I Tried Maingaining for 1 Year

Great to see the channel back in business. Keep it up bro!

Maingaining is a recomp. And until you get to 8-12%bf, as a male, your hormonal profile is optimal. Meaning your body is willing to use fat as the energy source for muscle growth. To synthesize 1 lb of muscle, 700 kcal are required. Meaning from 1lb of fat you can synthesize 5 lbs of muscle.


But once you get into that 8-12% bf range. Your hormonal profile becomes not optimal and thus you cannot trade that fat for muscle, as your body literally views that fat as life saving and not something it wants to lose.

So at 8-12% you need to up calories and bulk to literally get fatter and gain back that optimal hormonal profile.

Will you continue to maingain?

Thanks for posting this, because I'm the same height as you, and I was wondering to myself if I should try a bulk/cut cycle or try this "maingaining" thing I only recently heard about. Your detailed results helped me make up my mind even though my own fitness goals are a bit different from yours (I'm not doing any competitive lifting, just trying to stay healthy since I'm an older man). I'm going to give maingaining a try.

To me, maingaining is just bulking without the fat gain and without the eventual cut(which could lead to muscle loss mind you)

People believe you gain more muscle when you bulk because of the illusion of lookin bigger, which 99% of it is fat and water.

Hey, I just found your channel, would love yo have you on my podcast to talk about your journey with maingaining!

What if I’m not skinny-fat, but skinny-lean? I’m naturally 11% bf, but I’m like 5’9 and 130lbs. Would maingain work for me at all?

About to try maintaining for a couple of months at least, shall see my progress after

Alright, I just bulked to about 215 lbs, benched 290, squatted only 385 but hey it’s my weak area and deadlifted 529 so I’ve generated a fair bit of muscle from this. I now want to chase some aesthetics, I plan to drop about 30lbs, once I get to 180-185, just confirming that it would probably be a good idea to maintain, considering I’ll be under 17% bf
Cheers

How did group A lose more weight than group B on the cut given they had more calories? That doesn’t make much sense. Did the study not control or balance the amount of exercise for each group? Perhaps group A trained more?

Rant time. I have found that this is an INCREDIBLY complicated topic and answering the question, "How many calories should one eat to gain optimal mass?" Is just as complicated. It's complicated by a large number of variables, but I find hormone levels and number of years trained to be the most pertinent ones. Reason being that if you are too fat or too lean (hormone levels), your training and muscle protein synthesis suffer. And it has been suggested by the research (and arguably proven,) that every year that you have been training significantly diminishes the potential for muscle building that you possess. This second factor is often overlooked by people that suggest that advanced lifters should bulk and cut, since advanced lifters already possess less muscle building potential, being that they are already close to their full genetic muscle building potential, by definition. Therefore, this actually suggests that the longer you have been lifting, the less of a caloric surplus you necessarily need, and the closer to maintenance you should be eating in practice.

This is further complicated by the scientific literature. Most studies that evaluate variables related to caloric intake vs lean mass gain fail to distinguish between wet and dry mass. Relatively few (, as in almost no,) studies utilize a c2 scan in order to differentiate the two. This confounds the results because one can increase "lean mass" by simply increasing caloric intake, particularly carbohydrates which are the most modified caloric macro in the fitness niche, due to the fact that this "increase in lean mass" is actually wet mass rather than dry mass in many cases. Which is why I find studies like these where eating at maintenance or in a caloric deficit valuable, since this confounding factor is accounted for and therefore the increase is likely due to accumulated dry mass.

Another issue is how the fitness industry downplays body recomping, eucaloric intake related muscle growth and building muscle in a deficit for advanced trainees. As I've already discussed, the potential for muscle building diminishes with each progressive year of training, and this would explain why body recomping appears to have little or no effect on advanced. But this effect would likely spill over into your "bulk" cycle as well, since your muscle building potential is already diminished and the "massive gainz" you are obtaining could likely be attributed to adipose tissue and wet "lean mass" accumulation as well.

The same is true for a "cut." You could be gaining small amounts of dry muscle due to high protein intake and training stimulus as an advanced trainee, but the reduction in overall calories would translate to reduced fullness and wet mass at levels that are larger than the accumulation of dry mass due to depleted glycogen stores, assuming you aren't in such a drastic caloric deficit as to tank your hormones and energy levels to sustain your adequate rest and training stimulus. So it could appear that you are losing mass, when effectively you are actually gaining satellite cells and dry tissue that will become even fuller in appearance once your calories have returned to maintenance or a slight surplus.

