Why you've been afraid to "bulk" (calories surplus to build muscle)

Philip Pape 0:00

If you want to build muscle after 40, but you've been told the only way is to eat in a surplus and gain weight and accept some body fat, this episode is going to change how you might plan out your next few months. Today I am evaluating the surplus claim. Where does it come from? You'll learn the real energy cost of building a pound of muscle, plus three conditions that decide whether you can add muscle at the weight you're currently at. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. I'm a certified nutrition coach. I've worked with a lot of lifters. I've struggled and challenged myself to build muscle and lose fat many times over the past few years, and I've been reading the research. So last episode, Monday, I did an episode on perimenopause and weight gain. And one of the things I said there, stick around because today's episode is for men and women. One of the things I said was, hey, the math still works. What tends to change is where fat is distributed and how much muscle you are losing. And for men, the same thing starts to apply with older age. After you get over 40, you're starting to lose that muscle mat and you're starting muscle mat, muscle mass, and you're starting to gain some belly fat from different reasons and in different ways than women, but still. Now, a handful of you got back to me, which was pretty much the same question that I hear all the time. Hey, I want to build muscle, but I really don't want to gain weight to do it. And I'm afraid of gaining fat. So what am I supposed to do? And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because the advice you've heard for a long time on many podcasts, and I've said versions of it myself on this show, I've done probably workshops on this, is that muscle requires a calorie surplus. So if you want to build muscle, you have to eat more and you're going to gain some fat, and then you can cut that fat off later. And that's the traditional bulk and cut model. Now, you've also heard me talk about body recomp or aggressive maintenance or lean gaining, all that stuff. If you're starting to get on the older side of life, and I say over 40, it's not like a magic number, but it is correlated with not only hormonal changes, but also slowing down and more stress and less sleep and less adherence, all of that. And then with the muscle and bone loss, mat, bone mass loss, and all of that coming together at the same time. And you've probably spent your whole life being told to eat less, maybe trying to eat less, doing the diets I'm raising my hands right now, the keto, the carnivore, it goes back to Atkins and other weird diets that I've tried. The idea of deliberately gaining weight and doing it for months on end on purpose. What? WTF? I would never do that, right? So you're thinking to yourself, it's just not an appealing thing. Like, what the heck? I've been trying all my life to lose weight. And even if I'm haven't been trying to get skinny per se, I've been trying to not be fat. So what most of you do instead is you just skip the building part and you live in this permanent, you know, maybe maintenance at most, mostly a light deficit, slightly or largely underfueled, year after year after year. And guess what? That is a big part of why nothing is changing. So our roadmap for today's episode is pretty cool. First, I want to show you where the surplus number came from. Okay, you're gonna be a little annoyed when you hear it. Then I'm gonna look at what the trials measured, including where people arguing against having a calorie surplus, who are basically on my side of this episode, are also overselling their case. Okay, right? Because I've seen people say, send me Instagram reels by some, you know, really good lifter, bodybuilder, or whatever, who obviously is jacked and experienced. So you're like, nope, you never need to be in a surplus, you just need to be a maintenance. And there's it can lead people astray because there's nuance behind that. Then we're gonna cover the three conditions that predict whether body composition works for you, okay, and what the trade-offs are when you choose it. And when I say body recomposition, body recomp, I mean at the same time, like building muscle and losing fat at the same time, not over time with cuts and bulks. Then stick around to the end because I always have a little treat for you at the end of these. Today, it's gonna be one number that you can check tonight that tells you whether your current rate of fat loss is fast enough or slow enough relative to how much muscle you risk losing. It's always a good number to have in your fat pocket.

