Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of clients who have followed the classic “dirty bulk” approach (eating anything and everything to gain size as quickly as possible) and who generally aren’t happy with the results. While this can lead to some muscle gain, it usually comes with excessive fat accumulation, making it difficult to achieve and/or maintain a lean, muscular physique in the long run.
When I work with a client in this situation, my goal is generally to shift their mindset away from the idea that “more weight equals more muscle” and toward a smarter, performance-driven approach to gaining size.
Here’s how I would structure their plan to break the dirty bulk cycle and build quality muscle without unnecessary fat gain.
Step 1: Get Lean First
One of the biggest mistakes I see with chronic dirty bulkers is that they assume muscle-building is just a matter of “eating big to get big.” While it’s true that muscle requires a calorie surplus to grow, force-feeding your body excessive amounts of food, especially without monitoring macronutrient intake and not focusing on food quality, often leads to unnecessary fat gain rather than quality muscle growth.
As a result, many people who have fallen victim to the dirty bulking cycle are carrying a lot of excess fat. So, when I am working with a client who had spent years dirty bulking, my first goal wouldn’t be to immediately throw them into another bulk. Instead, I’d shift their focus to getting lean first.
Why You Need to Get Lean Before Bulking
Here’s why you ideally want to get lean first:
- Higher Body Fat Lowers Insulin Sensitivity: When you have higher body fat levels (≥20%+ for men, ≥30% for women), your body becomes less efficient at partitioning nutrients. This means that instead of sending excess calories toward muscle repair and growth, a higher percentage gets stored as fat. By reducing body fat and improving insulin sensitivity, we make sure that when the client does start eating in a surplus, more of those calories are being used for muscle rather than fat storage.
- Hormonal Optimisation for Muscle Growth: Carrying excessive body fat can negatively impact testosterone levels while increasing estrogen and inflammation. Since testosterone is critical for building muscle, bringing body fat down to a leaner, healthier range (around 10-15%) can actually enhance muscle-building potential in the long run.
- Improved Aesthetic and Motivation: Many clients who have spent years dirty bulking feel uncomfortable in their bodies. They might feel big, but not in a way that looks lean or athletic. By losing fat first, they’ll get to see more of their muscle definition, which often boosts motivation and confidence. When they start their next bulk, they’ll be in a better mental and physical position to make lean, quality gains.
- A More Productive Muscle-Gaining Phase Later: If you start a lean bulk at 12% body fat and gain muscle slowly, you can continue bulking for months, even years, before you ever need to cut again. But if you start at 20% body fat and gain more fat quickly, you’ll need to cut again soon, constantly spinning your wheels without making real long-term progress.
How I Would Set Up a Fat Loss Phase for a Former Dirty Bulker
Once my client understands the importance of getting lean before bulking, I’d guide them through a structured, sustainable fat loss phase.
1. Creating a Moderate Calorie Deficit
The goal here is steady fat loss without sacrificing muscle mass. I don’t want my client to aggressively diet because large deficits can lead to strength loss, muscle loss, and negative metabolic adaptations. Instead, I’d aim for a smaller deficit that has them losing ~1% of their body weight per week.
This isn’t a starvation diet, it’s just a controlled reduction to shift their body toward fat loss while preserving muscle.
2. Prioritising High Protein Intake
Protein is crucial during a fat loss phase. It helps:
- Preserve lean muscle mass while in a calorie deficit
- Keep hunger in check (protein is the most satiating macronutrient)
- Support recovery and strength retention
I’d set my client’s protein intake at 2g per kilogram of body weight (or even slightly higher if they’re in a steeper deficit). For an 80 kg client, that means aiming for ~160g of protein per day.
3. Smart Carbohydrate and Fat Management
Since my client is coming from a background of dirty bulking, where carbs and fats were likely consumed in excess, I’d work on rebalancing their macronutrient intake:
- Fats: Healthy fats are important while dieting, but we’d cut back on unnecessary excess fat intake, especially from stuff like deep-fried foods and fast food. Keeping fats moderate (around 0.6-0.8g per kg per day) supports health without leading to excessive calorie intake, and still generally leaving enough room for adequate carb intake.
- Carbs: Instead of excessive, uncontrolled carb intake, I’d structure their carb intake around whole food sources, likely prioritising carbs around training. Depending on how many calories they need to consume to be in a deficit, they may or may not have a lot of carbs to play around with. So we generally want to ensure the carbs are being used effectively to fuel training.
4. Training Focus: Maintain Strength, Don’t Chase Volume
One of the biggest mistakes people make when cutting is changing their entire training style. Many switch to high-rep, low-weight “fat-burning workouts,” but this often leads to muscle loss rather than retention.
Instead, I’d have my client keep their training intensity high, focusing on maintaining or even improving strength in their main lifts.
- Primary Goal: Retain as much strength and muscle as possible.
