Sure, when I don’t have the fortitude to either gain or lose weight.
I picked up on a “tip” from CT a while back. If you are not getting stage ready, 8-10 weeks deficit followed by a 3 week diet break. If a person cuts harshly, the diet break needs to come sooner because the body adapts to the decreased calories sooner
@T3hPwnisher has written a lot on this topic, maybe he can point you to some of his posts or do a quick-recap.
As far as what I’ve remembered from him and articles and such, and learning from my own errors: cutting → decrease volume, keep intensity high. This is also one of the times where I might increase my training frequency, but make my sessions a lot shorter (and significantly less focused on compounds).
Maintaining, keep a moderate workload and let the body rest a while to allow yourself to build a fire to either gain or cut.
Gaining: volume, baby.
You should have given it more time than a week. @jskrabac has written about how he holds a more water when experiencing novel training stress (and other stress?).
In my experience, the body always fights back. It fights back more the leaner and lighter you get and the further away you get from your starting point. We live in a society that celebrates being dog-headed more than being successful and quick turn-arounds, but that doesn’t mean staying miserable for the better half of 16 weeks just to get beach ready is the best approach. I’m not saying it can’t deliver the results that you want though.
While say doing 5/2 would demand more consistency over a longer period of time, it’ll keep training productive and stave off a lot of the negative side-effects such as being miserable. It’ll be harder to gauge progress, but that doesn’t mean that progress isn’t being made. It just demands being more meticulous. @EyeDentist didn’t you used to do quite extended fasts and if you desperately needed some energy you had a spoon of coconut oil (no protein as to not stimulate an mTor/insulin-response?)
You might also want to check out @robstein s contest prep logs for ideas. Start with the most recent one.
And if you find that “maintenance” doesn’t gel with you there is a variant of the MATADOR-diet that alternates between surplus and deficit. If you want to be in an overall deficit you make the deficit on the 2-week deficit weeks greater than the surplus on the 2-week surplus week. As a corollary, if you want to gain weight you make the surplus on the surplus weeks greater than the sum of the deficit on the deficit weeks.
It maybe even predates the MATADOR diet tbh.