What should I eat on rest days when bulking? Depending on how fast your metabolism is a typical bulking surplus will be between 300kcal – 500kcal per day. From this you should work out your weekly caloric surplus and reduce your rest day calories whilst increasing training day calories to keep the same weekly surplus.
Bulking for most people will be a pretty straightforward process, you get to consume a calorie surplus which means energy levels are high, you’ll have more strength in the gym and also have a little bit of flexibility when it comes to having ‘treat’ meals.
The surplus is primarily used to fuel your workouts and aid muscle recovery and growth, therefore it’s easy to consume your surplus on training days.
What many consider to be a confusing topic however, is what you should eat on the rest days when bulking as energy expenditure will obviously be lower.
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What Should I Eat on Rest Days When Bulking
What you should eat on rest days when bulking should be a very straightforward topic however, there is often confusing information out there, of which most is surprisingly correct.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to what you should eat on a rest, the first is that you should consume the same as what you eat on a training day to make sure you stay in an overall surplus.
The second is that you should reduce calorie intake on rest days closer to a maintenance level or a very small surplus of 50kcal – 100kcal to minimize fat gain.
The reason that both are correct in a sense is because it will depend on what your overall goal is for the bulk.
This means do you want to take a lean approach and build muscle whilst gaining the least amount of fat in the process or do you want to go hard and gain as much size and strength in the process without worrying too much about the fat gained in the process.
If you are not too sure about where you sit in this body composition phase you can check out my article on lean bulking:
Therefore if you are not sure what you should eat on rest days during a bulk the first place to start will be determining the calories.
Should You Eat the Same Amount of Calories on a Rest Day
Calories are the key to a successful bulk. Weight training and recovery are of course essential but if you don’t have an optimized diet plan in place then you will be significantly impacting on your progress.
How you bulk will have a direct impact on how many calories you should eat on a rest day and this will come down to whether you dirty bulk or lean bulk.
It’s worth noting that no matter which route you take the fundamentals are the same, you need to be in a caloric surplus over the week and also ensure you are getting an ideal macronutrient split (a diet consisting of purely donuts will not yield much, if any muscle growth).
Dirty Bulk
A dirty bulk is often associated with someone who takes the opportunity of a bulk to get a little looser in their diet and consume calories and foods that you’d be hesitant about consuming when cutting. These are typically what people consider to be junk foods.
I don’t like to label food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as that gives very powerful psychological associations with food which can be damaging to how you perceive food, I therefore look at food as nutrient dense or less nutrient dense.
Your typical junk food on a dirty bulk are foods high in either sugars or fats with minimal other macronutrients or micronutrients in the form of vitamins and minerals. This is food like sweets, soda, pizza, confectionery like cakes and donuts and a range of other commercial snacks.
Though there are some good bulking snacks that can blur the line.
A dirty bulk isn’t purely about the foods that you eat despite the name as one of the reasons people eat these foods is the high calorie count that they have, a dirty bulk is an approach many take when they try to consume as many calories as they possibly can in order to gain weight.
There is minimal scientific reasoning behind this approach and follows the old school thought process of “eat big to get big”.
With this approach you will be consuming as many calories as you can which means in the process you will be gaining quite a bit of excess body fat regardless of how good your genetics or nutrient partitioning is.
If this is your approach then you likely won’t want to reduce calories on your rest day too much, you should certainly reduce the carb intake as you won’t be fueling a workout and therefore your surplus is more likely to go towards fat storage.
Protein intake should be the same, after training your body stays in a state of protein synthesis (muscle building) for up to 48 hours and this could be even higher for beginners. Therefore you want to make sure you always have protein readily available for digestion and absorption.
A good rule of thumb on a bulk is around 1-1.5g of protein per 1lb of body weight. It’s worth noting however that this is heavily influenced by lean body mass, if you weigh 250lbs at around 22% body fat then not only should you not be on a bulk but you’ll also need to reduce this to match a lean body mass level.
For those on a heavy bulk then I would certainly reduce calorie intake on rest days by a few hundred calories coming from mostly carbohydrates. You’ll still have sufficient carbohydrate intake to refill and fuel muscle glycogen.
On average you should be looking to at a carbohydrate ratio of 3:1 to protein but I’ll cover ideal macro splits a bit later on.
Lean Bulk
A lean bulk for the most part will mean that you are consuming the majority of your calories from nutrient dense foods and will be very meticulous about your daily calorie intake. The reason for this is to minimise any excess fat gain whilst still having a surplus of calories to support muscle growth.
A typical surplus for most people bulking will be in the range of 300kcal – 500kcal per day and those on a lean bulk will likely look at 300kcal being the top end of a surplus.
One of the keys to starting a lean bulk is knowing what your maintenance calorie requirements are, this is how many calories you need just to maintain body weight on a daily basis. If you need help working out what this should be I have a dedicated guide to that here:
Once you know what this is then you can add your daily surplus to this which for a lean bulk will be very conservative.
When lean bulking you will want to keep your rest day calories as close to maintenance as possible, if not cruising at maintenance. The main reason for this is purely to minimize fat storage during a bulk.
When energy expenditure is lower on rest days you still need sufficient calories in order to support muscle growth so make sure that at a minimum you are hitting your maintenance requirements.
Depending on how you respond to surplus calories you should try to push your rest day surplus as high as you can without gaining any excess fat just so that you have adequate nutrients available to support muscle growth.
What Macros Should You Eat on a Rest Day
I’m a big believer in making dieting choices that improve your overall body composition regardless of what stage you are at in your dieting phase. Whether you are bulking to gain muscle mass or cutting to burn body fat you should be looking at optimal food choices.
At least 80% of your diet (I’d go as high as 90% depending on your adherence to a plan) should come from nutrient dense foods with the remainder being made up of less nutrient dense foods that many would consider a treat or cheat meal.
A linked an article earlier that covers both lean and dirty bulking and in it I run through the ideal macro split that you should be looking to consume.
For a generalized bulk on training days you should look at the following split:
Protein – 25%
Carbohydrate – 55%
Fat – 20%
I have my own custom calculator that pulls data based on my weight, height, activity level and other key indicators and have it programmed to give me this result on a bulk.
For a rest day you should typically look to reduce your carbohydrate intake by 5%-10% and increase your protein by that proportion.
This will keep your calorie surplus the same however a surplus of carbs are more likely to be stored as body fat when energy expenditure is lower and protein will be readily available for protein synthesis so it’s a win win situation.
How Many Days Should You Rest on a Bulk
Just on a quick side note you might be wondering how many days you should be training and resting on a bulk as this will ultimately impact your weekly caloric surplus.
For a beginner you might only be training 3 x per week, which is more than enough to stimulate muscle growth whilst allowing adequate recovery though it does mean that you have 4 rest days in which to manage your calorie surplus.
If you are at least past the beginner stages of training and can fully recover from 3 x per week full body training session then you should be looking to train 4 – 5 days per week giving you 2 – 3 rest days per week.
This will allow sufficient training frequency to keep protein synthesis high for all muscle groups whilst still allowing enough time to rest, recover and grow. This will vary depending on your training split and experience of course but as a general guide 2 – 3 days rest on a bulk is enough to allow recovery.
It’s also worth checking out this article on making best use of rest days:
Growth days or rest days?
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