Muscle-Building Diet Dilemma: Clean Bulk or Dirty Bulk?
You’ve finished your summer cut and the thought of increasing your food intake, packing on pounds of muscle, and setting personal records in the gym nearly every week amps you up.
You’ve set some big goals for yourself this winter—both physique and strength goals.
You’ve got your training program prepared and you’re motivated to make some solid improvements.
Then comes the big question—clean bulk or dirty bulk?
That’s the dilemma many lifters are faced with around the beginning fall as the temperature drops and “bulking season” quickly approaches.
Both of these bulking methods focus on the same end goal—building more muscle by combining strength training and a consistent calorie surplus.
Both have their own pros and cons, but which one is ultimately the best and most efficacious muscle-building diet?
Table of Contents
What is Bulking?
Bulking is the practice of deliberately increasing your food intake to put yourself in a calorie surplus.
A consistent calorie surplus combined with progressive resistance training is the simplified recipe for muscle growth. As mentioned earlier, the goal of bulking is to pack on more muscle.
You’ll be eating over maintenance—consuming more calories than you are burning to be in a calorie surplus.
Muscle growth is dependent on many factors, but here are three things that are important for building muscle:
✓ Being in a calorie surplus. Consuming more calories than you are burning to have extra calories left over to build with. Muscle can be built in a deficit, but muscle will be built at a much faster rate when in a caloric surplus.
✓ Eating enough protein. Muscle protein synthesis must exceed muscle protein breakdown, resulting in a positive protein balance.
✓ Your muscles need to consistently be challenged. The principle of progressive overload must be applied to your training to force you muscles to adapt and grow.
When these three things are done consistently, you eventually end up with more muscle.
Now that you understand what bulking is, let’s look at the differences between clean bulking and dirty bulking.
Clean Bulking
Clean bulking—also known as lean bulking—involves intentionally eating in a slight to moderate caloric surplus.
A surplus ranging of 200 to 500 calories will suffice for a clean bulk.
The large majority of your diet is composed of high-quality, nutrient-dense foods.
This will provide your body with enough calories, all of the essential amino acids, and a variety of key nutrients that support your overall health and muscle growth.
Calories are tracked to ensure you’re consuming just enough extra calories, but not too much. Macronutrients may also be tracked to be certain you’re consuming the proper amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and fats.
When calories and macros are being tracked, making the proper adjustments is much easier. This allows you to have more control over your body composition.
Body composition is closely monitored during a clean bulk to make sure you aren’t putting on too much body fat, but steadily putting on lean muscle mass.
The goal with a clean bulk is to pack on as much muscle as possible while keeping fat gain to a minimum.
Dirty Bulking
Dirty bulking consists of eating well over maintenance and not being so concerned with the quality of the food you’re eating.
A calorie surplus of several hundred calories, or even a thousand or more isn’t uncommon. Cheat meals and many calorie-dense foods are the norm.
Almost anything goes. You see food, you eat it. The goal is to pack on as much weight as you can in attempt to maximize muscle growth.
Your diet still consists of healthy foods, but processed foods are often eaten as well. The calorie-dense processed foods can be helpful for getting in large amounts of calories, but they often lack nutrients and contain high amounts of saturated fat and refined sugars—not the healthiest option.
Calories and macronutrients are usually not tracked. Part of the luxury of a dirty bulk is the more relaxed approach it takes. You typically aren’t going to be closely monitoring your calories or macronutrient breakdown. Since you’re eating nearly everything you come across, you know you’re getting in plenty of calories and high amounts of all three macronutrients—protein, carbohydrates, and fats.
Body composition isn’t something you worry about during a dirty bulk. You embrace the weight gain—fat and muscle—and do what it takes to get heavier so you can get stronger and build more muscle.
Clean Bulking vs. Dirty Bulking
Both clean bulking and dirty bulking have their own pros and cons. Let’s compare the two and find out which is ultimately the best muscle-building diet.
Time spent building muscle vs. time spend losing fat
Clean Bulk: Bulking in a slight calorie surplus allows you to build muscle while keeping body fat gains to a minimum. If your body fat levels stay relatively low throughout your bulk, then you won’t have to spend as much time in a calorie deficit to lose the extra body fat. Less time spent in a calorie deficit is ideal. This allows you to spend more time building muscle in a calorie surplus.
