For switching back and forth between bulking and cutting, is there some kind of rule of thumb with regard to how long you might stay on maintenance calories??
So if you are about to finish your bulk for example, do you maintain for a week before your cut? or a couple of days? or do you just go straight into the cut?
Hey @tuppydog - great question, especially as a lot of discussion around bulking and cutting focuses on going back and forth between those two states. Maintenance usually doesn’t get a ton of love!
In my experience, a good rule of thumb is to run a maintenance phase for as long as your diet phase was. For example, if your fat loss phase lasted 8 weeks, you would transition to a maintenance phase for 8 weeks. This helps you recover physically and mentally from your diet, all the while setting you up for future bulk and fat loss phases.
More in-depth info can be found via this article from Renaissance Periodization.
Hope this helps!
Epic thread revival, hopefully the OP didn’t just eat in a big surplus for 16 years after not finding the answer he was looking for…
LOL I realized after the fact how old it was! Ah well… Hope you’re right and OP didn’t go on a dreamer bulk for 16 years. 