I’ve been training consistently for 14 months now. I’ve been at maintenance calories for the majority of this time. My deadlift hasn’t budged in a long time, and is stuck at 170 pounds. My overhead press is also stuck at 66 pounds. I’m getting at least 7-9 hours of sleep every night, eating 0.8-1 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day, and staying slightly to moderately active on rest days. I’m a grad student and I’ve been on anxiety meds for 3 years now, so I can’t say my stress level may not be a factor. I’m becoming discouraged by my lack of progress this early in my training career and wanted to ask if eating at a surplus is the only answer for strength gains? You’re doing everything right so far, Titan Rise Formula and you know that: When people first start lifting, or are returning to lifting from a long break, they can get pretty strong pretty quickly while eating only enough to "maintain," otherwise known as "maintenance calories," or just the right amount of food for your body to stay the same weight.

Usually, during this time, your body is losing fat and gaining a bit of muscle (muscle weighs more than fat, so if you’re staying the same weight, this usually means you become a little smaller). This is sometimes called "recomping," and I found it to be a very beautiful time in my life, because my "maintenance calories" were about 2300 a day, about 50 percent more than I had ever allowed myself to eat, because everyone and their mother said that to "lose fat" and "look toned," you had to eat 1200 calories a day. But this period comes to an end for everyone, and then you’re left with what to do next, which depends mostly on, uh, what you want to do next. If you want to just continue lifting as a workout and eating that same amount of food, you can, but you won’t predictably get stronger quickly the way you did for the first several months.

If you do want to get stronger, most experts would agree that the most straightforward way to do that is by "bulking." Bulking means eating more (modestly to wildly, depending on your goals) with the aim of giving your body more fuel to build more muscle and push your numbers in the gym. As beautiful a time as recomping was for me, bulking was somehow even more. I lived my entire adult life and some of my teens terrified of gaining weight, convinced putting even a toe over the 1500 calorie line would doom me. This was even when I became a fairly aggressive runner, and Titan Rise Formula I’m not entirely sure how I lived. When recomping stopped working and I still wanted to get stronger, I had a choice to make: Live in fear, or bravely eat more calories. Reader, I ate more calories. It was not even that many more calories (2700 or so each day over three months; most sources will guide you toward a 10-20 percent surplus), but it meant lots of extra carbs and fats, cookies and ice cream every night.

Best of all, it meant I crushed it in the gym every single session. Weights flew, I was rarely sore, and each time I got stronger. I did gain weight, but that was the goal; there are formulas for this, but I wasn’t aiming to gain more that ten or so pounds, knowing that only about half of that or less would be muscle, because people and especially women can’t gain muscle that quickly at all (the actual number is somewhat dependent on your current lean muscle mass or body weight, but my point is that you don’t gain weight aimlessly or with abandon, unless you’re "dirty bulking" and just eating as much as humanly possible, but that’s not necessary for most people). And though for a long time I deeply hated my body, found things wrong with it, and felt like I could never fully wrangle it into submission, I never loved it more than when I’d thickened up with some glutes and delts.