Where the calorie surplus number came from

Philip Pape 4:43

All right, so let's start with where the calorie surplus rule came from. If you go open a sports nutrition textbook and you look up how much you're supposed to eat above maintenance to build muscle, you're gonna see recommendations somewhere between 360 and 955 calories a day. And maybe newer ones have a lower minimum. That is a huge range. And those numbers got perpetuated through certifications, through bodybuilding forums, through coaches, and became part of the zeitgeist. I love words like that, the zeitgeist of our culture. Okay, now in 2019, there was a review paper by Slater and colleagues, and Eric Helms was one of the authors on it, actually. Okay, I'm gonna come back to Eric in a minute. We all love Eric. And the paper asked a pretty simple question, which is whether an energy surplus is actually required to maximize muscle growth. And their answer, which for a scientific paper is about as blunt as it gets, is those estimates have never been validated in a resistance training population. Nobody actually studied them. So the numbers that people use oftentimes in this fitness industry that I've found are often inferred, especially ones on populations that have not been studied, like peri-impostmenopausal populations, for example. And I think the inference itself can be sometimes way off, especially if the math is wrong. And I'm gonna explain that here because this is the math piece, is what change how I

Can you use fat loss math on muscle tissue?

Philip Pape 6:14

think about it. All right. You know the rule that a pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories per pound. Okay, now it's not a perfect number, but it's in the neighborhood, it's in the ballpark. Fat tissue is, of course, mostly fat. Fat is energy dense. So when you reverse engineer it and you say, well, okay, a pound is a pound. So of course, building a pound of muscle, or you know, or let's say adding a pound of weight, which includes some muscle, must also take thousands of extra calories. The problem is muscle is mostly water. It's like 70 to 75% water. Only a fifth of it is actual protein. We also know muscle is more dense, but the water piece is probably more of a mover here. A pound of muscle stores way less energy than a pound of fat. And so you can't use fat math on muscle, right? Now, in the past, I've talked about this where if you do want to use math, a number like 2,500 calories per pound makes sense when you assume 50-50 fat and muscle. So I'll just throw that out there. I I have an episode about that, it came out a long time ago. But what is the cost of lean tissue? Well, estimates are that lean tissue store 700 to 850 calories per kilogram. And if you add in like metabolic overhead to assemble the tissue, you're in like 600 to 930 calories per kilogram. There is a newer model from this year from 2026 that puts the all-in cost around 3481 per kilogram. Now that's up from a preprint, it hasn't been peer reviewed, but I'm giving you the high numbers so nobody can accuse me of you know cherry picking here. So if you gain a kilogram of muscle over 12 weeks, for which for most of us over 40 years old is a really good 12 weeks, even using that high estimate, and I'm sorry I'm using kilograms for all my American folks out there, but it's that way I can connect the math to the paper. You're looking at something like an extra 41 calories a day. And on the lower estimates, it's only like five or 10, which is like a tablespoon of peanut butter. I don't think you can build a four-month weight gain phase based on such a tiny, tiny surplus. Now, stay with me, okay? It's hard. What I mean by that is hard to wait gain to gain weight and measurably know that you're doing so when the number's that small. That's what I mean. Now, this is a mechanistic argument, okay? It's the it's math related to the tissue density of energy, blah, blah, blah. Okay, it's not an outcome from a study. Math is a great abstract for real life. I'm not gonna lie about that, but we have to think about our evidence quality, let's say. So, what the math says is that a surplus is almost not even necessary. But what actually happens to your body over 12 weeks of trying to gain? Let's look at that, shall we? Ooh,

Comparison of 3 different calorie surpluses

Philip Pape 9:08

hopefully I've got you hooked. Okay, so we know that the surplus number itself hasn't been tested in a population. But let's look at studies that have done some testing, shall we? Eric Helms, I love his work. He's one of the few people in this field who will publish results that either show a non a non-result, let's say, or they just don't, aren't flattering to what his own position has been. He ran a study in 2023 where he took train lifters and split them into three groups. One group aid at maintenance, one was in a small surplus of 5%, and one was in a bigger surplus of 15%. Many of you are familiar with this, are familiar with this paper because I've used it myself as a foundation for some of working with clients and helping them build muscle with the right surplus. Everybody in the study trained for three days a week for eight weeks. Now, there was no evidence of a difference in muscle thickness between the groups, and there was no difference in squat strength. The bench press had some evidence favoring the big surplus, but I think the most important finding is that the rate of body weight gain predicted the increase in skin fold thickness, which is fat. Okay, skin fold thickness measured with, I think, a caliper. That's fat. And it did not predict muscle thickness. So the faster that people gained weight, the more of what they gained was fat. Okay. Now there's a caveat, there's nuance to this. Okay. That study started with 21 people and ended with 17 people on RAND during COVID. A small study like that that essentially does not find a difference between groups is not the same as proving there isn't a difference, just to put that out