- Lifting Plan: Keep compound lifts heavy (squats, deadlifts, presses), but slightly adjust volume if recovery becomes an issue.
- Reps & Sets: 6-8 reps on heavy compounds, 8-15 reps on the more accessory movements.
- Cardio: Used strategically, not excessive, just enough to support fat loss and health.
For a former dirty bulker, I’d start with 3-4 days of weight training per week and gradually add low-impact cardio as needed (e.g., 20-30 minutes of incline walking or cycling) until they were getting at least 90 minutes of aerobic exercise per week.
We ultimately want to get into good training habits that will benefit us once we eventually transition to a gaining phase.
5. A Sustainable Approach to Cardio
Dirty bulkers often fear cardio because they associate it with losing gains. The truth is, when done correctly, cardio can enhance the cutting phase without compromising muscle.
- Start with 8,000-10,000 steps per day as a baseline.
- Add 1-2 low-intensity sessions (20-30 mins each) to build aerobic fitness and help with fat loss.
- Keep high-intensity cardio to a minimum (unless necessary for personal preferences).
By avoiding extreme cardio (like excessive HIIT), we ensure the client’s recovery and training performance remain strong. A lot of people think they need to do higher intensity cardio, but it very often just leads to poorer recovery and reduced gym performance, especially when dieting.
6. Tracking Progress: The Key to Long-Term Success
To make sure the fat loss phase is effective, I’d have my client track:
- Body weight trends (aiming for ~1% drop in bodyweight per week)
- Gym performance (strength should remain stable, or even increase)
- Progress photos (taken every 2-4 weeks to track definition changes)
- Energy and hunger levels (to ensure we have things set up correctly)
Of course, there are more metrics we could track, but as I am trying to walk you through this in a more generic sense, these are the main ones to focus on.
If weight loss is too slow, we’d slightly reduce calories or increase movement. If it’s too fast, we’d increase calories slightly to prevent muscle loss.
The End Goal: A Lean, Prime Foundation for Muscle Growth
Once my client reaches 10-15% body fat, they’re in the best possible position to start a controlled lean bulk. Their body is primed to use nutrients more efficiently, they look leaner and more muscular, and they have a better understanding of their nutrition.
This means that when we transition into a slow, controlled surplus, the weight they gain will be predominantly muscle, rather than excessive fat. No more yo-yo bulking and cutting. Just sustainable, quality muscle-building.
Step 2: Moving to a Controlled Surplus
Once my client has successfully leaned down to 10-15% body fat, we’ve set the foundation for a productive muscle-building phase. This is where most people, especially former dirty bulkers, tend to go wrong. Their instinct is to immediately jump back into a massive calorie surplus, thinking that more food equals more muscle. But this approach almost always leads to excess fat gain, poor nutrient partitioning, and another frustrating cutting phase later on.
Instead, my focus would be on precision, patience, and implementing a lean bulk that prioritises muscle gain while keeping fat accumulation to an absolute minimum.
Why a Small, Controlled Surplus Works Best
Before diving into the specifics of setting up the lean bulk, it’s important to understand why a smaller calorie surplus is superior to an uncontrolled bulk:
1. Muscle Growth Has a Limit
Many people believe that the more calories they consume, the more muscle they’ll build. However, muscle protein synthesis (MPS) has a ceiling. Your body can only build muscle at a certain rate, no matter how much food you eat.
For natural male lifters, the potential rate of muscle gain is roughly:
- Beginners: ~1 kg per month
- Intermediate lifters: 0.25-0.5 kg per month
- Advanced lifters: 0-0.25 kg per month
For women, the rate is likely about half of this.
Anything beyond this is very likely fat gain. So, if my client is gaining 2+ kg a month, I know a large portion of it is fat, that will then have to be dieted off in future.
2. Nutrient Partitioning and Avoiding Fat Gain
When you’re in a small surplus, your body has a better chance of directing excess calories toward muscle growth instead of fat storage. This is effective nutrient partitioning, where calories are allocated toward muscle repair and energy rather than stored as body fat.
By keeping the surplus small, we give their body the chance to efficiently use calories for muscle repair/growth rather than fat storage.
3. Staying Lean Allows for a Longer Bulk
Another benefit of a controlled surplus is that it allows my client to stay in a bulking phase for months or even years, rather than having to cut again quickly. The leaner they stay while gaining muscle, the longer they can continue bulking without hitting the point where they feel sluggish, bloated, or unhappy with their body composition. This allows them to focus on progressing in the gym for longer, and thus, more muscle is generally built.
Setting Up the Lean Bulk: A Step-by-Step Plan
Now that you understand why we ideally want a small and precise surplus, here’s exactly how I would structure my client’s lean bulk:
Step 1: Determining Maintenance Calories
Before adding calories, we first need to establish their true maintenance intake (the number of calories they need to maintain their current weight). As we have been dieting up until this point, we likely have a fairly good idea of where their maintenance calories are. However, if you have skipped the first step or you somehow managed to get lean without actively being aware of calories, you may need to find where maintenance calories are.
