Bulking looks ugly. Your abs disappear, people ask if you stopped training, and the process takes months. Here is what Instagram will never show you.
You can see the bull run on the weight graph. Seriously. I pulled up my tracking app and looked at the last twelve weeks — the line looks exactly like a stock chart in an uptrend. Steady climb, small dips, then higher highs. A textbook bull run, except the asset is my bodyweight and the market is my kitchen.
Entering week 10 of this training cycle. Slow and steady progress. The scale is up, the lifts are up, the skills are holding. But Instagram won't show you the part where my abs disappeared, my face got puffier, and three people asked if I'd "stopped working out."
That's bulking. The part nobody posts about. Let me tell you what it actually looks like.
The Caloric Surplus Math: Not What the Influencers Sell
Every fitness influencer with a meal plan to sell will tell you to eat 500-800 calories above maintenance for a "lean bulk." Then they show you their shredded physique (which they maintained using methods they don't disclose) and promise you'll look the same if you follow their plan.
Here's the truth. A 500-800 calorie surplus is too aggressive for most natural athletes. You'll gain muscle, yes — but you'll also gain a disproportionate amount of fat. And then you'll spend four months cutting, losing some of that hard-earned muscle, and ending up roughly where you started.
My sweet spot: 200-300 calories above maintenance. That's it. A small, controlled surplus that feeds muscle growth without turning you into a water balloon. For me, that's roughly 2,800-2,900 calories per day on training days, and about 2,600 on rest days.
Is it slower? Absolutely. Am I going to gain 10kg in three months? No. But the weight I gain is mostly muscle, and when I eventually cut, I keep almost all of it. The tortoise beats the hare. In bulking, in investing, in everything.
Averaging fundamentally sound stocks during corrections is like being in calorie surplus — you're accumulating assets when conditions are right. The parallel between market cycles and training cycles is not a metaphor. It's the same underlying principle: strategic patience.
The Social Pressure Nobody Warns You About
Here's the thing about bulking that no YouTube video prepares you for: people will think you've let yourself go.
During a bulk, you carry more water, more subcutaneous fat, and more glycogen. Your face gets rounder. Your abs blur. Your shirt fits tighter in the wrong places. And people who saw your lean phase start asking questions. "Bhai, you stopped training?" "Looking a bit soft, no?" "What happened to your six-pack?"
Fix that shit — in your head, not your diet. Because if you cut your bulk short every time someone makes a comment, you'll never build any real size. You'll be the guy who's perpetually lean, perpetually small, and perpetually wondering why he doesn't grow.
Parwah nahi what they think. You're building. They're commenting. There's a difference.
The social pressure is even worse on social media. Every post in your feed is someone at their leanest, most dehydrated, most perfectly lit version. And you're sitting there in week eight of a bulk, looking like a well-fed bear. The comparison game will destroy your bulk faster than bad nutrition ever could.
So stop comparing. Your bulk is YOUR investment cycle. The returns come later.