bulking

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A period during which a person deliberately seeks to gain body weight.

   Like a bear fattening up before hibernation: deliberately adding weight to draw on later.

   Many lifters plan a bulking over winter, then lose the extra fat in spring.

   Her bulking added twelve pounds before the season began.

   Oppositecutting

   Note

   A bodybuilder's word that comes in a pair. A bulking phase of sustained caloric surplus builds mass, especially muscle. A cutting phase then strips away fat while trying to keep the lean tissue. Cutting is its natural opposite, and the two are usually spoken of as alternating seasons in a training year rather than as one-off events.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of bulk.

   The athlete is bulking steadily, adding muscle through the winter months.

   Editors complained that new regulations were bulking up the manual every year.

   Note

   Here the -ing form spans several verbs. Used intransitively, it means swelling or growing and, in training, putting on mass (he is bulking through the winter). Used transitively, it means storing goods in bulk. Using it to mean adding bulk to something, as in rules bulking a manual, is obsolete, and bulking out is the modern phrasing. As a gerund it shades into the weight-gain noun.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The process by which something gains mass or becomes solid.

   Like wet sand pressing together and setting into a solid block.

   The bulking of the concrete continued for days as it hardened.

   Geologists studied the bulking of the soil during the long freeze.

   Note

   Its most specialized home is sewage treatment, where the bulking of activated sludge is something filamentous bacteria can cause. The noun usually names a process happening to a material, so it typically takes an of-phrase saying what swells or firms up: the bulking of sludge, of soil, of a mixture.

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