Speaker A
How much muscle can you really build in just 90 days? And more importantly, how can you do it without gaining fat? To find out, I'm testing the three most popular muscle building diets on my brother-in-law.
Jeremy Ethier tests three muscle-building diets on his brother-in-law Dayton over 90 days, tracking muscle and fat gain with DEXA scans and other measurements.
Key Takeaways
- A lean bulk (about +250 calories) produced solid muscle gain with limited fat gain in this case.
- Protein around 0.7 g per pound of body weight may be sufficient for maximizing gains when calories are adequate.
- Adding calories from carbohydrates can boost training performance and energy for muscle growth.
- Life stress and overeating can derail short-term diet plans, so flexibility and tracking matter.
- Tracking strength progress is a practical way to gauge muscle gain without advanced body composition testing.
What the video covers
- The experiment tests three popular muscle-building diets (maintenance/body recomposition, lean bulk, fast bulk) on Dayton, who previously dropped from 33% to 17% body fat.
- Maintenance calories were set at about 2,300 per day with at least 100 g of protein, while training five days a week on a set split.
- Dayton gained 2 lb during the maintenance phase after overeating during the holidays and while coping with stress and the death of his grandfather.
- The diet order was swapped so the overeating aligned with a lean bulk of roughly +250 calories per day.
- After 30 days of lean bulking, Dayton gained an estimated 1.35 lb of muscle with only modest fat gain, which Ethier considers above average.
- The fast bulk added about 500 calories per day from mostly carbohydrates, increasing energy and workout performance.
- Dayton reported consistent strength PRs and began adding sets to his workouts during the fast bulk phase.
- Tracking lifts is presented as a reliable low-cost alternative to expensive scans for monitoring progress.
- The results suggest that individual responses vary, and Ethier provides a chart to help viewers choose a diet approach.
- The video also features a sponsor segment promoting a fitness app with a free trial.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Experiment Overview
- 00:41Setting Goals and Maintenance Diet Plan
- 03:33Training Plan and Early Progress
- 04:53Stress, Holidays, and Setbacks
- 07:07Lean Bulk Phase and Results
- 08:41Fast Bulk Phase and Training Performance
- 12:12Final Results and Comparison
- 16:40Conclusion and Sponsor Segment
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So, by the end of this video, you won't just find out how much muscle he gains, but which one builds muscle fastest, which one burns fat while building muscle, and which diet completely backfires.
Speaker A
>> This is a bit of a disaster.
Speaker A
So, last year I helped my brother-in-law Dayton drop from 33% body fat down to his current body fat of 17%. And now he's hungry for more.
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>> Now that I've cut, I really want to bulk up, get bigger at all. I'm not getting fat again. Like, I refuse to get fat again.
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>> So, to help Dayton with his goal, I'm starting him off with our first diet, maintaining.
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The theory here is that by training hard while eating just enough to maintain your weight, your body is forced to burn off your body fat to fuel muscle growth.
Speaker A
And to measure if that actually happens, Dayton's getting DEXA scans before and after each diet to see how much his muscle and fat changes.
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But because short-term DEXA can be less reliable, we also took ultrasounds, skinfold, and circumference measurements to get a more complete picture of which diet actually works best.
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Now, to set up his main gaining diet, if you take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by 13 to 16, depending on your activity level, that's roughly what your body needs to maintain.
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But I know from personally working with Dayton for so long, that his current maintenance is right at 2,300 calories.
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And this is a sample day of eating I've created for him to hit that target.
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As for protein, Dayton's targeting at least 100 g of protein per day.
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Now, while that might sound low, some new research suggests that if you're eating enough calories and you're not bodybuilder level shredded, then your protein needs aren't nearly as high as most people think.
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In fact, if you take your body weight in pounds and you multiply it by 0.7, that's already enough to maximize your gains, which gives Dayton more room for carbs to fuel his workouts.
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>> I got my veggies, lean protein, and my carbs. We're 7 days in. My weight hasn't moved. We're doing good.
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But what's going to have no doubt the biggest impact on his gains is his training.
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So I'm having Dayton train 5 days a week using my personal favorite workout split.
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And the plan seems to be working. He's sending me PRs every workout.
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And with his app, we'll be able to see how much his strength gains from each diet match up to actual muscle growth.
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But just as the going was getting good.
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>> All right, guys. Quick update.
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So, I just realized that both of my roommates are moving out, and that leaves me with only two months to find replacements.
