Thoughts on lean gains versus bulking

I will commonly get asked about whether I think someone should try and stay lean, or commit to eating a lot more calories to get bigger/stronger.

I think that in the case of most people, this is possibly a false dichotomy; both options are actually a poor option for someone aiming to gain strength and muscle. Eating like a rabbit whilst trying to progress is a wasting your training energy. Stuffing your face with more calories than you need will make you fat and require spending more time cutting down the road.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, progress is what matters in this discussion. When we understand that strength and muscle takes a long time to build, it also makes sense that our food intake should be increased at a progressive rate as well. I'm a big advocate for taking in the minimum effective dose of food to facilitate progressing in the gym. Any more than that is going to just put fat on you. However, I'm also not huge on tracking every morsel of food that passes your lips, as it tends to lead to some fairly neurotic thinking around food.

Really what I promote, is trying to progressively improve your diet, and increase your food intake by way of eating more of the good stuff. It's still easy to get carried away with too many desserts when you're attempting this, and this is where what the kids call 'mini cuts' comes in. I simply call this balancing things out. You take a few weeks to cut out some of the junk, and start getting out for more walks or conditioning. It's my opinion that this natural flux of food intake (resulting in slow and steady progress) , is a better approach for most people than dedicated 'bulking and cutting' phases.