Build Muscle Without BULKING for "Lean Gains" | Ep 384
Join Physique University for our new IGNITE 🔥 training template (4-day upper/lower time-saving split) - use code FREEPLAN for a free custom nutrition plan when you join: https://witsandweights.com/physique
--
You MUST "bulk" to build muscle... right?
Eat more, gain weight, accept getting fluffy, then cut it all off later with a fat loss phase... right?
Not necessarily.
What if bulking is inefficient for YOUR goals? What if you could build muscle while staying lean year-round?
Learn why you might NOT need a calorie surplus to build muscle and a unique approach called aggressive maintenance where you can skip bulking entirely while getting the strong, lean, aesthetic body you're going for.
Main Takeaways:
Traditional bulking optimizes for throughput (total muscle gain), while aggressive maintenance optimizes for efficiency (muscle gain per unit of input)
You CAN build muscle at maintenance calories when 3 things are dialed in
Certain individuals partition nutrients more efficiently toward muscle vs. fat and are better candidates for skipping the bulk
There are "hidden" but powerful factors that enable muscle growth without bulking
Episode Resources:
Review the podcast by October 15 for a chance to win 3 months free in Physique University Mastery Track ($261 value). Leave a review at Apple Podcasts... EVERYONE who leaves a review will get a gift from me :)
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why bulking might be inefficient for you
3:45 - Efficiency vs. throughput
8:20 - How muscle growth works without a surplus
13:15 - What is aggressive maintenance?
19:00 - Glycogen, neurological adaptations, and energy flux
24:10 - Who benefits most from skipping the bulk
28:15 - Operating at design limits without exceeding them
Build Muscle Without the Bulk
If you’ve ever felt stuck in the bulk–cut cycle, wondering if getting fluffy every winter is really the only way to build muscle, you’re not alone. Traditional wisdom says that muscle gain requires a big calorie surplus, steady weight gain, and months of extra body fat before dieting it off. But there’s a more efficient, sustainable path that works—especially for trained lifters and busy professionals who want to look strong year-round. It’s called aggressive maintenance, and it lets you build lean muscle without the constant see-saw of bulking and cutting.
This approach flips the script on what we’ve been told about muscle growth and shows that you can make measurable gains at (or barely above) maintenance calories—if you optimize your nutrition, training, and recovery with surgical precision.
The Problem With Traditional Bulking
Bulking works. If your only goal is to gain muscle as fast as possible, eating in a surplus of 200 to 500 calories above maintenance is the most direct route. But there’s a catch. Surpluses past a few hundred calories mostly drive fat gain, not additional muscle. Muscle protein synthesis (MPS)—the process of building new muscle—plateaus quickly. After that point, extra calories are just stored energy.
Think of it like an assembly line. Once production runs at full capacity, throwing in more raw materials doesn’t speed things up—it just creates waste. A traditional bulk maximizes throughput (total muscle built), but not efficiency (muscle gained per calorie). For many people, that inefficiency leads to frustration, body-fat swings, and months of cutting later just to reveal the same muscle that could have been gained more strategically.
What “Aggressive Maintenance” Really Means
Aggressive maintenance focuses on efficiency over speed. Instead of overeating, you hover right around maintenance calories—often within 50 to 100 calories above it—while optimizing protein, training, and recovery so your body directs those calories toward lean mass instead of fat.
It’s not about losing fat or gaining fat. It’s about maintaining body weight while gradually increasing muscle tissue and potentially improving body composition over time. This approach works because you’re removing the main bottlenecks to growth: inadequate protein, poor training stimulus, and poor recovery.
How Muscle Grows Without a Surplus
Muscle growth happens when muscle protein synthesis exceeds muscle protein breakdown. You can tilt this balance in your favor at maintenance if three conditions are met:
Protein is sufficient.
Aim for 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. Total daily intake matters far more than timing. This gives your body the raw material it needs to repair and build tissue.Training drives progressive overload.
Lift hard. Train close to failure. Use compound movements as your foundation and track progression over time. Mechanical tension—not calories—is the key signal for growth.Recovery supports adaptation.
Sleep 7–9 hours per night, manage stress, and keep inflammation in check. Recovery is the multiplier that allows your body to respond to training even without extra calories.
If these three are dialed in, you can grow muscle slowly at maintenance—especially if you’re consistent and patient.