How do we find this?
- Track calories for 1-2 weeks while maintaining weight.
- Ensure daily movement and training stay consistent (e.g., don’t suddenly add extra cardio or change training volume).
- If weight remains stable, we’ve found your maintenance intake.
For most active lifters, maintenance typically falls around 14-16 calories per pound of body weight. So for a 180 lb client, maintenance might be 2,500-2,900 calories per day.
Step 2: Adding a Small Surplus
Instead of an immediate jump, I’d increase intake by just 150-300 calories per day, and definitely not the excessive 1,000+ calorie surpluses they are used to on their dirty bulks.
Example for a 180 lb client with a 2,700 calorie maintenance:
- Week 1-2: Increase to 2,850-3,000 calories per day
- Monitor weight for 2-3 weeks
- If no weight gain, bump up by another 100-150 calories
The goal is a gradual weight gain of ~1kg per month, ensuring that most of it is lean muscle, not fat.
Step 3: Optimising Macronutrient Ratios
Now that we have total calories set, we need to distribute them efficiently to support muscle growth while minimising fat gain.
A typical breakdown:
- Protein: 1.8-2.2g per kg of body weight
- Fats: 0.6-1g per kg of body weight
- Carbs: Fill in the rest with quality carbs
By prioritising adequate protein intake and balanced macronutrients, we support muscle repair, training performance, and recovery.
Step 4: Monitoring Progress and Making Adjustments
The biggest mistake people make when bulking, especially those with a history of dirty bulking, is not tracking progress.
I’d have my client track:
- Body weight (daily, or at least 3 times per week): aiming for 0.5-1kg gain per month.
- Gym performance: strength should be increasing in key lifts.
- Waist measurement & body fat: to ensure fat gain is minimal
- Progress photos every 4 weeks: visual changes matter more than just weight
You won’t get things right on the first try, so you more than likely will need to adjust.
- If gaining too fast (>1kg per month) → Reduce surplus by 100-150 calories
- If not gaining at all after 3-4 weeks → Increase surplus by 100-150 calories
This ensures we stay in the optimal muscle growth range without excessive fat gain.
Step 5: Optimising Training for Muscle Growth
A successful lean bulk isn’t just about eating correctly, it’s also about progressive training.
For my client, I’d emphasise:
- Progressive overload (increasing training challenge over time)
- Multi-joint compound lifts (squats, deadlifts, presses, pull-ups)
- Adequate volume & intensity (around 10-20 sets per muscle group per week)
- Proper recovery (ensuring adequate sleep and stress management)
A dirty bulker often relies on food rather than training progression to grow. We reverse this by letting performance improvements drive the bulk.
Instead of simply eating more food to gain size, we’d make sure their training performance is leading the way. Food should be supporting training performance, not a tool to try and bully more weight onto the body.
The Long-Term Approach
By transitioning into a small, controlled surplus, we avoid the pitfalls of dirty bulking and set up a sustainable approach for lean muscle growth.
- Gaining <1 kg per month ensures quality growth
- Tracking calories, weight, and gym performance keeps us accountable
- Training progression, not just food intake, should drive muscle gains
- Staying lean allows for a much longer and more productive bulk
With this smarter, data-driven approach, the client will maximise muscle growth, minimise fat gain, and avoid the endless cycle of bulking and cutting.
Step 3: Long-Term Mindset Shift
One of the biggest challenges I face with clients who have a history of dirty bulking isn’t just adjusting their nutrition or training, it’s reprogramming their mindset about muscle growth. Too often, they’ve spent years in an endless cycle of bulking hard, cutting aggressively, regaining fat, and repeating the process without ever truly mastering their body composition.
When working with a client who has always relied on dirty bulking, my primary goal would be to help them break free from the short-term mindset and develop a long-term, sustainable approach to muscle building.
Breaking the Dirty Bulk Mentality
The dirty bulk mindset is built on a few key misconceptions that I see all the time:
- “More food = more muscle.” (Reality: Muscle growth has limits, and excess calories lead to fat gain, not extra muscle.)
- “Being big is all that matters.” (Reality: A bloated, high-body-fat physique lacks definition and often performs worse, not to mention the negative health impacts.)
- “I’ll just cut later.” (Reality: Cutting too often wastes time that could have been spent growing lean muscle, and you lose muscle in the process.)
To help my client develop a better approach, I would focus on three major mindset shifts.
Mindset Shift #1: Muscle Growth Is a Slow, Long-Term Process
Most dirty bulkers are impatient. They want to see the scale move up fast, assuming that rapid weight gain means they’re building more muscle. This often leads to force-feeding, bloating, excessive fat gain, and ultimately, the need for another long, grueling cut.