Dirty Bulk: Spending long periods of time in a large calorie surplus will result in more body fat gained, but not always more muscle. This means you’ll have to spend more time in a calorie deficit to lose the extra body fat you gained during your bulk. This takes away time that could have been spent building muscle instead. If you put a significant amount of weight, you may be tempted to drastically reduce your calories in attempt to speed up the fat loss process and cut down on the amount of time spent in a calorie deficit. If you do this, your chances of losing muscle and strength increase when you drastically cut calories.
Muscle to fat ratio
Clean Bulk: Approximately 2,500-2,800 calories are needed to build one pound muscle. Does this mean you can eat 2,800 calories over maintenance per day and gain one pound of muscle every day? No, of course not. That’s not possible.
You can only gain so much muscle in a given time period. This is why a surplus of about 200-500 calories is recommended.
You’ll have a much better muscle gain to fat gain ratio. You’ll gradually gain weight and pack on muscle while minimizing fat gain.
That’s the ideal scenario and exactly what happens during a successful clean bulk.
Dirty Bulk: With the dirty bulk approach you’ll most likely gain the same amount of muscle, maybe a bit more, but also much more fat.
The goal of bulking is to add muscle, not fat. With this method of bulking, the ratio of muscle gained to fat gained isn’t ideal.
Sure, you gain a good amount of muscle, but the large majority of those extra calories that went to fat storage were unnecessary. Did you need to gain all that body fat in order to gain that amount of muscle? No, probably not.
Lastly, even if you did gain an extra couple pounds with a dirty bulk, you run the risk of losing that muscle when you cut. The larger the calorie deficit, the higher the probability you end up losing muscle as well.
Your physique
Clean Bulk: Who wouldn’t want to have a great body year round? That’s one of the benefits of a clean bulk.
Instead of only being lean during the summer months, you’re relatively lean and look good year round.
You’re either in great shape or decent shape, but never getting sloppy and out of shape. You’re always within striking distance of single-digit body fat.
It feels good to look good.
Dirty Bulk: Your body composition isn’t much to worry about during a dirty bulk.
You’re embracing the fat gain and doing what it takes to pack on as much weight as you can.
The downside, you don’t look very good. You can say bye to your abs and any remaining muscle definition.
Your health
Clean Bulk: You’re healthier when your diet consists of a variety of high-quality, nutrient-rich foods.
You’re providing your body with the nutrients it needs to carry out the vital processes that keep you alive, healthy, and functioning at a high level.
Dirty Bulk: This usually incorporates more processed, low-quality foods that are high in saturated fat or loaded with sugar.
Over time these foods can result in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance, and excessive weight gain.
These foods also contain very little nutrients—depriving your body and muscles of the vitamins and minerals they need to function at their best. You can be overfed and still be malnourished.
Carrying too much extra body fat can negatively impact your hormones and decrease cardiovascular health. Besides the possible health complications, you’ll be lethargic and won’t be feeling your best.
The transition to a cutting phase (calorie deficit for fat loss)
Clean Bulk: Transitioning to your cutting diet to begin removing the bit of body fat you gained during your clean bulk will be much easier if you’re eating in a moderate calorie surplus composed of healthy foods.
When it comes time to cut, you can still eat the same foods. All you have to do is decrease your portion sizes to put yourself in a moderate calorie deficit.
This makes fat loss a much less daunting and difficult process. Being consistent and sticking with your plan will be much easier.
Dirty Bulk: If you’ve been eating in a 1,000+ calorie surplus for months with half of your diet consisting of basically rubbish, the transition probably won’t be smooth. You’ll have to cut your calories more.
There will be a lot changes that need to be made to your diet. This can make adhering to the fat loss plan much more challenging than it needs to be.
Hormonal profile, insulin sensitivity, and nutrient partitioning
Your hormones are in a healthy range when your body fat is also within a healthy range. High levels of body fat is associated with lower testosterone and higher estrogen. When you carry too much body fat testosterone gets metabolized into estrogen by fat cells, lowering testosterone levels. If your goal is to build muscle, decreasing the levels of this crucial muscle-building hormone is not what you want.
