Bulking vs. Lean Gaining: Fitness Perspectives Explored

Ella argues that lean gaining is more effective than bulking and cutting for both naturals and enhanced lifters.

### Rethinking Bulking and Cutting: Insights from Enhanced vs. Natural Bodybuilding
* 💬 The debate between bulking and cutting often centers around whether those on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) have different needs compared to natural lifters, but the argument can be made that the **opposite is true**.
* 🌟 Coach Greg and Scientific Snitch, Ella, discuss the rapid growth of Ella's channel, highlighting her **impressive knowledge of training and nutrition** at just 22 years old, which she attributes to her **early engagement with scientific studies**.
* 📚 Ella emphasizes the importance of staying updated with new scientific findings, stating that "**new science comes out every year or so**," which is crucial for informed discussions in fitness and health.
* 📊 They challenge the traditional notion that bulking and cutting is essential for muscle gain, arguing instead that **maintaining a healthy body fat percentage while slowly gaining muscle** may be more effective, based on literature.
* ⚖ Ella explains that gaining body fat during a bulk does not contribute to muscle growth and can lead to negative consequences, such as **decreased glycogen and protein availability**, which are vital for **muscle hypertrophy**.
* 📈 The conversation highlights overfeeding studies showing that fat cells can divide during bulking, leading to **long-term difficulties in maintaining a lean physique**, which contradicts the idea that bulking is **necessary for muscle gain**.
* 🔄 They conclude that for natural lifters, **lean gaining is a more sustainable approach**, while enhanced lifters may benefit from a different mass gaining strategy without the **drastic bulking and cutting cycles**.
* 🤔 Ultimately, they agree that bulking is no longer a necessity for most individuals, emphasizing that **understanding maintenance calories is key** to achieving and sustaining a healthy body composition.

So, for example, an argument would be, "Well, Greg, you're on HRT, so you don't need to bulk and cut. But if I'm doing it naturally, I need to bulk and cut." Do you think there's a difference between natty and enhanced in terms of the need to bulk and

cut? I would argue the exact opposite. [Music] Because Coach Greg and I are here with Scientific Snitch, and she goes by the name of Ella. Her channel is exploding in popularity; this girl had like 50,000 followers about a month ago,

she's almost at 990,000. And so she's going to the moon! I'm telling you guys, in a year or two she's going to have a million followers. And so I highly recommend you follow her channel. So, welcome.

great to be on the channel. Um, so yeah, I work in a lab, I do coaching, I like everything to do with science. And what's shocking to me is I've watched your content—I'm a fan, you're very educated—but I come to find out you're only 22

years of age. How is it possible that you know so much about training, nutrition, everything at such a young age?

I kind of started a little earlier. When I first learned how to read studies, and after I learned how to read studies, I just started reading like a study every

weekend. And it was something that became a hobby of mine, and I would make TikTok videos on the studies I read. They eventually popped off, and since then I've upgraded my knowledge and talked to other professionals who are online.

Platforms, um, and it's... I feel like there's always something to say that everybody has a piece of knowledge that you don't have. So if you learn what that is, then you're going to make yourself a smarter person at the end of the day. I think what I

really like about your videos is that you give the science behind what people actually think. So you'll, for example, you'll mention Jeff Nippard or Paul Saladino or, uh, Eddie Hall or all these guys who might say something and you're like, "This is what the actual science

says," and then we can have a debate. It's nothing against the person; it's just, "This is what the science is saying," and you report it in a very concise manner, about one minute in length as far as like the science goes. I feel like there's a very big emphasis on one point

in many different influencers where they'll grasp onto this one idea and they won't let go of it for the life of them. And it's really important to acknowledge that new science comes out every year or so. So even I might be wrong in maybe a year or so, but it's

just about like making sure to look at the broader range of information that's out there, rather than just focusing and hyper-fixating on that one point and never budging from it. It's always important to be skeptical, and I feel like that's what, um, needs to be

added to the discussion when it comes to fitness and health. Very good point. With new science, new opinions come out and things change, and so we see that with new supplements coming in all the time. But another thing that we've seen is the topic of mass gaining; it's coming