The deficit level where lean mass gains stops

Philip Pape 10:48

there. But there is a bigger piece of evidence we have, a meta or meta-regression by Murphy and Kohler in 2022. And by the way, a meta-regression, sometimes I have to slow down here and define these things. It's where you pool a bunch of studies together and then you look for a relationship across a whole range of values instead of just comparing two groups against each other. So they pooled resistance training studies where people were eating in a calorie deficit. And the lean mass gains were blunted or impaired compared to the control group. The effect size was negative 0.57. So, and then strength wasn't affected at all, essentially. The I'll say headline finding is that a calorie deficit of about 500 calories a day is where the lean mass gains stopped happening. Okay, so think about that for a second, because we have kind of two directions fighting for each other. On one hand, it's saying, hey, a deficit can cost you muscle growth. Okay, fine. Some you you're often you often hear that a deficit's gonna potentially cause you muscle loss or gonna cause muscle loss. On the other hand, it means a deficit smaller than 500 calories a day. Well, the people in these studies were gaining lean mass while losing fat. What is that? That's body recomp. That's body recomp. Now, you know, to be fair, they were looking at deficits, different sized deficits. They didn't have a group that was also in a surplus. That'd be pretty cool, right? So when you when you hear someone say, talk about that paper and say, okay, here's how much growth you would lose by going from a surplus to maintenance. Well, they're extrapolating past the edge of the data. They might be right, but the paper's not going to tell you that. So this brings me to the part that I guess I'm a little uncomfortable with and why I love this show, because we can challenge our own beliefs and we can be skeptical. Because right now, the loudest people out there are pushing this one really hard, the fact that you don't need a surplus and pushing it to an extreme like they always do. Okay. In other words, I would like to make the nuanced argument on this episode today that you don't quite need a meaningful surplus to build muscle, but there's nuance behind it. But I'm not going to go to the extreme of you just can do deficits all the time and always be a maintenance and never be in a surplus. Okay. So the claim goes something like this.

Where the anti-surplus argument overshoots

Philip Pape 13:08

In something like, I don't know, 90 to 95% of hypertrophy studies. I think I heard Milo Wolf or somebody mention this on a podcast. Researchers never tell people, hey, I want you to bulk and I want you to cut. They say just eat normally. Sometimes they're not even controlling for nutrition, right? And then the body weight stays the same in many cases. And then people gain muscle because they're on this training regimen. And so by definition, they must have lost fat, right? So recomp is happening, and that's great. So you're like, oh, yeah, hold on, Philip. You've been arguing that exact thing for the last few minutes. But I think there are some problems with this. Okay. The first is that in a lot of these studies, hypertrophy is measured by ultrasound at one spot in one muscle, like the front of the thigh. Body weight is measured on a scale, and they don't measure body fat distribution or body composition, right? Whole body fat mass a lot of the time isn't measured. So the fat loss part is an inferred conclusion, not a measurement. The second problem is that stable body weight, like within 1% over eight to 12 weeks, is well inside the normal fluctuations from water and glycogen and gut content and all of that. So I have a real problem with like these short-term studies trying to conclude anything. Well, I shouldn't say anything. That's taking it too far. But like on body weight. And it to be fair, many of them aren't even measuring, they don't care about the body weight necessarily as a variable. They just happen to say, hey, by the way, their weight didn't change. If I give you a specific example, okay, maybe it'll help. There's a 2024 study on single set training. Uh Herman with two N's, he was the lead author. And Brad Schoenfeld and Milo Wolf were the co-authors. And it was done in train lifters who averaged over four years of experience. And people cite this as a finding of body recomp. So I went and I looked at the paper, and body weight change and fat mass change, I didn't see those appear in the results at all. Like they're not reported, going back to my comment I just made. So whatever recomp claim people are attaching to the study is not necessarily something you reported. This is why you gotta be very careful. I know you're not all gonna read every study just like I don't read every study, but you gotta just be careful. Now, that doesn't make recomp false. Okay, when we measure it, sometimes we do find it. And I also think recomp is a really fun and marketable thing to sell because I sell it myself, because yes, it's possible and it's possible for certain people. But like some people take it too far or they build their whole business off of it. So having said that, this brings me to what I think is the practical problem with all

