis of the ICECAP trial, PLoS ONE, 2021pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Siedler et al., Assessing the reliability and cross-sectional and longitudinal validity of fifteen bioelectrical impedance analysis devices, British Journal of Nutrition, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- NHLBI, Aim for a healthy weight, 2025nhlbi.nih.gov
