[quote]shark39 wrote:
Hello CT, I would like to have your opinion on my situation. I have been cutting for 15 weeks now and I have only one week left to do before I increase a little bit my calories and go into a lean mass phase. The problem is that 3 weeks ago, I drasticly increased my volume (from 10-12 sets per bodypart to 16) for the last ‘‘sprint’’ of my cut with the intention of burning even more fat, wich have worked so far. My problem now is that I feel overtrained, I lost a lot of strenght since 3 weeks (gone frome benching 260x5 to 255x 2 unexplosive and hard reps, I have a lot less libido, less appetite, trouble to sleep ect. I really don’t know how to handle my last week of cut.
Should I take it completely off? Should I still eat in a calorie deficit while i’m off? Should I eat more to help my body rebound? Should I still go to the gym but going low volume? In short, I really don’t know what would be the most intelligent thing to do. I would like to have your opinion on wich approach would be the best with the training and the diet! Thanks!
P.S I went from about 228 lbs at 18-19% bodyfat to 200 lbs at about 8-9% bodyfat so far. [/quote]
I will most certainly give ground to CT’s expert advice–but on the off chance he doesn’t get to this very quickly because he’s busy I’d like to give you my take on things.
First, I would not have increased my overall volume by 50%. That was a mistake in my opinion, especially without modifying calorie intake. A bump up for a sprint to the finish? Maybe yeah…but adding 50% total volume isn’t a bump, it’s a mountain. Especially for 3 straight weeks. I might have blitzed for 1 week like that, then back down to “normal”, then the next week up say 20%, but I would either a) not have jumped it up 50% in the first place and either used a gradual increase each week (10%, then 20%, then 25-30%, then maybe 35%), or b) do the blitz I mentioned: 50% up for a week, then normal for a week, then +20% or so.
At this point I’d say you might be at the end of your cut. You did a great job, but now you’re wearing down and you don’t really want to do that.
Options as I see it: 1) add calories, start a lean “maintenance” level before your lean mass phase BUT keep the training volume up 2) drop your extra training volume back to normal cut levels, and add a little bit of calories as well 3) stop training.
In my opinion stopping training should be last resort. You added so much extra work you are under-recovering, and it is likely if you add calories you will not get any fatter and may even get slightly leaner over the short term because your body is craving nutrients to deal with the increase in training.
You’re pretty much at the end of your cut anyways–you made your goal, why press into another week of strain if you don’t have a competitive deadline? It’s unlikely you’ll get another jump in fat loss over this last week and you’ll end up feeling worse.
So, depending on how bad you feel I would respectfully suggest either option 1 or 2. Add calories either way–go to maintenance levels, or even a slight bump up if you want to keep training volume and if not and you feel too bad, go with option 2–add calories, cut volume but keep training.
You will almost certainly do no damage to your physique if you add calories, even if you add what you perceive as slightly “too much”, because you have a recovery debt. Stopping training completely would do more damage to your “look” than dropping volume and adding calories.