Should i bulk during summer

Getting fat or putting on muscle? For most, it would be muscle. How slow? The target should be to gain If you go any faster, there is a good chance that most of the weight you gain will be FAT and you will reach the point where you will have to start cutting. This will come faster than expected and cutting sucks. In terms of setting your calories, eat calories more than your maintenance calories. If you see that you are gaining weight very fast, drop the calories a bit.

If you are not gaining weight at all, add more calories. By doing this, you are taking advantage of the period where your body is primed for growth and you can spend a lot of productive time bulking up.

If you have even an iota of correct information, you know that bulking or cutting depends on your calorie intake and not the season.

Invest your time and effort wisely and make a decision best suited to your situation. Pratik Thakkar is an online fitness coach who is regarded as someone who will make it easy for you to understand the process by putting things in the right context and providing science-based recommendations.

In his free time, Pratik likes to read about psychology or play on his PlayStation. He can be reached at thepratikthakkar gmail. Shop Read. Signup with us to unlock all features! Body Building. By Pratik Thakkar. In the short term you need to be prepared to sacrifice being lean during the summer in order to improve your physique in the long term. One approach that people consider to be a more sustainable approach is whether you can bulk on maintenance. Bulking on maintenance means that you consume enough calories to maintain your current body weight.

Bulking for beginners. This approach is also what is more commonly known as lean bulking. From here you will consume your maintenance calories every day whilst still continuing with your weight training.

Even if this is around training days when the surplus of calories can be utilized by the muscles you need to make sure you are finishing the week on a calorie surplus. A typical bulk can be anywhere from kcal — kcal per day and many will even exceed this number though that is a very aggressive approach to a bulk and will result in more fat gain than muscle growth in the long run.

A lean bulk is when you consume kcal — kcal per day in order to still have a surplus of calories and nutrients available for your muscles to utilize but the surplus is so low that not much will be left over for fat storage. This is a great approach to maintaining a physique whilst still pushing for muscle growth however the smaller the surplus the less room there will be for muscle growth. For this reason trying to bulk on maintenance calories is a non-existent term. To bulk you will need to be consuming a calorie surplus.

A maintenance approach is most likely best for the summer months so that you can maintain your physique however if you want any sort of progress and more muscle mass then you will need to consume a calorie surplus.

If you were in two minds about whether you should bulk in the summer or not then it will come down to personal preference. If you are a complete beginner then I believe you should make the most of newbie gains and spend a year or longer in a dedicated bulking phase. This will help your physique in the long run and then later on you can start to give yourself dedicated bulking and cutting phases and yes, these can be based on the seasons!

If you are looking to make changes to your physique by either losing body fat, building muscle or looking to maintain a lean physique then sign up to my weekly newsletter below. There are two ways to break it down. You can start bulking when you hit a certain body fat percentage or level of leanness, or you can simply start bulking at a certain time of year on a regular basis. As for bulking season, the best time to start packing on size is almost always in the fall and winter.

While some of us are extremely skinny and desperately need to add size, a large majority of people have a few pounds or more of fat to lose in order to look our best. Not only that but gaining enough muscle to make a noticeable difference in your appearance is an agonizingly slow process.

You can easily, however, lose pounds of fat per week on a proper cut. So the benefits of cutting a significant chunk of your extra fat off before bulking are:. Doing a proper and successful cut is a much bigger topic than this article can cover, but I personally like to keep it pretty simple:. So to sum up, I think most people will see the best results getting pretty lean before they go into a bulk.

However, some people like to time their bulks and cuts by season, rather than by their physique. Yes, you can cut off a bunch of fat and get shredded in the relative short term, but packing on muscle and getting the combination of size and definition that you want will probably take years.

The best time to cut, or lose fat, is undoubtedly the spring and summer.