Bulking on purpose

I ran a marathon 23 days ago.

Twelve days ago, I started eating more on purpose. More food, fewer running kilometres, weights back on the bar. Today is day 13 of a bulk that runs through September. I am writing this heavier than I’ve been in months, eating more than I want to most days, and back under a bar six days a week.

If you have been reading this newsletter for the last three issues, you’ve watched the end of one chapter. Marathon. Cancun. Three open-water swims that humbled me. That whole arc was about getting fast by being light.

This is the start of the next chapter. I need to be strong enough to hold a bike for 180 km and recover from a 3.8 km swim. Light doesn’t do that. Strong does.

So I’m doing the boring guy version of a body recomp. Planned switch. Stated reasons. No before photo, no transformation reveal, no “I gave up running” headline.

Marathon training stops being kind to muscle past a certain mileage. By race week, the legs felt thinner and the lifts felt heavier than they should have, even when the bench numbers held. Endurance work shaves muscle off you whether you want it or not. I want a real base going into Ironman training, not the lean-and-tired version of myself.

That’s reason one. Reason two is the calendar.

Calgary Marathon was May 24. Victoria 70.3 is May 2027. Ironman Barcelona is October 2027. Between now and Victoria, I have a base-build phase that can take a hypertrophy block stacked on top of it without breaking anything.

Translation: I can lift six days a week, eat in a surplus, and still log enough easy bike and swim hours to learn the two sports I am worst at. The bike I just got, the Kuota Kougar, is barely two months old. The pool is somewhere I tolerate, not somewhere I’m good. I need volume on both, not intensity.

A surplus pays for that volume. A deficit doesn’t. It’s that simple.

Phase 2 of the plan runs June through September. Hybrid bulking on top of 70.3 base. After September, the build for Victoria starts. Lifting drops to maintenance and shifts to triathlon-supporting work: fewer hypertrophy reps, more single-leg, core, and back work. The kind of strength that holds up to a 180 km bike.

So this isn’t a season. It’s four months. With a date on the back end.

Most bulking blocks have a leg day. Mine doesn’t.

The bike does the leg work. The plan has me on the bike three to four times a week through the bulk: short Z3 intervals on day-shift mornings, easy Z2 base on off weeks, and one long Saturday ride that ramps from 2.5 hours in June to 3.5 hours by September. That’s a lot of stimulus for the quads and the glutes.

Replacing leg day with a dedicated arm session frees up the time and the recovery budget to actually move the upper body. The plan calls for chest volume of 24 to 33 sets a week. Arms 20 to 28. Side delts 21 to 32. The only word for the loading: AGGRESSIVE.

A back squat and an RDL get tucked into the back-and-biceps session. About fifteen minutes total. Maintenance, not building.

My legs are already huge. Probably from being fat for so long. Strangers comment on the calves. Coworkers poke fun at them. The legs are not the problem.

Strength didn’t just stop. It deloaded into this on purpose.

Nine days off the bar. Then taper week, then race week, then the marathon, then the trip to Cancun. The Apr 21 to May 2 gap was deliberate. I was not going to lift heavy in race week and the legs needed the calories for the run.

The May 2 and May 3 sessions weren’t impressive. That’s the point. You don’t come back hot from a deload. You come back to feel the bar again and let the volume ramp.

It ramped. Three ramp-in sessions at the end of May, then bulk day one on June 4: 92.1 kg for five sets of six. The heaviest top set in my log.

Week one was supposed to be six lifts. It was three. My 2nd Class exam landed June 8 and ate the week. The plan is four months long for a reason.

A “before” photo. A daily macro target I’m publishing. A calorie surplus number for you to copy.

I’m not a coach. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m a guy with a plan, a Hevy log, and a date on a calendar.

What it is: six lifts a week, more food than I want to eat most days, easy bike and swim volume on the days I’m not in the gym, and one clear goal: get to October with more muscle and the same engine.

This is the first time in my adult life I’ve tried to gain weight on purpose. Every other phase was about losing it. There’s a part of me that finds it weird to be on this side of the math.

Adding food when adding food got me to 320 in the first place feels like running toward the thing I spent years running away from.

Most people who hear “I’m starting a bulk” assume the fear is gaining weight.

It isn’t. I weighed 320 lbs. Two hundred doesn’t scare me. Two-ten doesn’t scare me.

What scares me is who I was at 320. The guy who couldn’t sleep through the night without choking on stomach acid. The guy who avoided cameras. The guy who thought a bag of takeout at 1 AM was a reasonable input to a 5 AM shift.

Gaining weight on a bulk is not the same thing as becoming that guy again. The first one is a planned input. The second is what happens when you stop paying attention.

A scale reading of 94.37 kg (about 208 lb) on Apr 30 — up about 3.5 kg from the previous logged reading — is a vacation, not a relapse. I knew it was coming. The frame survives a vacation.

The June 9 scale: 92.1 kg. The vacation weight left on its own. The climb from here is on purpose.

Same skill that built the cut. Same daily showing up. Different direction.

The next four months are mostly going to be boring.

Six lifts. A few swims. Easy spin on the trainer most mornings. Eat. Sleep. Reassess at the end of September.

That’s the whole thing.

Next week: the actual training calendar I’m running on a 7-on / 7-off rotation, week by week, with what gets cut when overtime lands.

Forward this to anyone who thinks gaining weight on purpose is failure.

— Kiegan