And gone, uh, today I think that, uh, bulking is vaulted, or it's basically at this point that we don't need to bulk and cut, which I'm gonna say 95% of people think you need to bulk and then cut in order to put on muscle that

that's the optimal way to do it. I've seen some of your videos, and so let's have a little discussion: Do you need to bulk and cut to put on muscle optimally, or could you, for example, maintain a healthy body fat percentage, which I say

is, for example, for men, let's call it 15%; for women, 25%, and just slowly put on muscle over time? Or should we bulk up to perhaps 10 or 20 pounds, get on a little bit more fat, get a bit more sloppy, and

then diet it down? And will that be, in fact, better based on the studies that you've seen? Based on the studies I've seen, that bulking and cutting is not supported by the literature, at least to the extent that people think. Um, a lot of people will cite these short—and I say

short-term, because this is the longest study we'll ever have on this topic—but short-term or quote-unquote long-term outcome studies in people who are trained and bulking. But the issue is that they never compare it to actually doing like a lean-gaining sort of thing

that you preach. And honestly, it makes a lot more sense to do that than bulking up and gaining body fat because, if you want to think about it like this: If you're gaining body fat, those calories aren't going towards your muscle; they're going towards body fat, and if you're

Just storing body fat over time, you're eventually going to have to cut back down. And when you do, you're taking calories away from carbs, which depletes you of glycogen; you're taking calories away from protein, which takes away one of the main signals for muscle

hypertrophy; or you're taking away fats, which can have a bad impact on your mood and your overall mental health. So it's a mixture of: you have to take something away at a certain point, alongside the fact that if you're putting on body fat, it's not muscle—

you can't just force body fat to turn into muscle. And if we can build muscle in a deficit, then we can build muscle at maintenance. Yeah, the trouble I had with that was always like, I could see how eating in a calorie surplus—at more calories—

force-feeding, perhaps—would build a little bit more muscle. I could get behind that. Okay, I'm like, okay, that makes sense logically. But then you're fatter, and now you have to go on a diet, and so now you're in a deficit. And so while I'm maintaining and eating

what I need, you're now in a cut. And so how could you possibly build as much muscle while you're dieting? And so I feel like both methods, in the end, are going to result in the exact same amount of muscle built over, say, a year,

two years, or five or 10 years. That's 100% what I basically preach. Um, and a big reason—and I actually also, even though I do feel like there is a potential to build more muscle on a bulk, I don't think that the way that a lot of

What people do when they first start going to the gym is bulk, and that's going to be conducive to extra muscle, um, specifically when we're talking about getting bigger. If you're coming from a place where you're very small, going and bulking to an extent that you

are at a higher body fat percentage, you are increasing the amount of fat cells you have because that is one of the primary starting points of body fat gain. So it's uh, you're almost stepping on your own foot when you want to get leaner, and I don't think that

newbies should bulk until they're overweight or obese. Very interesting point. Now, remember, I'm old; I'm 49, pushing 50. Pushing 50 keys is a testosterone across the border, but that's besides the point. When I was 22, when I was your age,

you weren't even born yet, and we learned that there were three times in your life where fat cells could divide. This is what I was taught: when during pregnancy, when you're a baby, or during puberty; that was the only time that fat cells could actually divide and multiply. But

what I'm hearing is that new science is saying that when you go on a bulk, the fat cells—the billions or however many you have—some of them are dividing, and they're there permanently. And so if you bulk and cut every time you go through this,

you're actually having more fat cells, and so it's even going to be harder to stay lean over time. Yeah, so basically, the entire idea behind that; we have about 300 different overfeeding studies, and you can see this in the systematic review, um, and I can send over

