Pack on the Sexy: Results

March 16th, 2010

A twig of a human nowadays, I decided to beef up quickly, a process known to bodybuilders as “bulking.” I challenged myself to put on 10lbs of muscle in less than three months. I derisively called this challenge “Pack on the Sexy.” Watch the intro video here. These are the results, warts and all.

“Hey gullible fatso, wanna have gleaming, hairless abs like mine? It’s easy.”

I loathe fitness ads and the deception they spew. It’s been said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” You probably don’t recognize this quote, because most folks avoid quoting Hitler. Doing so seems appropriate in this case, since few people in history better knew the art of deception.

With that in mind, I did research into what normal, inexperienced, steroid-free human beings could achieve from short-term, concentrated weight lifting. “Buckle down, work hard, be reasonable” were my directives.

I elected to follow a “bulking” routine; eating more calories than necessary every day (mostly protein), and sticking solely to weight lifting.

I knew that setting a hard deadline would discourage procrastination. After all, Parkinson’s Law cannot be ignored! Doing research online, I coordinated my scientific hunches with objective accounts of “bulking”, deciding 10lbs of muscle in three months would be my goal. This seemed appropriate, considering I wasn’t spurred by a 20 million dollar movie contract and a Red Bull fueled personal trainer. To self-motivate, I created a video challenge.

Here are my results and what I learned from the experience:

I knew before I started that “bulking” meant I’d also get fatter. While I have encountered stories of people who got leaner and built muscle at the same time, evidence of… let’s call it “exaggeration”, seemed apparent. I suspect those miraculous results were found in atypical situations, by people sheltered from typical middle-class concerns like eating leftovers to save money and finding time to clean up the garage.

My targets were 3200 calories per day, 240g protein, 89g fat, and 360g carbs. Hitting these targets posed a problem, particularly around the holidays and towards the end, just before moving to Switzerland, when I no longer had a kitchen of my own.

What I Learnt

• It’s better to eat too much than too little. In order to put on muscle you need to eat an excess of calories every day. As I mentioned, that means you’ll get fatter. As a fitness conscious person, it can be difficult to make this switch.
• It’s not enough to think you’re eating right. Start tracking. At first I thought I was eating enough calories and protein. In fact, I was convinced of it. But I was seeing poor results and was perpetually fatigued, so I started meticulously tracking my nutrient intake. Doing so made it clear to me that my diet was waaaaay off base. I shopped and ate differently thereafter and saw a marked improvement.
• Learn to love protein drinks. Lose any prejudices about them. Find ones you like or just suck it up and choke them down. Aside from blending up three chicken/soya/skim milk smoothies per day, you just can’t get the required daily protein intake without protein powder drinks.
• Start at a low body fat percentage. Thanks to an injury — and a desire to generally beef up — I started bulking at a high body fat percentage, at least compared to athletic people. By the end I was fatter than I wanted to be. Next time I plan to start at 10% body fat or less.
• You start and end on a plateau. Much like my experience losing weight, progress starts off slow, builds up momentum and then tapers off. I was happiest with my results in the middle of my progress.
• You will get discouraged. It’s part of the process. Just keep at it.
• You tend to throttle your progress. Knowing that I would achieve my 10lb goal, towards the end I did not work as hard, instead opting to tackle other priorities in life. In other words, set ambitious goals or you’ll drag your feet.
• You need meat. Sorry Peta, building muscle without meat is like building a skyscraper without metal. Without the most fundamental building block of the process, the compromises are too big. I broke a two-year vegetarian streak after reluctantly accepting this fact. Not only does meat contribute to amino acid diversity (in other words, filling in gaps in your diet), it also can boost testosterone, which increases protein synthesis. Grass fed beef is considerably better for you, so I sourced mine from a local farm that doesn’t feed their animals chemical slurries. After all I’m not against eating meat, I’m against eating crap.
• It’s easy to be deceptive with results. I discovered dozens of ways to produce quote-unquote “evidence” of big muscle gains. Many of them were merely temporary tricks. The typical methods for tracking fitness are flawed, and that includes photographs. I will write more about this later since the trickery of fitness is an interesting topic. I call it the “fudge factor”, and it’s surprisingly easy to crank up. [Update: Fudge factor article posted.] Moral of the story: be honest with yourself and overshoot your goals just to be certain. In retrospect I should have privately shot for 12lbs muscle gained to be completely confident the results weren’t, well… fudgey.

Final Word

My ultimate goal is simply to be in very good shape. Although I set a three month time frame for this experiment, I knew it would just be the first three month period of many. I’m not interested in quick fixes, but I am interested in being motivated by deadlines.

I’m encouraged to see that considerable muscle gains are indeed possible, even for “hardgainers” (read: scrawny folks). This challenge was a learning process I cannot fully describe. Too many minute and me-specific lessons were learnt to catalogue them all here.

If you are interested in putting on some muscle, I would suggest you follow a similar plan and learn from my experiences. Set an ambitious, time limited goal, watch what you eat, keep your head on straight, and know it’s just the first leg of a long trip. Good luck!