Reverse Bulking: How to Maintain Your Gains After Bulking

Reverse bulking is for people who are sick of eating so much food but want to maintain the gains they made while bulking. I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere else, which is strange, given how well it works. I’ve been using this method on myself and clients for over a decade now, but we never named it, and I don’t think we’ve ever mentioned it our articles.

The idea is simple: most skinny guys hate eating enormous amounts of food. When they finish bulking, they want to go back to eating like regular human men again. But they’re worried that if they do, they’ll lose all their hard-won gains. That’s where reverse bulking comes in.

I haven’t ever heard anyone talking about reverse bulking, perhaps because it’s a phenomenon unique to us naturally thin guys. If you’re familiar with the bodybuilding concept of reverse dieting, this has the same rejuvenating spirit, but it’s coming from the other direction.

Whether you’re reverse dieting or reverse bulking, the idea is to return to a more intuitive and enjoyable way of eating and living. It’s a method for maintaining your gains in a healthy and sustainable way.

However, reverse bulking won’t work for everyone. It hinges on a trait that’s somewhat unique to us naturally thin guys. Even then, it only works for about 60–90% of us. Let’s delve deeper into the nuance.

In a landmark study by Levine and colleagues, researchers put men in a metabolic ward, giving them complete control over how many calories the participants ate and what activities they engaged in. The researchers began by determining how many calories these men ate and burned. Then they overfed them by 1,000 extra calories each day.

As you’d expect, the extra food helped the guys gain weight. However, there was a huge variance in the amount of weight they gained. One guy gained a whopping 9.3 pounds. Another gained only 0.79 pounds (study). Said another way, even though all of these guys were being overfed by the same amount, and even though they were doing the amount of exercise, some guys gained 10x more weight than others.

The researchers discovered that some people have especially adaptive metabolisms. When you feed them more food, their metabolisms increase, burning away most of the extra calories. These guys were dubbed “hardgainers.” Their thinness was genetic. The same is true for many of us.