now i understand this might come off as a simple question, but the more i thought about it, it really didn’t make sense. yes theyre eating +6k calories a day, so then why wouldnt it turn into something more useful like dense muscle with all the training their doing?
In: 1990
In body building, there are two phases that body builders will subject themselves to:
* “Bulking”, where they put on weight (both muscle and fat)
* “Cutting”, where they go into a caloric deficit while trying to selectively lose fat (and by doing a lot of resistance exercise to maintain muscle)
The first is to get big and strong, the second is to get lean and to improve muscle definition. But during cutting, there is always the risk of losing some muscle. The guys in strong-man competitions who are not in it for aesthetics simply do not care about the second phase because the only thing that wins strongman competitions is sheer strength. (Not even relative strength for their weight, just as much strength as possible for the competition challenges. Many of the strongest strong men [actually struggle to do bodyweight exercises such as pullups](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdicwabHtbc). Hafthor Bjornsson weighs about 400 pounds, and in the video, you can see that [he struggles to do a clean pull-up](https://youtu.be/MdicwabHtbc?si=iBGvlIPFRGYUKOJK&t=272) with his massive bodyweight, unable to get his chin over the bar.) So they just bulk and bulk and don’t do a cut phase. As a result of this, they put on a considerable amount of fat.
As for why they are putting on fat and not just straight muscle, it’s because they are getting themselves into an anabolic state, and in that state, their bodies are responding to growth hormones that trigger both muscle growth and fat storage. But another reason is that muscle consists of protein, and a lot of their surplus calories are also from fat and carbs. Your body can’t just turn fats and carbs into muscle. If you have a large caloric excess of fats and carbs in your diet, the fats get stored as adipose tissue, and the carbs first get stored as glycogen in the muscles, but then you hit a point where your body stores anything beyond that as newly created fat (de novo lipogenesis).
The body can’t store excess protein that isn’t used to build muscle, excess protein doesn’t automatically get turned into muscle; the proteins that get metabolized for energy end up shedding the nitrogen content as urea in the form of urine.
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