5 tips for a clean bulking cycle

1Keep an accurate diary

A clean bulk is all about control, so it's essential to maintain your diary to ensure you're sticking to your calorie and macro goals. You'll want to eat in a calorie surplus, but ensure this is controlled within a certain limit (10-20% increase from maintenance). You'll also need to keep a close eye on your protein intake to ensure enough for maximum muscle gains and also ensure you're eating enough carbohydrates to help keep your energy up!

2Avoid relying on 'junk' food

While it's easy to opt for takeaways and convenience foods when you have more calories to play with, these foods are processed and full of saturated fat, salt and sugar. An excess of these nutrients isn’t good at any time, so try not to rely on these foods. Of course, you have a bit more flex to eat certain things slightly outside the healthy range at this time, but try to avoid relying on these sorts of foods entirely throughout your bulk. You can end up feeling sluggish, having poor sleep quality, feeling unmotivated and potentially miss out on essential nutrients – all of which can affect your training progress.

3Follow healthy eating guidelines

On the flipside to this, it's vital during this time to nourish your body in the best way. This means following the usual healthy eating guidelines we should all try to adhere to, which are:

• Eat at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables each day
• Choose wholegrain carbohydrates such as wholemeal bread, wholegrain rice and wholegrain pasta
• Opt for lean protein sources such as chicken, turkey, extra lean beef, fish, eggs, beans, pulses and tofu
• Eat low-fat no-added-sugar dairy foods (milk, cheese, yoghurt), or calcium-fortified dairy-alternatives, as a good source of calcium, while keeping the saturated fat levels down
• Choose 'good' unsaturated fats, found in things like olive oil, nuts, oily fish and avocado
• Limit your intake of foods high in saturated fat, added sugar and salt – such as confectionery, cakes, pastries and takeaways. These should be an occasional treat.

Continuing to eat a diet rich in nutritious foods ensures your body is receiving the nutrients it needs to stay healthy during heavy training, as well as helping to maintain energy levels. A few extra indulgences during this phase are fine, as you have more flex with calories, but ultimately your diet should still follow the 80:20 rule – nutritious foods 80% of the time, with more flexibility the other 20% of the time.

4Focus on micronutrients too

Training hard to gain muscle mass takes its toll on the body so it's more important than ever that you’re getting a balance of nutrients in your diet. While we often talk about macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat), micronutrients are also vital – I'm talking about vitamins and minerals. These are the key nutrients that keep our body functioning at its best and can play a role in energy metabolism, immunity, muscle growth, training recovery and bone health to name a few.

Providing you're following the healthy eating guidance in point 3, you should be getting a good balance of micronutrients such as B vitamins, vitamin C, zinc, calcium and iron in your diet. Aim to have plenty of plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, pulses and wholegrains, in particular to help with getting a variety of vitamins.

5Stay hydrated

Sometimes forgotten about, adequate hydration is vital for maintaining muscle strength and function [4]. It's extra important during the bulking phase to ensure you're drinking plenty of fluid to help optimal functioning of the body and to ensure the muscles are receiving the fluid they need to grow and repair.

The general recommendations are for us to drink around 6-8 glasses of fluid each day, which equates to around 1.5-2ltrs – but when training, and depending on your body size, you could need a bit more. Aim to drink small amounts of water frequently throughout the day and keep an eye on the colour of your urine to check personal hydration levels – a pale straw colour is what you're aiming for.