So Soulman posted this Lyle quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lyle McDonald
The simple physiological fact is that, to gain muscle, you have to provide not only the proper training stimulus, but also the building blocks for the new tissue. This means not only sufficient protein (see below) but also sufficient calories and energy. While it’s wonderful to hope that the energy to build new muscle will be pulled out of fat cells, the reality is that this rarely happens (there are some odd exceptions such as folks beginning a program, and those returning from a layoff).
I know Lyle is a diet expert and I am a diet peon, but I can't help but think he is making a subtle error here which is the same one that leads him to claim that any surplus over 500 calories a day is useless (I'm paraphrasing but he says something close to that, and it's really blatantly false.)
He says you need sufficient protein "but also the building blocks for the new tissue". And that's all he says.
Doesn't "the building blocks for new tissue" imply that you need to consume the nutrients that actually are directly used to form the new tissue, and that's it?
I mean it's not even clear from that idea that you would need to put on any fat at all...you consume x surplus of calories and it is directly converted to new muscle. Maybe there are leftover substrate molecules or something that become fat.
But anyway from my experience bulking at different levels of surplus, it seems clear that the caloric surplus has more to do with putting your body in an overall anabolic state.
When you eat a ton you recover from soreness and injury way faster, you increase your metabolism, you tell your body it doesn't have to worry about being thrifty with energy. All of this is hormonal milieu stuff rather than direct tissue synthesis.
Am I just being uncharitable to Lyle? To me it seems like the "building blocks" model of eating to bulk is just inaccurate and leads you to cap your surplus at arbitrary amounts like 500 cals/day because that's "all the building blocks you can use in a day" or something.
tl;dr Does Lyle have a misleading idea of the function of caloric surplus while bulking?