Why It Works: Nutrient Partitioning and Energy Flux
Leaner, active individuals partition nutrients more effectively toward muscle tissue. That means the same meal that might store as fat in a sedentary person helps a trained lifter repair muscle. Daily movement (especially walking) and high-quality resistance training both improve insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning, allowing your body to build muscle even without a traditional surplus.
There’s also energy flux—the idea that eating and moving more increases your total energy turnover. When you move more, you can eat more and still maintain body weight, keeping metabolism high while fueling muscle recovery. It’s the sweet spot between dieting and bulking.
Building Your Aggressive Maintenance Plan
Start with your estimated maintenance calories (for most, 13–15 times body weight in pounds) and eat roughly that amount, adding a small 50–100-calorie buffer.
Protein: 0.7–1.0 g per lb body weight
Fats: 0.3–0.4 g per lb body weight
Carbs: Fill in the rest with complex sources and target the bulk of them around workouts for performance and glycogen replenishment
For training, use a moderate-to-high volume hypertrophy plan (10–15 sets per muscle group weekly) with progressive overload and recovery days built in. Compound lifts form the base; isolation work fine-tunes weak points.
If you’re short on time, check out efficient programs like the IGNITE 4-Day Upper-Lower Template in Physique University. It uses supersets, drop sets, and strategic volume to fit hypertrophy training into 30-minute sessions without sacrificing results.
The Hidden Levers That Accelerate Lean Gains
Sleep architecture: Deep and REM sleep trigger growth hormone and recovery. Poor sleep can erase the benefits of training, even in a surplus.
Carb timing: Carbs before and after lifting help refill glycogen, signaling an anabolic environment at maintenance.
Activity outside the gym: High step counts and NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) enhance nutrient delivery to muscle.
Micronutrients: Adequate magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, and electrolytes support hormonal balance and muscle adaptation.
Consistency: The real “secret.” Without it, none of this matters.
Who Should Skip the Bulk
Aggressive maintenance works best for:
Overweight individuals who already have energy reserves
Detrained lifters returning to training (muscle memory effect)
New lifters experiencing neurological and beginner gains
Midlife athletes and busy professionals who want to stay lean year-round
Anyone prioritizing aesthetics and sustainability over short bursts of size
Those chasing maximal strength or advanced hypertrophy may still need full bulks eventually, but they’ll benefit from spending time in this phase first.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Expecting bulking-level muscle gain rates
Undereating carbs and tanking training performance
Neglecting recovery and sleep
Over-tracking or constantly changing macros instead of letting trends play out
Aggressive maintenance is a slow burn. You might gain only a couple of pounds over six months—but if your waist shrinks, lifts go up, and you look leaner, that’s the point.
The Takeaway
You don’t have to choose between bulking up and staying lean. You can build muscle efficiently by operating near maintenance and optimizing the system around it. Think of it as an engineering problem: precision inputs, measured feedback, and sustainable throughput.
If you’re ready to implement this, join Physique University at witsandweights.com/physique and use code FREEPLAN for a free custom nutrition plan with your membership. You’ll also get access to the new IGNITE training template and our full course library.
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or all other platforms.
Then hit “Follow” and you’re good to go!
Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you want to build muscle, you need to bulk. At least that's what you hear all the time. You have to eat more, you have to gain weight, you have to accept getting a little fluffy in that calorie surplus and then cut it off later with a fat loss phase. What if that approach is inefficient, at least for you? What if you could build muscle while staying lean year-round? In this episode, you're gonna learn why muscle protein synthesis does not require a calorie surplus the way you think it does. You'll discover the principles of what I call aggressive maintenance, and you'll find out who can skip bulking entirely and still make gains versus who might still want to bulk, including the hidden factors like sleep and energy flux that many people ignore. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. And today we're talking about something that often challenges conventional wisdom in the lifting world: building muscle, but without bulking. If you've ever felt trapped by this need to bulk and cut, and you wonder, is there a smarter way to add lean mass without the fat gain roller coaster? This episode is definitely for you. But I also want to give a caveat that to get the quickest gain in muscle, you're gonna have to have a surplus of some kind. I'm just gonna get that out of the way. But we're not necessarily talking about the quickest path here. We're talking about efficiency. And efficiency often means looking at the next six months, the next year, the next two years, and where you want to be with your physique at any given time to get the final result, which may take a little longer, but the way you get there is more sustainable for you. So we're gonna break down the science and the systems behind what I call aggressive maintenance. I've covered this topic here and there in the context of body recomposition. But today I'm specifically focusing on the muscle building side, not so much the fat loss side. This is really about engineering the whole system, your nutrition, your training, your recovery, your nutrient partitioning, doing it efficiently so that you are biasing muscle rather than fat all while eating around maintenance calories and not having, quote unquote, to bulk. And I'm gonna tell you who can benefit from this the most. Now, before we get into that, I definitely want to share a couple listener reviews that came in recently on Apple. Just two. The first one I really love, it is from Laura Lai 1964. She says Philip provides relevant and evidence-backed information on nutrition and resistance training. If you were ever on the fence about whether you should introduce resistance training to see change, listen to this podcast. Science-backed evidence proves it's a huge key to longevity, and Philip breaks it all down. He has top-notch guests on as well, which has led me to other great podcasts. One more thing. He's so fun to listen to, always has a smile in his voice. Thank you, Philip Bape. And you just made me smile, which is hopefully why you hear that on a regular basis. I try to be optimistic about this stuff. I think, like a stoic, we have many things in our control. And if we focus on all only those things, an optimism bias can lead us to amazing results, no matter what life throws at us. And that is the definition of resilience. The second review is interesting. The headline is I didn't know what I didn't know until now from host new normal big life. So this looks like a podcaster. I'm a sponsored adventure sports athlete and have been a competitive athlete most of my teen and a young adult life. However, this podcast taught me there are many factors impacting my health and performance that I didn't know about. Learning about what standard lab work really tells us about our health is a game changer. Thank you so much. So that was probably in response to some recent episodes related to blood work, performance blood work. This is a service we now provide. I'm not going to get into it here, but the long and short of it is if you're looking to understand the interactions and the root causes of things that may be going on with your body, despite having tried all the other things like training, nutrition, lifestyle, it could be another way to peer inside what's happening with your biomarkers, with your hormones, et cetera. Go to witsandweights.com slash blood work for that. But when it comes to these reviews, anyone who leaves a review, we are actually running a say contest, not a contest, a giveaway right now that anyone who leaves a review is entered for a giveaway for three months in physique university in our mastery track. That's a $261 value. And everyone who submits a review is gonna get a surprise bonus. Deadline is October 15. Go into Apple and add your five-star radio review there, if you haven't yet. And I will be monitoring those and then I'll send out the results to the Facebook group and to our email list. All right, let's get into the engineering behind building muscle without bulking, because yes, it is possible. I want to start with the efficiency problem that comes with traditional bulking. As much as I love calorie surpluses and bulking for people who want to get the fastest results, and you will, and the bulk cut cycle, which has been the standard approach in bodybuilding and hypertrophy and strength training for decades, and it still is, again, a tried and true approach, where you spend months in a calorie surplus. In my opinion, six to nine months is ideal, sometimes longer, to maximize your muscle growth. Along for the ride comes some fat, but you are maximizing the muscle growth, meaning you're hitting that ceiling of how much muscle you can, you know, slabs of muscle you can add to your body every month. And to do that, you're making the trade-off that some fat comes along for the ride. And then you do a cut or a fat loss phase to cut it