Insulin sensitivity refers to how your body responds to insulin. Insulin is a hormone that gets released from the pancreas when a meal has been consumed—especially a carbohydrate-rich meal. The carbohydrates you ate get broken down into glucose and circulate in your blood stream. Insulins main job is to bind to cells and allow glucose to be taken up by muscle cells, the liver for later use, or fat cells. When you’re insulin resistant, insulin can’t bind to the cells to allow glucose to enter them. Blood glucose levels remain high, causing your pancreas to pump out more and more insulin. This results in fat storage and can lead to blood vessel, nerve, and organ damage. Eventually leading to diabetes.
Optimizing your insulin sensitivity is key for building muscle, staying lean, and being healthy. The more sensitive your body is to insulin, the better off you’ll be. When you’re sensitive to insulin your nutrient partitioning is good. Glucose can easily be shuttled into your muscles to be used as fuel for intense workouts and building muscle. Insulin is able to shuttle nutrients and amino acids into muscles as well.
If you’re excessively overconsuming carbohydrates and eating processed foods loaded with refined sugars, you run the risk of decreasing your insulin sensitivity and eventually becoming insulin resistant. When you’re insulin resistant, your nutrient partitioning isn’t good. The nutrients, calories, and especially carbohydrates you consume are much less likely to be stored as glycogen in muscle cells, and much more likely to be stored as fat. Higher levels of body fat are often associated with poor insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning. This is one of the big benefits of a clean bulk. Your insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning won’t suffer and you’ll find it easier to build muscle.
Clean Bulk: Your hormones are likely to stay in a healthy and normal range. Your insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning are on point. This allows your body to productively use the nutrients you consume.
Dirty Bulk: Your run the risk of decreasing testosterone and increasing estrogen if your body fat levels get too high. As you gain more body fat, your insulin sensitivity may decrease which impacts how your body handles the nutrients consume. As you gain more and more fat, gaining muscle becomes more difficult and gaining fat becomes easier.
Rate of gains
Clean Bulk: When you’re carefully monitoring your nutrition and eating slightly above maintenance, you run the risk of eating too close to maintenance.
Some people are fearful of gaining body fat. They limit their calories a bit too much and end up eating at maintenance, or even worse, eating under maintenance. In this case, muscle growth will definitely be slower compared to a dirty bulk. When a clean bulk is done right, muscle growth happens at a decent rate and fat gain is limited. Sounds simple, right? Well, not quite.
Finding the caloric intake that will maximize muscle growth while limiting fat gain will require some experimenting and trail and error. Use the BMR and TDEE formulas to get a close estimate of your calorie requirements.
Dirty Bulk: Many lifters are eagerly looking to pack on as much muscle as they can, as quickly as they can.
Many people believe more weight gain means more muscle (not true). That’s what makes dirty bulking so appealing.
The weight gain comes fast and you love seeing the number on the scale climb. Your clothes are getting tighter and it makes you feel big. In the gym, you’re setting personal records left and right. Friends and family members comment on how much bigger you’ve gotten recently.
Trust me, I’ve done my fair share of dirty bulks and I know the feeling. You definitely will gain muscle during a dirty bulk. There’s no doubt about that. Potentially even faster gains compared to a clean bulk. There are other factors involved in muscle growth besides calories.
It’s up to you to decide if the potentially faster muscle growth is worth the unnecessary amount of body fat you’ll add that you’ll eventually have to get rid of.
The table below shows how much muscle you can expect to gain based off your level of experience. This table was put together based off research done on some of the top natural bodybuilders.
As you can see, once you get a few years of lifting under your belt, the rate of progress slows down significantly.
You can’t force more muscle growth by simple eating in a larger and larger surplus. It’s a waste.
The only group of lifters I’d suggest bulking a bit more aggressively is beginners. This is because they’re able to pack on much more muscle in their first year or two.
I still don’t suggest a dirty bulk, but I do suggest a bulk consisting of quality foods and a surplus of 600-700 calories instead only a few hundred.
Structure, discipline, attention to detail
Clean Bulk: Clean bulking is composed of healthy, high-quality foods that carry a variety of nutrients. Your calories and macronutrients are tracked to ensure you’re eating the correct amounts.
You’re probably still prepping meals. Your body composition is closely monitored to make sure you’re adding muscle while limiting fat gain. You might even be doing cardio a few days a week to keep body fat levels in check.