Measuring what the scale doesn't show you

Philip Pape 15:35

of this. And speaking of, you know, conflicts of interest and disclosures, you guys know that I have an app and it's called Fitness Lab, right? And if you run a recomp phase, your body weight is supposed to stay roughly flat. Now I've talked about aggressive maintenance or slight deficits, but still your body weight's gonna stay mostly flat compared to if you're bulking or cutting. That's kind of the whole point, which means the scale is really not gonna help. It's not gonna move very much, all right? And so if you make it front and center, it's an easy reason to quit. It's very hard to see changes in body recap. It takes longer, you have to be more patient. All right, you have to look at the right things. And so when you know, working with a coach or using my app or whatever, you have to understand what you're measuring and managing is aligned with the thing, with the outcome you're trying to get. So if you look at my app fitness app, it reads your scale weight but turns it into a trend. It reads your lift progression alongside that, okay, and says, okay, you're getting stronger or not. It looks at how hard your sessions are because that's useful, right? That gives you even more information than just the numbers, especially when you connect it to things like your sleep and your other biofeedback. And then when you take all that together with check-ins and you put it all together, here's what's going on underneath the hood. That's kind of the recomp process, okay. When you're building muscle and not gaining weight, that's kind of the game when we talk about recomp and not having to be in a surplus. But I'm gonna put a star in that. And I'm sorry I'm kind of rambling today because a lot of this is unscripted. The evidence that it's working is mainly in your training log and in your biofeedback, as opposed to in the scale. So, anyway, real quick, by the way, I should pitch my app since I'm talking about it Fitness Lab. We're running a Labor Day sale right now. I don't want you to miss it because it closes September 13th. And this episode comes out pretty close to the end of that. But you have to be on my email list. Go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list, and you'll get it in your welcome email. If you're already on my list, guys, you should have seen an email with the deal. If not, just reply to one of them and let me know, hey Philip, where's the freaking 30% off deal? But if you're not on my list yet, just go to witsandweights.com slash email, and that goes through September 13th. Fitness lab can do all this for you with the body recomp stuff. But anyway, if the surplus isn't required, if recomp is real, but it's being oversold, then the useful question, of course, isn't does