down and rinse and repeat. Now, let me be clear: this bulking is the fastest way to gain muscle. Whether you're a man or a woman, whatever your starting point, doesn't matter. It's the fastest way to gain muscle. If I were to put any caveat on that at all, it would be as if you are significantly overweight. If you're significantly overweight, you definitely want to lose some of that body fat for health reasons, but also because you can actually build a decent amount of muscle while losing weight in that context. So putting that aside, we're talking about people who are kind of in the average range of weight. Even if you have a little extra weight to lose, you're kind of in that average range. If pure speed to muscle growth is your only goal, a calorie surplus is the best way to go. And my usual recommendation for a beginner is around 0.3 or 0.4% of your body weight a week. Potentially more if you're doing it in a very precise, controlled way, or you're a really good responder and you want to take advantage of that. Potentially less if you're not sure or you're worried about gaining too much fat or being not super consistent. But then you need a fat loss phase after that, no matter what, right? You gain the muscle plus the fat, then you diet it off. And the whole cycle takes maybe a year, maybe two years to really get leaner and leaner. And that's fine in the scheme of your whole life. How long really is that when you've been struggling for years and years and years? So if you're into that, which is the way I do it personally, it's very efficient. I mean, it's very, I'll say it's efficient from a long-term perspective. It may not be efficient in the short term, depending on your goal. So I'm happy to help anyone through that who's struggling, who needs help. You can come into physique university. That is what one of the things we teach. We also teach body recomp, which I'm talking about today. It's all all roads to Rome lead to Rome. Okay. So from an engineering perspective, this is really a throughput approach. You are maximizing the input to maximize the output, more fuel, more materials, more resources, and it works. But it's not efficient by all measures. Let me explain the difference. Efficiency is about the output per unit of input. Throughput is the total output, regardless of the input. So a bulking cutting cycle optimizes for throughput, right? You're trying to maximize that muscle and you're also getting more fat along for the ride. What we're talking about today optimizes for efficiency, at least on a shorter term scale. That's the I have to keep saying that because over a several year period, I actually think bulking and cutting, if done right, if done consistently, if you don't stop your training, is the most efficient. But for a lot of people, it's not the most practical, nor is it a state they want to live in for months at a time, let's say. What I mean by that is a lot of people don't want to be fluffy for many months out of the year. That's okay, I get it. And it's okay to not want that and to make a trade-off to get to avoid that. Okay, so muscle protein synthesis, MPS, is the process by which your body builds new muscle tissue. Research shows that MPS rates plateau relatively quickly compared to calorie intake. Gone are the old days of the dreamer bulk where you're eating five or six thousand calories or something like that, because you think there's really no limit to muscle gain as long as you just eat more. Yeah, I'm gonna get fat, but I'm gonna get more and more and more muscle. No, it actually has a plateau, right? So the curve goes up quickly and then it quickly hits a limit, like a fixed limit. So beyond that calorie surplus that gets you to that limit, which is around two to three hundred calories above maintenance for a lot of people. Additional calories then mostly increase your fat mass, not your lean tissue, right? That's why it's uh hard for some people to kind of find that level until you do it once and see what happens, and then you can refine the next time. So think of it like this: your body has a limited capacity to synthesize new muscle at any given time, period. Right? It's not like a construction project where throwing more materials and workers speeds things up. Your body's muscle building machinery can only work so fast. That is the rate limiting step, to use another technical term, the rate limiting step. Okay. So if you're an adult over 30, and that's an important distinction between, because if you're under 30 and you're raging with hormones and you've got a lot more responsiveness and ability to build muscle, you may want to throw my discussion today out the window altogether and just go hog wild on that surplus. Because who cares? You've got all the time in the future ahead of you, and you're super responsive to the muscle. You've got the hormones and everything else. If you're over 30, especially if you're over 40 or in your 50s, pushing body fat higher just to build muscle becomes a little bit less efficient because your nutrient partitioning gets a little bit worse as you age, meaning a higher percentage of the extra calories might go to fat rather than muscle. You just are a little bit less efficient putting on that muscle. Sorry, that's just what happens when we get older. At least you're doing it, right? Versus your peers who are letting their muscle wither away into decrepitude into old age, which is not what we want. But as you get old, your insulin sensitivity decreases, your recovery, you know, gets a little bit harder. Even if you eat more, even if you sleep more, it's still declining slowly over time. Your joint tissues, connective tissues get a little less pliable, et cetera. So what we're really after here is directing the limited resources toward muscle rather than fat storage as laser-targeted as we can. And that is kind of that when you think of like an engineer