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If I don't find someone, that's going to leave me with a lot of money to pay all on my own.
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And on top of that, my business has hit a dry spell. It's the slowest it's been for a long time.
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So, that's a lot of stress right now and it's making it a little hard to stay on track with the workouts and the diets.
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>> With all the added stress, he began snacking a lot more than usual.
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And it also didn't help that this was filmed during the holidays where he couldn't resist my mom's Filipino desserts.
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>> I got my third plate of the night, a dessert. It's called ube and then some sort of rice pudding.
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>> But then something happened that might just end this experiment altogether.
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Um, my grandpa, he passed away a few weeks ago, uh, from cancer, and he was a big male role model for me, as, uh, my dad passed away when I was seven, also from cancer.
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So he was my father figure. So yeah, it was honestly a tough time for our whole family, but especially for Dayton.
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And even though he could have easily quit the experiment, he stuck it through, not missing a single workout.
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And even though he tried his best to stay on track with his nutrition, when he returned for his second check-in on day 30, the results weren't quite what we had planned.
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You actually gained 2 lb of body weight.
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Now, the goal was to maintain your weight as best as possible, and the next phase, the goal was actually to gain 2 lb >> in a month. Oops.
Speaker A
Luckily, his overeating actually lines up perfectly with the next diet that we had planned, a lean bulk.
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That's where you take your maintenance calories and you bump them up by about 250, which typically results in around 2 lb of weight gain per month.
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So, we decided to swap the order of his diets and save the main gain diet for the very end of our experiment.
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The good news is that it seems like those extra 2 lbs went to the right places. Okay.
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>> Based on Dayton's results, combined with the data from our additional measurements and scans, after 30 days of lean bulking, he's gained an estimated 1.35 lb of actual muscle.
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As for whether that's good or not, in a 2020-minute analysis from a huge number of short-term training studies, participants gained roughly 2.4 lb of actual muscle, but it took them 10 weeks to do.
Speaker A
So, Dayton's definitely above average. Plus, the last time I seriously assessed my own rate of muscle gain, it took me 60 days to put on just half a pound of muscle.
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So, Dayton clearly still has the ability to build muscle quickly.
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As for fat gain, based on the data from his belly skin folds, ultrasound, and waist measurements, he did gain some fat, but it wasn't excessive.
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So, overall, Dayton's lean bulk was quite the success. But it does beg the question, can we speed up his gains further if we feed him even more?
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So, for the next 30 days, we're running a fast bulk, cranking his daily calories up to 2,800.
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That's 500 calories more than his body burns every day.
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>> You're probably wondering, like, what types of calories should I be eating?
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>> Yeah, right.
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>> You're getting enough protein. So, my personal recommendation is if you're going to add calories, let's do it from just pure carbs.
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>> Okay.
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>> Because that's what's going to give you the glycogen and the energy that you need in your workouts, so that we can see your workout performance, just really, really be taken to the next level.
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So, it's not like we're taking his diet from this to this. We're just making small daily changes so that he gains roughly 4 lb by the end of the next 30 days.
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I can have a little bit more rice, a bit more carbs, some more sauce, but I have to stay on track.
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I have to weigh everything. I can't make the same mistake I made last time.
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>> I'm just hoping he doesn't overdo it.
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Yeah, my roommate came back from Mexico and he came back with a giant bag of candy-coated sugared peanuts.
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And I love candy-covered peanuts. So, I did crush a lot of these. But at least Dayton was putting these extra calories to good use.
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>> So, I think Jeremy's right about upping the carbs. I've been hitting PR after PR after PR. I have a lot more energy and I'm just feeling way stronger.
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Dayton felt so good that he actually started adding more sets to his workouts.
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And normally, studies would never allow for this. Workouts are kept identical. So the diet is the only variable, but I honestly think that misses a huge indirect benefit of eating more calories, the extra energy to train harder and longer.
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So instead of holding him back, we let him loose. Whether it leads to more muscle growth, we'll find out soon.
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In the meantime, as his body transformed, so did his business.
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His TikTok fitness videos drove traffic to his business content, and that attention turned into orders.
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>> So, I got some exciting news. My brother is currently looking for a place to live, and I so happen to be looking for a roommate.