Long story short, I have incredibly transformed my physique in 3.5 years of religious training and dieting by completely ignoring the ridiculous bulk and cut cycles suggested by the mainstream fitness industry. When you are fatter you can move more weight but this does not necessarily translate to increased muscle mass. Mass accumulation seems more related to training sets at or near failure with adequate rest and sufficient protein intake. Assuming you are consuming enough calories to push yourself at or near failure for your work sets and your sleep is unaffected by whatever degree of leanness you possess (and therefore, your hormone levels are intact,) you should see mass accumulation which will obviously get slower and slower over time. Be patient. Or use gear. But quit complaining. This is a lifestyle and not an overnight fix.

You can build muscle in a deficit. Healthy body fat percentage

Just wish I knew what someone my size and weight should look like, don't know if I'm too lean or not. 5'10, 158ibs. Is there a form or site to compare progress with others on their adventures?

Nah. You bulked and bulking works. How many more millions of young men have to spin their wheels for years for people to finally see that bulking and cutting is the only way to move the needle?

The sad thing is that most of the wheel spinners eventually think it’s just bad genetics and give up. It’s not genetics. It’s substandard nutritional, rest management and programming practices.

How to waste your time for years on end:

You’re proportionally very strong. Congrats on the progress!

you know the main gain will works if you achieve the best version physique of yourself, but if you still have lacking or not achieving the best of you don't do the main gain stick with the basics again do the bulk and cut cycles, and the main gain will works remember if you are conscious to you own physique now and if it does not do the basics

im around 19% body fat im thinking about maingaining but do you think i should just get down to 15% and then maingain?

The problem is the first study was for advanced lifters, not intermediate or beginner who have more potential to build muscle.

Short and to the point 👊🏼

I maingain because I started going to gym at my ideal body weight already and I just want to maintain it.

Isn't maintaining just a clean bulk?

Thanks man

It seems like most people still dont understand what maingaining means. Maingaining is eating 100-200 calories ABOVE maintenance. It's not eating at exactly maintenance and "spinning your wheels". It's a surplus lower than a lean bulk.

You were too lean for maingaining

“I showed him pictures of his nipples” bruh I legit laughed out loud!

Let's spread the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ 😇❤🙏🏻
Glad you are a Christian

Here's the truth...when you are a noobie you can do anything and it will work. When you are advanced nothing "works" except PEDs. The end.

All the skinny Greg fanboys here thinking maingaining is gonna help them. Just bulk. You’re like 150 lbs.

bro gained 2kg of muscle in a year

The way I look at it is maingaining is just the middle ground between bulking or cutting. You will gain the most muscle bulking, the least cutting and a middle ground while maingaining. You can gain muscle doing all 3 but obviously the less calories you consume, the more difficult it becomes, and the easier it is to hit your limit. Really just depends on your goal

You claim to have gained muscle and that you've done bulking and cutting for many years yet you are skinny af? LMFAO

under rated keep it up king

Started maingaining last year without even knowing the term for it, but I started with 68 kg at 1,85cm in august 2022 and was 77kg in August 2023, and right now at 78.5kg. In the whole process I barely gained any fat and actually got even leaner in the process. Personally I think there's a very slight line between maingaining and lean bulking and whatever that line is it works great for me

Big fan of the diet soda :)

MainG@Yning

Simple and awesome to those who pay attention ! I am 150 lbs, 5, 9 and want to lose fat and gain muscle ! So I just eat maintenance calories without deficit and do mix if resistance training and aerobics or cardio to burn carbs. No not calorie deficit needed

Thx much

If you got stronger, that's all that matters, big muscles are dumb as fuck, strength is infinitely more important.

Cool video….

I tried bulking. I built muscle but I also got a little fat and I built an unhealthy relationship with food. I just think for the average person, you should just eat normally (assuming you aren't fat or anorexically skinny) and just lift weights. The changes I think happen very slowly. I think a lot of the people who think this doesn't work are people who are on steroids or who have a body building mentality. For normal people, once you're out of the newbie gains phase, the muscle building process happens very slowly and probably takes at least a year to see significant results. Probably more like 2 or 3 years to really make huge progress. I'm not a doctor, I'm just sharing my thoughts but I do believe that the average person should not be bulking.

Eat so you're not losing weight, stay active, lift hard. Easy recipe to have a nice fit body.

can you maingain or "recomp" from 15% bf to 10 or is it bullshit?

Great video brother, thanks a lot for the self experiment and for sharing your results it is appreciated! Great channel and good luck with it all!

Worked for me. My calories only change +200 or -200 depending on how I look at the end of the week in the mirror

I don’t believe you gain 7lb muscles in one year…..especially you had some training experience…. Definitely some fat bro

Hey what was your training protocol during this experiment, and specifically in terms of volume?

But you gained 3kg? That’s lean bulking not maingaining.

The study doesn’t make sense. If they gained fat with the 3000kcal diet, they were in a surplus which means they were not „maintaining“ as that would mean eating at maintenance or not?