By: Chris Gates

So you want to build muscle, and you need to figure out the best way to manage your diet.

I love that! And I’m glad you’re here, because you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we’re going to talk about everything nutrition-related for bulking, and answer the following question: Should you eat less on rest days while bulking?

It’s a popular question, and the thought process typically looks something like this…

• When you’re not exercising, you’re burning fewer calories.
• And if you’re burning fewer calories, that means you could be gaining body fat.
• So logic suggests, you need to change things up day to day.

But that sounds kind of complicated.

Not to mention other dietary factors like how much protein you eat, how many carbs and fats, meal timing, and so much more.

Does that stuff matter?

How complicated does this stuff actually get?

I’ll answer all of those questions, and more, to help you optimize your diet and build as much muscle as possible while bulking, and limit excess body fat.

If that sounds good to you, let’s delay no more! Time to dive into the details.

Interested in getting results like these? Head over to my coaching page to learn more about how 1-on-1 online fitness coaching works!

First, Let’s Talk About Burning Calories

Before we get too far into this topic, let’s start on the surface.

Many people associate fitness with burning calories, and the more exercising you do, the more calories you’ll burn.

Right?

Well… Kind of.

It’s possible that you’ll burn more calories on training days than non-training days. But it’s not a given.

Because exercising isn’t the only thing that burns calories.

Throughout each and every day, your workouts account for roughly 5 percent of your total energy expenditure. The other 95 percent of the calories you burn come from:

• Your internal organs doing their jobs.
• Digesting food.
• Non-exercise activity like walking, doing chores, cooking dinner, etc.

So while exercising burns calories, it’s a very small percentage of what happens throughout the day, and throughout the week. And if you have a day where you’re moving a bit more from a non-exercise perspective, you may actually burn more calories than on your training days.

In fact, most people vastly overestimate the amount of calories they burn while working out.

I share all of this to make it clear that eating more or less on a daily basis may be a flawed approach if you’re doing it for the sole purpose of accounting for calories burned.

It’s not wrong, but there are better reasons to adjust the amount of calories you eat. We’ll dive into those below.

Should You Eat Less on Rest Days While Bulking? A Calorie Surplus is Required

Another important piece of information to cover is what’s optimal for your diet while bulking.

I’m talking about a calorie surplus.

Eating in a calorie surplus is going to be the best way to ensure your diet matches your goal of building muscle. And a calorie surplus is simple to understand:

• A surplus of calories means you’re giving your body more calories than it needs to get through the day.
• Those excess calories can be utilized by your body to recover, adapt, and grow muscle after a hard training session.
• Being in a calorie surplus consistently for an extended period of time will ultimately lead to the best results.

Your calorie surplus shouldn’t be a free-for-all of calories every day, though. That will put you on the fast track to gaining far more body fat than muscle.

You’ll want to approach it with moderation and be diligent with what you put in your mouth.

You can read my article on how big should your calorie surplus be to learn more. In general, I recommend a calorie surplus somewhere in the range of 300-500 calories for people of average height and weight.

Training Hard is Required, Too

While a calorie surplus takes care of the diet side of your bulk, your training matters just as much.

A proper strength training program will be the catalyst to muscle growth.

You need to train legitimately hard, which means you should lift with an intensity that gets you very close to failure with regularity.

No, you don’t need to max out on every lift every time you step foot in the gym. That’s probably counterproductive.

But you need to legitimately challenge yourself if you want your muscles to grow.

You need to be doing enough total training volume, as well. So try to lift within 1-2 reps of failure with regularity, and make sure you’re doing 10-20 sets for each muscle group that you want to grow.

And finally, understand that building muscle is playing the long game.

If you’re bulking, commit to bulking for at least three months, but ideally 6 months or more. It takes time to add muscle to your body.

Give yourself adequate time.

Should You Eat Less on Rest Days While Bulking? The Simple Approach

OK, we’ve addressed all of the background information.

Now, let’s answer this question: Should You Eat Less on Rest Days While Bulking?

If you want to make your bulk as simple as possible, the answer is “no.” You should NOT eat less on rest days while bulking.

Because honestly, having your calories go up and down all the time just gets complicated.

• You have to constantly remember how many calories to eat, based on what you’re doing.
• If something changes, and you can’t train, then what do you do? How do you adjust?
• And as we’ve already discussed, it probably doesn’t make that big of a difference since you’re probably not burning a ton of calories in the gym.

Most people are not advanced lifters. You probably aren’t either.

Which means you are in a great position to get in a moderate calorie surplus and stay there for an extended period of time, to reap the benefits.

1. Train hard.
2. Eat enough.
3. Have fun with it.

And then down the road, you can dive into either a short mini cut (2-6 weeks) or a longer fat loss phase (6+ weeks) to shed any unwanted body fat you accumulated during the bulk.

Building muscle is hard, but burning fat is simple.

So get in that surplus every day, and let your training and nutrition do the work.

Should You Eat Less on Rest Days While Bulking? The Advanced Approach

While the simple answer is “no,” the more advanced answer to should you eat less on rest days while bulking is, “yes.”

And let’s be clear. You don’t HAVE to go this route.

But eating slightly more on training days, and slightly less on non-training days could lead to better body composition across the duration of your bulk.

I want to stress the word “could” in that previous sentence, because it’s not a scientific fact. For various reasons, having a consistent daily surplus (the simple approach) may be more effective for you than this more advanced approach.

But having slightly more calories on training days may fuel better performance in your workouts.

For example, having more calories via carbohydrates a few hours before you train could give you added energy to pull from in your workout. And that could lead to you…

• Knocking out a few more reps.
• Using slightly heavier weight.
• Doing more quality volume.

Those little things add up over time and can really push the needle in the right direction when you want to progressively overload.

And then having more calories across your entire training day could lead to slightly better recovery, which once again will help you build muscle efficiently.

Once you’re 24-48 hours removed from a workout, your muscles should theoretically be fully recovered if you’re in a surplus with adequate protein. So continuing to consume excess calories past that window of time might not be necessary.

This approach is more applicable to experienced lifters — folks who have been lifting consistently for 5+ years, and who have seen considerable progress with muscle gain.

I Hope This Helps!

As you can probably see, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to your bulking diet.

There’s not a strategy that’s best for everyone.

But there are options that you learned in this article, and one of them should hopefully be easy for you to apply to your daily lifestyle to make progress.

I hope you found this article helpful, and I really appreciate you stopping by to read!

If you’re interested in getting help so that you can maximize your bulk and build as much muscle as possible — as efficiently as possible — I would love to help!

I’m an online fitness coach, and I work with people all over the world to build muscle, burn fat, and create lasting results.

Be sure to hop over to my coaching page to learn more about how 1-on-1 online fitness coaching works. And if you’re interested in signing up, submit your application and I’ll reach out to you.

Thanks again for stopping by, and have a great day!

~ Chris