One of the first things I’d teach my client is that building muscle is a slow process, but slow gains are quality gains. A realistic expectation for natural muscle growth is:
- Beginners: ~1 kg per month
- Intermediate lifters: 0.25-0.5 kg per month
- Advanced lifters: 0-0.25 kg per month
This means that trying to gain 2-5 kg per month is a mistake. Most of it will be fat, and they’ll end up cutting again sooner rather than later. Instead, by embracing slow and steady progress, they can keep bulking for months or even years without ever needing to cut drastically.
The goal is to stay in a lean muscle-building phase for as long as possible, rather than constantly cycling between excessive bulking and cutting. You can do shorter dieting phases when fat gets a bit higher or you have an event that you want to be lean for, but generally, you want to stay in a surplus for a long time, and gain weight slowly.
Mindset Shift #2: Staying Lean Makes Future Growth More Efficient
A common belief among dirty bulkers is that body fat percentage doesn’t affect muscle-building efficiency, but it probably does. The more fat you carry, the worse your hormonal environment, insulin sensitivity, and nutrient partitioning become.
High body fat levels generally lead to:
- Reduced testosterone levels, leading to slower muscle growth
- Decreased insulin sensitivity, meaning more calories are stored as fat instead of muscle
- More inflammation & sluggishness, making workouts feel harder and less productive
Even if it doesn’t actually make a difference, and the hormonal changes don’t matter all that much, the fact remains that by gaining excess fat, you will eventually have to diet it off. This will definitely put you in a more catabolic hormonal environment which likely means you will lose some muscle and at the very least, you won’t be gaining muscle. Not to mention you do also get the negative health effects of carrying excessive body fat.
A leaner body (up to a point) is actually more anabolic than a higher-fat body. By keeping body fat in check (staying around 10-15% for men), you will:
- Partition nutrients better, meaning calories go toward muscle, not fat
- Feel and perform better, and ultimately have more energy, better endurance, and higher training intensity
- Be able to bulk for longer without having to cut frequently
The key is to reframe the way these individuals think about fat gain. A little bit of fat gain is normal in a lean bulk, and we certainly should not be afraid of that or try to stay excessive lean. But the goal is to minimise fat gain so we can maximise the time spent in muscle-building mode.
Mindset Shift #3: Performance Over Scale Weight
Dirty bulkers often equate weight gain with progress, using the scale as their primary measure of success. They chase higher numbers, thinking they’re making rapid gains, only to realise later that much of the weight is fat, water, and bloating.
So when coaching these clients, I try to shift the focus away from the scale and toward the gym. Instead of obsessing over their body weight, they should be tracking:
- Strength progression on key lifts: Are they getting stronger in compound movements?
- Muscle fullness & density: Are they seeing improvements in the mirror, not just on the scale?
- Training volume & intensity: Are they pushing themselves in the gym?
- Recovery & energy levels: Are they feeling strong and recovered?
If performance is improving, muscle is being built, even if the scale isn’t moving that dramatically.
Building a Sustainable Approach: Avoiding the Bulk-Cut Trap
Too many lifters spend years bouncing between bulking and cutting without ever truly building their ideal physique. The best long-term strategy is to minimise the need for constant cutting by approaching muscle gain intelligently.
To many people fall victim to the dirty bulk approach and fall into a cycle of:
Bulk aggressively → Gain 10+ kg of fat → Cut aggressively or for a long time → Lose muscle & strength → Repeat
This approach just leads to:
- Wasted time: Always cutting instead of growing muscle.
- Frustration: Never feeling happy with body composition.
- Muscle loss: Losing hard-earned gains during aggressive or prolonged cuts.
So, instead of this, we should try to create a more sustainable, slow and steady approach. For most people, that looks something more like this:
- Get lean first (10-15% body fat)
- Eat in a small, controlled surplus (~150-300 calories over maintenance)
- Track progress and adjust calories as needed
- Focus on training performance & progressive overload
- Stay in a bulk for 6-12+ months without excessive fat gain
By taking this long-term, disciplined approach, you will build muscle more efficiently, stay leaner, and feel stronger, without the huge swings in body weight.
Final Thoughts On Breaking The Dirty Bulk Cycle
If you’ve been stuck in the dirty bulk mindset, it’s time to break the cycle. Get lean first, ease into a controlled surplus, and focus on training progression rather than just eating more. As a result, you will build a stronger, more muscular physique without the unnecessary fat gain.
This approach may take more patience, but trust me, it’s how you build a body that not only looks great but performs at its best. Your health will also almost certainly thank you.
Client case studies, such as this case study on how to set up a HYROX performance nutrition plan, are a phenomenal way to learn how to coach someone. While we teach people how to coach nutrition, there is just so much to learn and you often need examples to illustrate the concepts.
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