The link, too, if you want to pull it up or whatnot. Um, but there have been over 300 overfeeding studies over the past several years—I don't even remember how long, but it's a lot of studies. And what we've seen is in healthy young

individuals who eat and overeat in a caloric surplus, they start gaining fat cells first. And this makes sense from a survival and evolutionary perspective: if we were out in the wild and faced with a surplus, wouldn't it be better to have more fat

storage so that way, when you do cut back, you have that essential body fat that you need because you have more energy stores? So, typically when you start overfeeding, fat cell division is the first step, and then they undergo hypertrophy. Although fat cell division isn't the problem,

the hypertrophy part is. So, if you want to think about it like this: if your fat cells are dividing, that's not going to be a huge deal in the short term,

but in the long term, when those fat cells hypertrophy, that's when they're going to start sending those metabolic dysregulation signals, which are not conducive to being able to diet down. So, from an evolutionary perspective, this seems to

make sense because a lot of people think that we're like, 'It's 2024; you can eat whatever you want,' and so on. But we've got to think 10,000 or 100,000 years ago; we didn't have what we have now.

Right now, and so if you were being faced with starvation in the winters, and every time you had to go through that, that if your fat cells divided and became more plentiful, and it made it easier to get fat, that would actually be a good thing.  In 2024, being fat or obese is just not good.

But thousands of years ago it probably was. And so, from an evolutionary adaptive thought process, it makes sense that that's how our bodies would work. Yeah, it does. And even though I'm not I'm not very big on the whole, like, ancestral, like, 'look at what our ancestors did,' like...

I I'm not all into that sort of thing, um, mainly because there's not a lot of evidence to back that up. But what we do have is those overfeeding studies, and those overfeeding studies make sense from an

evolutionary perspective. They also go to show you—in histology, you literally see in these healthy individuals who are overfed, more fat cells; and in fact, some of their fat cells actually shrunk in size—like, the average size of the fat cell shrunk because there were more. So,

it wouldn't make any sense if fat cell hypertrophy was the primary driver of fat gain, which is...I found that kind of interesting. And so, are there any studies at all that say if you keep dieting that maybe your fat cells stay smaller, easier

longer, or that they disappear? And that the more times you diet, the easier it is to stay shredded? Or is that just silly to think? I would think that the more times you stay lean, like the more, like the length of time that you stay lean, probably will have a bigger impact on

How easy it is to stay lean rather than cycling. We know that weight cycling is inherently bad for us. We know that that can drive up insulin resistance because as fat cells hypertrophy, that's when that insulin resistance kind of comes on. Um, and we

also see that in overfeeding studies where individuals who have, uh, who gain weight and then lose weight, they tend to have a poor amount of insulin sensitivity when they're weight cycling. However, with that being said, I don't think that staying lean is inherently bad; it just would be

inherently bad for building muscle because you just don't have as much body fat on you to play around with. And so I think what main gaining—I think that the pushback is that a lot of people are saying main gaining doesn't work, or guys

who are—I don't know if you know, like Tristan Lee—guys like single-digit body fat that are very lean all the time, and they have a harder time putting on muscle. But that's because they're not eating enough in the first place. If you

get to that healthy weight, main gaining is all you need to do. But if you're perpetually comp eating, like you're a bodybuilder like [inaudible] or any Mr. Olympia competitor, of course you're going to bulk and cut. You're at 5% body fat,

you might bulk to 12 to 15%, then you cut back to five. But if you're a normal human being, you're probably already fat. I mean, most people are fat to start with, and so why are you going on a bulk if you've already bulked? If you're walking around

And you're at 25% body fat right now; why are you actually adding more calories? You already have more than you need.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. Um, and I feel like a lot of people push back because they don't actually understand

what maintenance means. I get a lot of people saying that maintenance calories is just maintaining your body weight, but the issue with that is that it's not just body fat and muscle; you have water weight, you have glycogen stores, and you can only—of course, you can only

fill your glycogen stores to a certain extent before they're kind of capped out. And that's why we build body fat when we bulk, um, because it's not going towards our glycogen at that point; it's just going towards body fat.

With that being said, being somebody who's extremely lean and then trying to maintain or gain probably isn't going to work too well for you, um, especially if you're such a low body fat percentage. I see why bodybuilders have to do it, but even they are not necessarily doing the bulk and cut cycle

because they're not bulking to an absurd extent. Like, they're not getting—they're not—like, especially if you're talking about somebody as competitive as, say, Big Ramy. I can almost guarantee he's not bulking to obesity and then coming back down. No, he's probably 12% maximum, and

all these other, like, Mr. Olympia's—like, Derek Lunsford, he won last year's Mr. Olympia—offseason 10% max. These guys are shredded year-round, but then people will say, yeah, but they're on steroids. So do you think there's a big difference?