3 conditions that decide whether body recomp works for you

Philip Pape 18:02

it work? It is, does it work for you? And that's where you have to understand. Can it work for you? There are three conditions. And I'd say if you have two out of three, you're pretty good shape. Okay. Condition one is you have some body fat. You have some body fat to spend. That's like a nice little battery of energy on your body. This is the way I like to reframe for people who have a little extra body fat carrying around. Hey, you've got some energy to draw from. We go back to Gilbert Forbes in the 80s, and there was a concept called partitioning, which just means where the tissue comes from and where it goes. And some people still use the term, right? Nutrient partitioning, for example. So leaner people tend to give up more muscle when they're in a deficit, and they put more of their surplus toward muscle. People carrying more body fat tend to do the opposite, which for our purposes here is what we want. Because the body is more willing to pull that energy out of fat stores and put it toward muscle. Interesting. All right. So you're starting to see why surplus or not surplus isn't really the right way to frame this. Because if you have a lot of body fat and you eat at maintenance or in a slight deficit, your body may still experience that as a quote unquote surplus from the muscle mass building perspective. All your body cares about is does it have enough resources to construct that muscle tissue? Right. And your body's able to create some of a lot of those resources too, from the energy. And this is why lifting weights is so fantastic, especially when you're overweight. Now you're gonna hear specific numbers touted about body fat cutoffs, where, oh, are you lean or not? Or where does this start to happen? You're gonna hear like, okay, men above 10 or 12% body fat, or women above 18 or 20% body fat. And these are more like coaching heuristics. Okay, there isn't like a trial that establishes these body fat thresholds for recomp. And again, it would probably be very individual anyway. There's definitely not one for women. I know that. So this is like a rough sense of direction, right? It's not like a hard line, like many of this stuff. And by the way, Forbes' original data came from people who weren't lifting at all. Some of them were recovering from starvation states. So we gotta watch out who we apply this to. So anyway, condition one is that you have some body fat. Condition two is you have some training headroom. What do I mean for that? Okay, for most of you listening, that means that there is room to improve your training stimulus, which is uh I could say the vast majority of you probably. Okay. Maybe you are detrained, maybe you're coming back from a break or an injury, maybe you never really trained hard in the first place. Or this is the big one. Maybe you've been doing the same three sets of 10 with the same pink dumbbells for two years. I mentioned the pink dumbbells again, I did last time. Maybe that lady who commented on Spotify about how I I constantly mention I'm an engineer and she's so annoyed by it, will be annoyed by the pink dumbbells if I just keep mentioning them. So if your training has been coasting, right? You haven't really been using a progressive overload, then doing it is going to put your body in a massive, big new stimulus. And you don't need extra calories to respond to a stimulus if you're a noob. You weren't getting it, now you are. That is a huge stimulus where your body will respond to it almost despite how much you're eating. Almost, almost. Okay. Training is what builds muscle bar none. The food and the protein are there to support it. Speaking of protein, that is condition number three. Okay. I'll just mention it again. At least 0.7 grams per pound, that's your floor for protein. Are you getting that much protein? If not, you need to work your way up there fairly quickly with your routine. You know, track it if you need to. Use macrofactor, my code, wits and weights, all one word, and get your protein. All right. You have to be training and the protein supports it. If you're only eating protein and not training, it's not really gonna make a lick of a difference. Now, when you're in a fat loss phase or a calorie deficit, I should say, you probably want a little bit more protein than that. All right. And it's not just to hold on to lean mass, but in many cases, it's You're newer, it'll actually still help you build more lean mass even when you're in a deficit, even when you're losing weight. It's crazy. It's crazy. So combining multiple of these things that you're not already doing is a huge lever that you should get going on right now, guys.

Recomp trade-offs

Philip Pape 22:13

All right, now let's talk about trade-offs. One trade-off of body recomp is that you give up speed. A calorie surplus is probably going to buy you a little bit more muscle. I don't think it buys you as much as what like our bulk and cut bodybuilding culture, social media culture implies. And again, we can go to the Helms study that says, hey, the faster you gain, the more you're probably just gonna gain fat, but it's very individualistic. Again, if you're new to training, you have a little more leg legroom. I always put a brand new person who's doing their first building phase ever, who's highly responsive to training and maybe has some fat but not too much fat. I might put them at like as much as 0.4, 0.5% body weight a week, which is still not that much. It's still not that much. If if anything, it's enough to push you to eat more. And because people tend to not eat enough and have trouble eating more, they eat just the right amount. It's the way I think about it. It's like a stretch goal. So that's one trade-off. You give up speed. The other thing is you give up using the scale as the signal. And for a lot of you, that's hard psychologically, but it could be hugely beneficial because then you learn the other things that you get to use. During a body recomp phase, you want to use your strength log, you know, your training log, your tape measurements at your waist, at your navel photos every few weeks, all those things to kind of see what's happening. Biofeedback, like you should be feeling good during body recomp. You shouldn't feel low energy or like you're in a deficit, but you're also not gaining a bunch of weight and potentially fat to go with it. It's just gonna take time and you have to be patient. Now, I'm not saying a surplus never helps, okay? Tying all this together in a bow, the you don't have to be in a surplus piece really means you probably can get enough energy into your body to support muscle growth if you're at least at maintenance. And sometimes it helps to push a little past that, but if you have a little extra fat, you may not have to because of the extra fat and your body still experiences as a quote unquote surplus. The other thing is if you start to build muscle and your body craves more energy and food, you may have to overconsume calorie-wise, and it might seem like a surplus, but

