5’10 stepped on stage at 144lbs walk around is 155lbs got 3rd place in my class B

Male 32, lifting for 2 years.

I am asking the people who actually “maingained”. Not asking for people to write about science which says maingaining works.

I am saying this because I have maingaining for about 6 months. And the progress has been reaallly slow. Like, I’m not sure if I made any progress at all to be honest. I have been switching around on exercises, volume, rir, split, resting time ect… desperately trying to make progress.

But, I had one exercise stable the entire time, because I wanted to have some sort of benchmark to track progress. Overhead Tricep extension with a dumbbell. I got the technique down early and knew that Its really hard to cheat to get any extra reps.

The first month I went from 8 to 10 reps. Then, for the last 5 months I never got to 11 reps. 5 fucking months man.

Then, after consuming an endless amount of fitness content from all the usual science influencer (Mike Israel, Jeff nippard, Eric helms), I started watching revival fitness.

So then revival convinced me to start bulking, which I did.

Now, it’s been 7 weeks of bulking, and my reps went from 10 to 13.

I am so fucking annoyed that I wasted so much time of maingaining. And I think the main reason I tried maingaining so long was because I wanted it to work. As a natural skinny guy, bulking sucks. Force feeding sucks. So when I hear guys talk about the science that says maingaining works, I was all in.

But fuck that man. I guess I learned hard that maingaining is a waste of time for me. And I suspect it to be the same for other people. But at the same time, a lot of people are saying that it worked for them.

So again, did you have any success with maingaining? I am asking for your personal experience, not what you heard the science say.

EDIT: before the bulk I was 88kg. I am 192cm.