applied to physique development, where I'm coming from. So, yes, bulking is faster, but I'm gonna talk about aggressive maintenance here. Aggressive maintenance can be more appealing and more efficient, especially if you want to stay relatively lean year round. And I'm sorry to all my lifter buddies who are all about strength PRs, okay? If you're all about strength PRs, I'm not talking to you because you really should be eating. You know that. And you're not here to listen to, but you all at the same time, we all have that vanity bone inside of us. That's like, what if I just tried with Philip's saying for a year or two and see what the difference is? Experiment. You're gonna avoid that psychological roller coaster of gaining and losing weight, and then you're gonna build muscle in a sustainable way that you could potentially just rinse and repeat forever. Now, you can rinse and repeat bulking too, but again, you are stretching up and down a lot more in a lot more extreme way than what we're talking about today. All right. So that again, this is where the system efficiency comes in. So now I want to talk about the next piece, how muscle growth works without this big surplus or without this modest surplus, I should say. To understand this, we have to look at the mechanisms of muscle growth, which happens when the synthesis of protein exceeds the breakdown of protein, which is muscle protein breakdown, MPB. And you actually do not need a calorie surplus for this to occur if three conditions are met. The first condition is that your protein intake is sufficient. Duh. Okay. If you're a new listener, I don't mean to patronize you, you're gonna learn something here. If you've been listening for a while or any other fitness podcast for the last however many years, you know this that protein is super, super important. The research consistently points to 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight, or 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight of intake per day. And at these levels, you're basically maximizing those raw materials available for protein synthesis. It's as simple as that, guys. Get enough total protein a day and you're gonna meet this first criteria. Don't get hung over or hung, don't get hung over either. Don't get hung up on the meal timing and the type of protein and all of that. Total protein's probably gonna get you there. Now, if you have a very restrictive diet, it's gonna be, it's gonna create some problems. Restrictive meaning you're vegan or vegetarian, for example. You know, no knock on you guys. I'm just saying it's harder to get the full, complete amino acid profile without being a little more deliberate. Okay, so total protein. The second criteria where you don't necessarily need a surplus to build muscle, is that your training provides the adequate mechanical tension and progressive overload. Those that's really all we're looking for is training close to failure and always progressing, making things slightly more challenging in the gym so that you get stronger because strength builds muscle, and vice versa. And the signals you're giving your body when you do that is the most important signal to adapt. And your body's gonna take the protein you're eating and build more muscle tissue. And then third is your recovery. I'm sorry to hammer this home time and again, but guys, we have to sleep. We have to manage our stress. I've been using my breathe that more. I actually put it as a complication on my Apple Watch, just so it's staring me in the face every day, doing more breath work and things like that. One minute at a time doesn't take a lot. These are the most powerful hidden levers that allow the process to actually occur. Now I know what you're thinking here. You're like, okay, but where does how is it possible to do this while at maintenance? Doesn't it all net out? We're gonna get to that. Let's talk about energy partitioning because this is where things get interesting. Lean individuals tend to partition their nutrients a little more efficiently toward muscle than fat. And train lifters tend to do the same. People with good insulin sensitivity are better at directing nutrients where they need to go. And as an aside, one of the best things for insulin sensitivity is being active throughout the day and walking. Okay. Just had to put that in there. Resistance training itself improves partitioning, even at maintenance calories. So, what does that mean? What does that mean? That means versus someone who is sedentary, simply by having an active, trained lifestyle with plenty of protein and adequate leanness, right? You're not excessively over fat, you will get more out of your nutrients toward muscle versus fat versus a sedentary person. And that's a huge advantage. Even not sitting a lot for your job and getting up and moving will move that needle toward that direction. There's something called body fat set point theory. Okay, and and and there's mixed evidence on this, and the way it's communicated is often specious, or what am I trying to say? I don't want to say this the wrong way, but basically, people are closer to a lean but not extremely lean body composition, let's say 10 to 15% for men, 18 to 25% for women, they often have better recomp. Okay. Now you would think that somebody with extra fat has better recomp. I would say someone in extra fat, I would lean toward trying to lose the fat actually and be in a deficit because that's gonna be the best net benefit. But for most people in kind of an average leanness, they're gonna have better recomp, their hormonal profile is gonna improve, they're gonna have better nutrient utilization, and they're gonna be running kind of super efficiently and they're gonna maximize muscle gain based on what you're already consuming. Again, we're not talking about a surplus. Surplus is always gonna make it more in terms of muscle