subject: To be lean or bulked up [print this page] To be lean or bulked up To be lean or bulked up
Anyone who has been hitting the gym for a couple of months and has started to build a little bit of muscle knows that the best thing you can do for your body is to build muscle while keeping your fat levels really low. This is of course a lot easier said than done, however there are a couple of traps people often get caught in and these traps keep them from getting the results they want with their body.
The first trap a lot of people get caught in is that they measure their bodybuilding and muscle building success based on the criteria of how much they weigh on the scale. If they go up in weight they are really happy and if they go down they panic and start eating more because they think they are losing precious and hard earned muscle.
This is actually far from the truth and you really can't and shouldn't measure your training success based on the scale. Your scale weight can fluctuate greatly depending on a lot of different factors including water and sodium levels, how large meals you had and how much sugar you are storing in your muscles. It is for this same reason that you often find guys weighing the same, yet having two totally different body frames. What you want to start thinking of is the term lean mass. What lean mass basically is, is the weight of the pure amount of muscle you are packing on your frame.
A lot of people who get caught in the mindset of putting as much weight as possible start looking really bloated and fat after eating like madmen for a couple of months. Even though they are putting on muscle, they have a very "soft" look because of all the water and fat they are storing. This fat is definitely not easy to just get rid off afterwards and what usually happens is that a lot of these guys stay kind of chubby long after they stop their bulking experiment.
What is even worse is that most of these big guys don't even have as much lean mass as the lean guy weight a lot less than them. Therefore you should at all points in your training career focus on how much lean muscle you are packing instead of being impressed by a guy who weighs a really soft and chubby 240 pounds with a little muscle hidden underneath all the fat.