Between, like, natural versus enhanced. So, for example, an argument would be, "Well, Greg, you're on HRT, so you don't need to bulk and cut. But if I'm doing it naturally, I need to bulk and cut." Do you think there's a difference between natty and

enhanced in terms of the need to bulk and cut? I would argue the exact opposite, because people who are on androgenic compounds, they tend to grow faster; they have an extra...

So if you want to think about it like this: if my pinky finger is the

pathway for recovery, this is like the pathway for, um, the pathway for steroids and androgenic compounds, where they're kind of overlapping each other. But instead of having, like, damage and an injury to start off with the recovery pathway, you have steroids which, at the

very end of the day, end up in more growth. So you're not just replacing what you lost, but you're growing on top of what you already have. So you're hijacking something that normally would just keep you the same size, but using it for growth. People who are on anabolics,

they're more likely to grow faster, and it just does not make any sense why you would say that it would work less for naturals. If that's the case, okay, I like this. This is so... for people, like, what I'm hearing is if you're

natural, the argument should be definitely that lean gaining is going to work. But if you're enhanced, maybe bulking and cutting would benefit you because you're building muscle perhaps 10 times faster, and you need all those extra calories. I wouldn't argue necessarily that bulking and

Cutting, I would say that it would just be a different type of mass gaining. So, like when we're talking about mass gaining, we're increasing calories in proportion to how much muscle we're gaining. So to them, maybe it seems like a bulk because they're increasing those

calories so quickly, but in reality, their body fat percentage is still staying the same. Like, the same sort of pathways and mechanisms are going to work for people who are on anabolics versus natural; it's just one is going to be a little faster.

So you're just increasing that rate, that increased calorie amount, a little bit faster. But with that being said, as I said before, maintenance calories does not necessarily equal maintenance of just body weight; it's more so maintenance of body fat, because that's what we store and use when we eat too

much or we eat too little.  B King is vaulted. Do you agree with this? Don't need to bulk. All right, yeah, I don't need a bulk.

Scientific Snitch

Greg Doucette

Introduction and discussion about the necessity of bulking and cutting for muscle gain.

Initial question regarding the difference in bulking and cutting between natural and enhanced individuals.

Introduction of Ella (Scientific Snitch) and her growing popularity on social media.

Ella's background and admiration for Greg's knowledge despite his young age.

Greg's explanation of his knowledge acquisition through studying and creating content.

Ella's appreciation for Greg's approach of presenting scientific evidence in fitness discussions.

Analysis of the scientific evidence regarding bulking and cutting.

Greg's perspective on the current trend of minimizing bulking and cutting.

Discussion on maintaining a healthy body fat percentage while slowly gaining muscle.

Ella's perspective on the lack of scientific support for the necessity of bulking and cutting.

Explanation of the drawbacks of gaining body fat during bulking, including potential negative effects on muscle growth and overall health.

Discussion on the challenges of building muscle while dieting after a bulking phase.

Discussion on fat cell division and its implications for bulking and cutting.

Greg's previous understanding of fat cell division and its contrast with new scientific findings.

Ella's explanation of the potential increase in fat cells during bulking.

Ella's reference to over 300 overfeeding studies and their findings on fat cell division and hypertrophy.

Explanation of the evolutionary perspective on fat cell division and its relevance to modern lifestyles.

Discussion on whether frequent dieting leads to smaller and fewer fat cells.

Comparison of bulking and cutting strategies between natural and enhanced individuals.

Question regarding the difference in bulking and cutting needs between natural and enhanced individuals.

Ella's argument that enhanced individuals might benefit from bulking and cutting due to faster muscle growth.

Analogy to explain how anabolic compounds enhance muscle growth.

Ella's suggestion that for enhanced individuals, it might be a different type of mass gaining rather than traditional bulking and cutting.

Reiteration of the importance of considering body fat maintenance rather than just body weight maintenance.