gain, period. There's also the concept of myonuclear domain theory. When you train, you gain muscle nuclei. And these nuclei persist even during maintenance or slight deficits. So that means muscle memory is a real thing. It really is. And I see this in someone who is detrained, comes back years later, starts to train again, and wow, they just regain and build that muscle so fast. They just gain it back fast without needing to bulk because the cellular machinery is in place. So these are interesting concepts, aren't they? All right. So that brings us to the what here, the aggressive maintenance protocol I've been alluding to and dropping hints at. What the heck is this? And I haven't seen anyone else explain it this way or use this term, so I should probably trademark it. But I have seen plenty of experienced lifters talk about this in other ways. It's eating around maintenance calories, allowing for those daily fluctuations in calories, the daily fluctuations in your metabolism. You're pushing training hard, you're optimizing your protein intake, and you are eating in a way where you're never in a deficit. So to never be in a deficit, it means you have to knowingly be in the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest surplus. Does that make sense? Okay, because you you're keeping yourself fully recovered and optimized, and you're keeping your tank just a little past full, but you're not adding so much where now it goes to fat storage. Okay. You're also not adding enough to maximize muscle, as I keep mentioning, but you are still biasing it toward muscle gain and maybe some fat loss. But today's not about recomp per se, even though this is a good technique for recomp, in my opinion. Studies show that trained individuals can increase lean mass while decreasing fat mass when protein is high and training is well structured. Again, that's recomp. And then there's recent research on energy flux. That's the total energy turnover, basically eating more and moving more to expend more, right? To increase your metabolism, not cardio per se, not like chronic cardio, but just walking, movement, eating, being active, that doing that promotes leanness and muscle gain, even at maintenance. And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from experience lifters out there, and you see it on Instagram as well, where you don't really have to bulk and you can still slowly gain muscle. I had Holly Baxter on the show. She was talking about the same thing. You're tuning your nutrient delivery, your recovery, and your mechanical stress just the right way to direct your limited resources toward muscle. But you have to be consistent, right? You have to be consistent. So when it comes to like protein, I want you to get your total protein that start there and then start to distribute it across your day, not because it's some magic formula to maximize protein synthesis, although it should bump it up a little bit, a small amount, but mainly because that's going to enforce the consistency and ensure balanced meals, good satiety, habit forming, et cetera. Okay. And I like whole sources of animal-based protein followed by supplementation like whey supplements. Plant-based protein is in there as well. It should kind of naturally fall in there if you're eating a diverse omnivorous diet. If you're vegan or vegetarian, you're gonna have to rely a little more on pea and rice protein and plant-based sources of protein, watching for the fats and carbs and trying to keep it balanced. All right, for resistance training, again, the consistency matters. And that means having the appropriate level of volume for you, which is moderate to high volume because you've got a lot of resources coming in. So 10 to 15, up to 20 sets per muscle group per week, maybe not 20, that might be too much, unless you're in a surplus. So this is where there's some small differences between this and a full-on surplus, but I believe that you're getting still most of the ability to progress because you're not dieting. The fact that you're not dieting gives you a big advantage here. Focusing on compound lifts as the foundation with hypertrophy movements as your developmental and accessory work, using that periodization, you know, using your program long enough to progress, but then avoiding stalls and fatigue by rotating things in the right way, right? I'm not gonna get into the details of programming today. Energy availability, because you're not in a surplus, is also crucial. What I mean by that is carbs. Carbs around your main, around your training is gonna maintain your glycogen and your performance, even though you don't have the higher overall calories. So your carbs should still be pretty darn decent, right? If you're eating, let's say, let's say your maintenance is 2,500 calories, that means you're eating about 2550 or 2600 a day. Because remember, this is called aggressive maintenance. You're being aggressive by pushing it a little bit past all the time. So you're probably gonna have, let's say, I don't know, it depends on your body weight, but let's say you weigh 160. You need, you know, 140 grams of protein, maybe 60 grams, 70 grams of fat, and then 250 grams of carbs or something, maybe 300. It depends, you know, men, women, depends on where your expenditure is, right? But we shouldn't be low carb or keto here, generally. You're gonna get much better results for muscle building when the carbs are there, hitting some minimum threshold. They don't have to be extremely high, just hitting that minimum threshold. And, you know, if you don't have that energy, then your body's gonna draw on other energy systems like your fat and that we call that fasted training. You probably will find a drop-off in performance. But if you're still getting your total carbs for the day, even if you're training fasted, it's still gonna compensate quite a bit for that. All right. So there's a