All of this requires more structure, discipline, and attention to detail. If you ask me, that all sounds great. I love having detailed structure built into my life and I believe this helps build better habits. However, for many people this is a pain the ass to deal with. This is another feature of the dirty bulk that makes it appealing. A much more relaxed approach can be taken.
Dirty Bulk: Dirty bulking consists of a much more relaxed approach that does not require the same amount of attention to detail and discipline.
Calories and macronutrients probably aren’t being tracked. Your body composition isn’t something you’re worried about. You’re definitely not doing cardio. There’s much less structure in your nutritional approach.
For some people, this is exactly what they want. Someone who’s been dieting all summer to get as lean as they can may not want to keep tracking their food intake or worry about their rate of weight gain. They rather take a less strict approach, enjoy food as much as they want, and keep lifting heavy.
The cost
Clean Bulking: High-quality foods are typically more expensive. Grass-fed beef, Ezekiel bread, brown rice, wild caught Alaskan salmon, fruit, vegetables, and nuts are much more expensive than processed foods with refined sugars.
You can eat an entire pizza and get in plenty of calories for a decent price. It would cost much more to get that same amount of calories from healthy foods.
If you’re like me, the higher cost of healthy foods is worth it. Health is priceless, but some people still rather go for convenience and lower cost if it means getting in the calories.
Dirty Bulking: As mentioned above, dirty bulking can sometimes be cheaper due to the lower quality of food, but it’s not always cheaper.
If you’re truly eating an enormous amount of food, you might end up spending more, even though you’re buying cheaper foods. It comes down to your total calorie intake and where your calories are coming from.
For those with a very fast metabolism
I’m sure you knew a kid like this growing up, or maybe you were this kid, or still are. He could eat endless amounts of junk food every single day and never put on an ounce of body fat.
He was naturally skinny with a very fast metabolism. He quickly and efficiently burned through whatever he was fed.
These guys might struggle to gain weight on a clean bulk, especially when you factor in the intense workouts 4-5 days a week.
High-quality, healthy foods typically have less calories. For example, an entire pound of chicken breast only has 480 calories. Two average slices of pizza has about the same amount of calories or even more. Getting in the calories that are needed to be in a surplus and build muscle can be challenging for those with extremely fast metabolisms.
If 85-90% of their diet is composed of healthy, high-quality foods, they need to eat much more food in terms of total volume.
For these guys, dirty bulking seems more appealing since many processed foods are very calorie-dense, meaning you get a lot of calories for not that much food.
This can make it easier for them to consistently be in a large enough calorie surplus to gain weight and put on muscle.
Even for those with exceptionally fast metabolisms, I still wouldn’t suggest a dirty bulk. I would suggest eating more healthy, calorie-dense foods.
Some examples are whole wheat pasta, beef, fatty fish like salmon, nuts, nut butters, olive oil, avocados, and whole eggs. You can strategically throw in cheat meals as needed.
The Final Verdict
In the long-run, clean bulking seems to be the better choice for building a lean and muscular physique. You get to spend more time putting on muscle and less time losing fat. I think everyone rather spend more time building muscle and less time attempting to lose fat in a calorie deficit. It’s not much fun eating under maintenance.
You look better and you’re healthier year-round. I think the large majority of people would prefer that as well.
In my opinion, dirty bulking is unnecessary. I find it’s mainly used as an excuse for those who lack the discipline and self control to eat well year-round. The excessive and unnecessary fat gain is not worth it.
The amount of time needed to rid your body of fat, the possible decrease in testosterone and insulin sensitivity, and potential harm done to your health is all not worth an extra couple pounds of muscle. That is, if you even gain any extra muscle compared to a clean bulk.
I’ve done multiple dirty bulks myself. I know the pros and cons. I’ve experienced them myself. Most of my dirty bulks were in the early stages of my lifting career. As I became both more advanced and more knowledgeable, I realized clean bulking is the way to go. I’ve experienced both and have been able to make an unbiased and fair comparison.
If your goal is to build a jaw-dropping, lean and muscular physique, a clean bulk will likely be more effective strategy to get there.
Need some guidance packing on lean muscle mass, getting stronger, and getting the body you want? Fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!