When a small surplus DOES help

Philip Pape 24:10

you're not really in a surplus. Your body's metabolism's just going up. And sometimes you have to overshoot that a little bit, being a tiny surplus, just to stay at not a surplus, if that makes sense. And if I'm confusing all of you, if I'm confusing all of you, I want you to reach out. Okay. I want you to reach out, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, reply, let me know what you're dealing with, let me know what you're confused, and I'll reply in person. If you're already lean, you're already well trained, progress has stopped, you know, maybe a small surplus is the boost you need. And there's good evidence behind that. We also know that recomp takes time. Take, we said that it's slower than a dedicated build and a dedicated cut, and you have to stay motivated in other ways. I'm also not saying, hey, just eat a maintenance and you're going to sort yourself out. Of course not. You have to have your training, you have to have all the other things, the protein, et cetera. And even to stay at maintenance can be a difficult skill to build over time because you need to know, am I really a maintenance?

What happened when 43 postmenopausal women lifted for 24 weeks

Philip Pape 25:03

Now, what's cool is we have plenty of studies on young trained men, but we also have some resistance training trials in post-menopausal women that show this exact pattern. And sometimes they don't use the word recomp. So it's it's kind of hard to find the studies depending on how you search for it. There's one from 2024, and they had 43 postmenopausal women over 24 weeks of resistance training, and they measured significant reductions in total fat and visceral fat alongside significant increases in muscle mass and in strength. And the heavier load groups did even better. Nobody said here, eat in a surplus. Nobody said here in a death, eat in a deficit. They just lifted and their body composition changed in the best direction in fat and muscle for both at the same time. Now, those were untrained women. So again, this is what happens when you start lifting. So I don't want you to conclude on this up from this episode you should eat less. No, I think it's somewhat the opposite. I think it's you need to start lifting, you need to eat more fuel to support your lifting, you need to increase your protein, right? But to the level that you need to be fully fueled, which still may not be a surplus, if that makes sense. It's just not in a deficit. Okay. Before we wrap up, that number I promised you at the beginning of the episode, I'll give you that in a minute, so that you can properly calibrate your uh window for body recomp. But before I do, the fitness lab deal closes this Sunday, September 13th. You have to go to witsandweights.com slash email. Join the list. You'll get it in the welcome email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. This is a permanent 30% off for life deal. Anybody who knows Fitness Lab since we launched last year, we've never had a deal like this. Usually the deal is 20% off your first payment. This one is 30% off permanently. Okay, so get in there. You get an even bigger deal if you sign up for a whole year. So that's up to you. But go to wits and weights.com slash email. All right. Here's a numeric value that you can check for yourself if you're trying to, you know,

Bonus: the rate of loss that protects your lean mass

Philip Pape 26:55

build muscle, lose fat recomp. All right. There is a meta regression that pooled a bunch of resistance training studies done in calorie deficits. And they saw where lean mass gains occurred versus where they stopped. And they stopped right around a deficit of 500 calories a day. Now, I don't like just calories or percentages of calories. I like rates of loss relative to your body weight. So if you convert that to body weight, for most people, this if you if we base it on the weight in the study, the body weights in the study, you want to limit your rate of loss to roughly half a percent of your body weight a week. Now that's not nothing, like that's still meaningful, right? So if you weigh 160 pounds, stay under three quarters of a pound a week of loss to potentially not only keep your lean mass, but gain lean mass, especially if you're newer to lifting. If you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, pun intended, maybe? Yeah. Okay. So look at your last three weeks of trend weight. Okay. I know I threw you for a loop there. You can't just go by whatever you weighed yesterday. You got to have a good idea of your trend weight right now, your overall actual average weight, and just do the math. Okay. Do the math, multiply it by a half percent. And whatever that is, don't exceed that amount of weight loss per week. Now, you take that, you multiply by 3,500 calories, that's the calorie deficit. All right. In other words, the pounds that you calculate times 3,500, that's your calorie deficit. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the surplus was never the thing that built the muscle. The training does that. The food is there to support it. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.