lot of flexibility here. And then your micronutrients are really the hidden levers, your vitamin D, your magnesium, your zinc, you know, all of these things affect your performance, your muscle adaptation. Sleep, of course. Okay, sleep is huge, hydration is huge, all of those things. The goal is to engineer the entire system to gain lean mass. Now, you should be dialing in these things anyway if you were to prepare for fat loss. But what you're doing here is just making this a sustainable way that you do things. This is who I am, this is what I do. I am pushing the maintenance calories just a little bit. And when you do that, what might happen is over a six-month period, you might gain a couple pounds. That means you did it right. And a couple pounds is nothing because hopefully all of those two pounds extra are muscle and some of the pounds that are hidden are muscle as well, meaning you gained more than two pounds of muscle and lost some fat and it did out. So you've gained weight, but you've actually gained more than the gain in muscle. That's really what we're going for here. And that's awesome. And you can tell that by measuring your body, you know, your waist size, how you look, how you feel, how your clothes fit, et cetera. And of course, that you're progressing in the gym. So, you know, speaking of efficiency and gym and programming, I know some of you are thinking, well, what the heck do I do in the gym? If you're kind of new to this and you're busy, like a lot of you are, you're trying to save time in the gym. I definitely want to tell you about our new Ignite training template we just came out in Physique University. It is a four-day upper-lower split. It uses supersets and other time-saving techniques like drop sets, but still incorporates compound lifts and solid principles of progression. Each session takes about 30 minutes max. That's why I love it. To get it, you have to be in physique university. So anybody listening who's there, go get it. It's already out. This is from Coach Carol Hanshu, who's our assistant coach in the group. And if you don't have it, if you're not in physique university, join right now. It's only $27 to join. You can cancel right after you grab it if you want. I don't care, but I hope you'll stick around because you see the value in the courses, the curriculum, the coaching, the live calls, the QA's, all of it. You can then use code FREEPLAN to get the free custom nutrition plan that I will put together for you. So you're gonna get a free custom nutrition plan, and then you're gonna have access to all of our training templates. The free nutrition plan is worth multiples of the price alone. You get all of that. Go to wits and weights.com slash physique to join. Remember to check the box for the plan and then use code FREEPLAN to get it for free. Click the link in the show notes or go to wits and weights.com slash physique for our ignite four-day upper lower time-saving training template. All right, now I want to talk about some of the less discussed aspects of building muscle at maintenance that really make a difference. Glycogen. Glycogen's role goes beyond just energy. You're filling up your glycogen stores, signals your anabolic pathways, anabolic meaning build. You can refill glycogen at maintenance without bulking by using carbs. And I mentioned this already, but you've got to have sufficient carbs and ideally time them around your workouts, which creates an anabolic environment without needing a surplus. The next thing is neurological adaptations. These are significant, especially if you're a newer lifter. Your early strength and size gains are gonna come from neural or neurological efficiency, the motor learning, the motor recruitment, the connection between your brain and your muscles, just to simplify it. And these really don't require surplus, believe it or not. You can get this just by starting to lift weights. Then recomp, when we it's it's worth talking about recomposition a little bit here, because it is more likely when you're in what we call an energy flux state, a high energy flux state. If you know you want to think like you're an athlete, because you are, guys, you you're listening to wits and weights because you want to be an athlete of aging. I actually stole that term from John Sullivan Sully, who wrote Barbell Prescription. Definitely buy that book if you don't have it in your library. Athletes with higher non-exercise activity, right? Higher NEAT, higher daily step count, higher movement, and less sedentary sitting behavior tend to recomp more effectively while at maintenance. Being more active outside the gym helps direct nutrients to muscle, gives you insulin sensitivity. It's kind of counterintuitive because you think, okay, I'm more active, so I require more food. But the system becomes more efficient and the food that you are already getting now goes more toward muscle. If that makes sense. Now, you may need more food as well if your metabolism goes up, and nobody complains about that. Okay. Your sleep architecture, I'm using this term more, sleep architecture, right? The whole system of your sleep quality and quantity. Understanding the slow wave sleep, your deep, your REM sleep, which are correlated with growth hormone release, with muscle protein synthesis. If you have chronically short sleep, less than six hours, you're gonna have a hard time holding muscle, even in when you're in a slightly hypocaloric condition, meaning even when you're in a slight surplus. Sleep quality actually substitutes for a calorie surplus. It is like getting a calorie surplus, guys, for muscle building. Get your sleep. And then there's the protein leverage hypothesis where high protein diets reduce spontaneous energy intake while maintaining an anabolic environment, right? And this explains why some lifters gain muscle without bulking. They're actually leveraging protein to drive