Thanks a lot for the replies!
My responses will probably be rather long all the time, but I can’t help it, I always get carried away writing about this stuff! 
But, it’s the bodybuilding thread after all. Go!
Hahaha, it’s far too late for that… Maybe you remember my thread from three years ago to which you replied:
https://t-nation.com/t/unhappy-with-progress/203122
For those interested the thread contains my training history up until three years ago, including pictures.
TL;DR: After good newbie gains I wasted a few years with Starting Strength, got a big ass, big legs and a big gut. 2012/2013 I did 9 months of 5/3/1 and made noticeable gains, the best physique gains since my newbie gains. After that I tried the HFT stuff as well as 5/3/1 again which never yielded the crazy progress which it gave me first.
To be honest not much has happened in the three years since then. It’s a pity. I’ll tell you what I did up until now, but I’ll first adress some points BrickHead made:
Yeah, I know. I guess I just fell for another guru once again. He’s a good talker though and his stuff seems very reasonable and science-driven and… whatever, I guess you could say that about a lot of people in the industry, haha.
I know, I was just caught by surprise because it’s only been about two weeks and two volume increases… and I was still not doing more sets than I did in the past for longer periods of time (while doing constant volume week to week). That said, I’ve been cutting for a bit more than four months and have been on maintenance calories (~2500) for the last six weeks. When I’m slowly bulking I eat 3000+ so that will surely be a factor right now… mhh.
Sleep has been rather erratic in the last few weeks, but it feels that’s more in response to training/volume than anything else. It’s getting better though.
I’m 29 years old now. Well, I’m not that convinced of this training approach anyway. At least not for bodybuilding. I’ve been doing it like three times in my lifting career, but never for more than six months as that seems to be when fatigue catches up to me, despite autoregulating intensity and a few rest days here and there.
This approach with daily full body training is nice for strength though. I’ve been the strongest when I’ve been doing that. The thing is that this isn’t “real” strength. It’s mostly due to neural conditioning and doing the lifts daily. It has a big impact, but pretty much all of the strength vanishes as quickly as it came as soon as you return to a more moderate or low frequency…
Also it didn’t lead to much hypertrophy for me. The only thing it did when I was doing it a few years back was that it gave me rear delts from doing bent over laterals daily for a few weeks. Hadn’t been training that muscle directly at all before though.
So much for that, I’m not planning to do this type of training again at the moment.
Also, again talking about recovery… I don’t know how fast the body “gets old”, haha, but to be honest I don’t think I would be able to survive the 5/3/1 routine I did 5 years ago right now. At some point it just felt like too much. Of course, I was eating about 1000 calories more than right now and am maybe underestimating the impact on recovery of that… but still, I kinda feel like I’m not getting any younger, haha. Although it’s just been 4-5 years…
How’s it been for you, BrickHead? From what I know, you are about ten years older than me…??
That’s good to know. Then I don’t really think that nutrition is that much of an issue for me. I’ve been tracking my calories pretty meticulously for 7 years now and make sure that I always get at least about 120 grams of protein. I adjust the calories up or down whether I want to gain or lose… but whenever I’ve been gaining I end up skinnyfat most of the time. It’s frustrating.
I also don’t eat any cake or sweets or something other “normal” people eat. Just sayin’, haha.
I have no problem being somewhat soft. The thing is that I always end up skinnyfat and gain almost no muscle. You know the drill, you try gaining, even doing it slow, but at some point you feel fat. Then you cut the fat and start feeling weak and flat and change course again.
That said I don’t jump around all the time, I try to gain for months and even years before I go on a cut again.
The thing is, I’ve kinda always been bulking from “somewhat lean” to “skinnyfat with a gut”… and seeing that most of the time I almost gain no muscle at all I figured it might be more “comfortable” to cut down again… and instead go from “lean!” to “still somewhat lean” in the building phase. Kinda like shifting the average fatness around a bit, if you know what I mean. I guess I’ve been bulking from like, I don’t really know, ~13% bodyfat to 20+% fat… and it kinda sucks. I would like to to it from like ~10 to ~15%…
I’m running out of time at the moment, but I’ll adress this and everything I’ve been doing training- and nutrition-wise in the three years since I started that thread later…