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He's really into working out, and we have tons of things in common
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>> I've been working out the last year and a half. Before that, I was an addict for 10 years, living on the streets, getting in trouble. Uh, pretty much weighed nothing. Now look at me. after dealing with the loss of my grandfather. It's
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really got me thinking about family, how uh me and my brother lost my parents at a young age. I really haven't had my brother in my life for about 10 years due to his own struggles. So, I'm just
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really happy that he's uh doing better and he's going to be living here. >> And while Dane was enjoying his time training with Cole, his progress on the scale was completely stable, which is exactly what we want. But it was now
Speaker A
hard for him to tell if he was making any actual progress. But research shows that if you keep your exercises the same week after week and your strength is going up, especially in the 6 to 12 rep range, that is a very strong sign that
Speaker A
you are building muscle regardless of what the scale says. Now, we'll see if that's actually true for Dayton. But I'll be honest, main gaining is just not for everyone. If you're already pretty lean, say under 15% body fat for men or
Speaker A
25% for women, your body may not have enough stored energy to reliably fuel muscle growth, which can leave you spinning your wheels. And if you're underweight, like I was growing up, you're not going to gain 20 lbs by main
Speaker A
gaining. But if you have enough body fat, you're newer to training, or you've just never trained or dieted properly, main gaining can be a great alternative to constantly cycling between bulking and cutting. Which is why at the end of
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the video, I'm going to showcase the results from all three diets and explain which one will work best for you based on your body. And bro, you are a master of maintaining your weight because your weight is the exact same as it was 30
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days ago. Before I show you the Dex results, let's pop open the hood. Now, keep in mind that Dane did all of this with only dumbbells, a bench, and a pull-up bar. And what he doesn't know is I'm going to be surprising him with a
Speaker A
brand new gym setup to help him and his brother continue the journey. But before I surprise him, let's review the results of his final diet. Starting with muscle gains.
Speaker A
Dude, look at this chest, man. Every time I see it, it's just like ballooning up.
Speaker A
Holy. So, after 30 days of his maintained diet, Dayton gained an impressive 1.1 lbs of muscle. That's only 15% less than his lean bulk and 37% less than his fast bulk, leading to a total of roughly 4.4 lb of muscle over
Speaker A
the whole 90 days. But what's interesting is his strength gains during each diet actually match quite well with how much muscle he ended up building.
Speaker A
So, if you don't have access to fancy scans, tracking your lifts is an easy and pretty reliable way to assess your gains. Now, as for fat gain, for the first time in our experiment, rather than gaining, he actually lost a bit of
Speaker A
fat. His waist tightened up and some of his belly fat actually came off. Which brings me to our final question. Based on the results of all three diets, which one worked best and is the approach I'm going to actually recommend for Damon?
Speaker A
Well, while the fast bulk delivered the most gains and he did enjoy the extra food, it came with a disproportionate amount of fat gain, which I know Dayton would end up regretting. As for main gaining, I was honestly surprised with
Speaker A
how much muscle he still built. But since I know he felt the best with more calories, and he does want to prioritize building muscle before attempting to cut to 12% body fat for the summer, the lean bulk, it just makes the most sense for
Speaker A
now. But that's just my take for Dayton, and it might very well be different for you. So, I wanted to make this chart right here to help guide your decision.
Speaker A
But just keep in mind that in all three diets, Dayton still made tremendous progress. So, I don't want you to overthink it. Eating well and training hard is what's going to drive most of your gains. And as for which diet,
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Dayton's decided to stick with a leaner bulk. I think if we stick to that, I don't get too much belly fat over the next few months, then I can hit that 12% easier. Won't feel like I'm giving up.
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so much. >> True. And to help Dane get there, it's time to reveal the surprise that I prepared for him and Cole.
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>> Yo, you went overboard, dude. >> I don't think you know what this thing can do.
Speaker A
>> I don't. That's what I mean, dude. I have no idea. I got you a barbell. I got you weight blades. I have more weight plates coming.
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>> Crazy, bro. >> How's your whole experience been? >> Amazing. I mean, my whole life changed for so many positive ways. just diet, my energy, everything's just been overall better. And it's thanks to you and your app. It's just so nice to not have to
Speaker A
overthink. It's just it does all the little things, the monotonous stuff that no one wants to do. It just takes care of all of that.
Speaker A
>> If you guys want to give the app a shot, you can get two weeks free at billscience.com or scan this QR code right here. And if you guys want to try out a full body workout plan that's all
Speaker A
done for you, then give this video a watch
Topics:muscle buildinglean bulkfast bulkmaintenance dietbody recompositionDEXA scanprotein intakebodybuilding nutritionfitness experimentJeremy Ethier