both satiety and hypertrophy. And then there are micro surpluses within macro maintenance. Micro meaning day to day, macro meaning overall for the week or for the month or for the year. Your daily calorie intake is gonna hover around maintenance, but really you need to be pushing it a little bit above. In my opinion, about 50 to 100 calories above maintenance on a constant basis. And you may have to switch this up between your training days and your rest days. Maybe. Not everybody has to do that. In fact, most people don't have to do that or overthink it. It's gonna flux with your week because it's not just your training that affects this, it's also your stress and your sleep and your work and your family and your schedule and your vacations and so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. Over the week, it's gonna net out to a few hundred calories over maintenance for the whole week. But it's gonna kind of feel like a little bit of a bulk, which is great. It's gonna feel fueled up. Okay. It's a really great approach, in my opinion. And again, all you're gonna get for it on a negative, and this is not even a negative, is maybe a couple pounds of weight gain over many, many, many months, but you're gonna net muscle gain, which is the goal. So the kind of the last segment here is who benefits the most from skipping the bulk, what we're talking about today. I would say if you are overweight or have a much higher body fat, you definitely don't need to bulk. In fact, this is the one scenario where I'd say you probably still want a slight deficit because you have so much stored energy and you need to drop that body fat. That's so I'll put that there. If you were detrained and you're coming back to lifting, you have all that muscle memory, so to speak, and you're gonna respond really fast, it's a great way to get started and see what you get for your results without needing to go in a surplus. If you're a new lifter and you get these neurological and early hypertrophy gains, right? Newbie gains, again, they require less of a surplus. You're trying to respond to training without needing a ton of extra food. Just make sure you're not dieting. Just make sure you're not dieting. If you are, and then this is the a big category for a lot of you. If you're a lifter who wants to just look good, you want a lean look, you care about aesthetics throughout the year, you want to avoid the cycle of getting fluffy and cutting, you want to stay lean year-round, this is a great way to go. Just let's face it, it's okay. It's okay to have a vanity goal. This is the way to go. And if you're, you know, you're midlife, you're busy, you're professional, you know, raising a family, this aligns perfectly with many of your goals. You want efficiency, you want sustainability, sustainability, long term health. You won't you don't want to deal with drastic swings, which admittedly come with the need for more structure and control to do them the right way. Or I'm gonna raise my hand, having a coach in your corner, or A community like Physique University in your corner, or if you want a free community, get started, join our Facebook group, right? You just don't have that time or desire for these cycles, it's a good way to go. Now, there are some pitfalls, right? The gains are gonna be slower compared to bulking. We talked about that. Also, you do have to still be precise. You have to precisely track how much protein you're eating, your recovery, your training. Too aggressive of a deficit is gonna push you into a surplus. So you've got to just kind of watch out what's happening. In most people's experience, I find it works out no matter what because you're pushing your expenditure up and it's you kind of almost struggle to keep up with it, but not as much as in a surplus. And then there's the psychological trap. If you expect bulking level gains at maintenance, you are gonna be disappointed. You're gonna be disappointed, you're gonna have to bulk in that case. Don't have unrealistic expectations. Okay, but this can be a great approach. So the reason aggressive maintenance works isn't just about the calories or the protein or the training, it's operating at the design limits of your body without exceeding them, at least from a muscle versus fat perspective, right? Again, if we just want raw muscle gain, you're gonna gain more fat as well, and you go after it with a surplus. But this to what we talked about today is its own form of precision that you might find appealing. It is also quite sustainable. It's something you could just keep doing. Now, maybe if you drift over time and gain a few pounds over, say two or three years, you eventually do a fat loss phase, maybe. Or you might find, heck, I'm just leaner and leaner at higher body fat, at higher body weight, and I'm super happy now. I look strong, I'm jacked, I'm lean, I never had to diet. It's possible. So traditional bulking is the fastest way to gain muscle, requires a fat loss phase afterward, and that's a throughput approach. Aggressive maintenance is more of an efficiency approach. So if you want to stay lean year-round while building muscle moderately over time, this is the way. So before we wrap up, remember we do have a review giveaway. If you love the show today, if you learned something, leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell me what you thought of today's episode. Do it by October 15, and one winner will be selected for three months in the mastery track of Physique University, and everybody who submits a review will get a surprise bonus. Just search for Wits and Weights in your app if you're not already in Apple right now. Scroll down, tap write a review, make it happen. I appreciate it. I'm grateful. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, building muscle does not require getting fat. It requires precision, consistency, and a systems based approach.
