For sure, I recall you explaining your approach in my last thread. I think having that focus on strength and performance is incredibly important; if I hadn’t been gaining strength this whole time, I’d feel like I’d made no progress at all in nearly a year.
If it were me?
Probably take a 2-4 week break, eating at maintenance, then make a 6-8 week run at getting really lean.
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IMO there’s so much here standing in the way of achieving your goals, and it’s not at all surprising you’ve been spinning your wheels a bit.
For one, this training is not conducive to recomp, especially for a natty. Personally, I’ve never been able to make any progress on a recomp or even just a cut if I wasn’t training 5-6x/week and sometimes 4x/week if I was really pushing myself every workout. You have 10 exercises here and they’re all straight sets I presume, so no circuits or supersets even that would elicit the metabolic disturbance you’re looking for. And 6/10 exercises are isolation exercises! I think you’d get more out of 4-5 compound exercises and ignored all the fluff movements. And only 1/10 is lower body? Again, lower body movements are the most demanding, hence most metabolic. So on almost every dimension: frequency, ratio of compound to isolation, exercise selection, and lastly execution of the sets (straight sets vs. any kind of circuits or giant sets) you are standing in your own way.
Second, protein intake is way low. At your size, I’d realistically expect you to be taking in 200g or more of protein if you’re after a true recomp. You’d probably be able to get away with higher calories too. With ultra low calories, you really got to bump protein to spare/build muscle.
From here, you don’t really have the option to keep cutting. Your calories are already too low and you’ve kind of blown the opportunity to do so this round. I’d very slowly bump calories each week (and I mean like 25-50 cal per day per week slow!) In the beginning, try to bump exclusively from protein until you can get it closer to 200g. From there I’d do 1-3 years of focusing on building as much muscle as possible. You don’t really have enough of a base to even be thinking in terms of “bulking” or “cutting” right now.
IME, focusing on maintaining strength numbers is a bit overblown. I’ve never lost strength during a cut, but that doesn’t always guarantee you’re retaining all your muscle. Your numbers are not high enough that you shouldn’t be able to hang on to strength through neurological adaptation and to some extent sheer will power. At the end of the day, you can look at comparison pictures and know if you’re really getting the results you want. I know a few guys mentioned being “depleted,” but you’re not gonna be depleted at 180g of carbs, especially not if you’re following the workout you posted. I’ve been able to get a pump on 50g/carb a day lol.
I know I’ve thrown alot out there, but I think foundationally you kind of need to hit a hard reset with this whole process and shift your priorities for the time being as well as think much longer term. Eating 1400 cal/day has got to be miserable and isn’t sustainable. I’ve dipped to 1650 in the past at the end of a cut and was there for only 2 weeks max and it was to get down a true 6% bodyfat… Oh, and I was hitting 250g of protein. I couldn’t even imagine the hell you’re going through.
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Thanks a lot for the write up. I think the thing is, the fact that I don’t have enough of a base has been at the back of my mind throughout this entire process. I’m painfully aware of it, but I’ve felt in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ kinda situation, because I see myself as both having too high a BF% to be putting on weight, and evidently, too little muscle mass to cut to where I’d feel comfortable gaining.
As you say, I don’t think realistically I can carry on cutting; if I’m on 1400 calories now, with a run everyday and a workout every other day, at some point it’s going to be unsustainable, and it’ll get to that point before I reach my body-fat goal. I guess I might lose a bit more fat at that calorie level, but I can’t see myself getting to 10% and being able to get enough protein in to maintain muscle.
When you talk of spending several years focusing solely on building muscle, and not thinking in terms of bulking and cutting, are you referring specifically focusing on recomp/eating at maintenance?
I wouldn’t “throw in the towel” until I tried frequent clean protein meals. With six times a day clean protein meals you can consume more calories and keep your insulin from spiking. That will optimize both muscle gains through more available protein and minimize fat deposits by reducing the amplitude of your insulin spikes which stores fat.
Near starvation is a fool’s approach to optimizing body composition.
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It sounds like your metabolism is Highly variable. And that if you lower calories your body has No problem adjusting to the situation and simply burning fewer calories.
So you cut calories to go into a bigger deficit, and your body says “fuck that” and responds by “slowing down” and burning fewer calories.
Moving forward, maybe you could try some approach where you Rotate your calories. Like you eat in a slight deficit for 5 days, and then eat More/maintenance calories 2 days per week to “trick” your body into keeping the calorie expenditure up.
Or you diet for 2 weeks to keep lean and maybe cut a little and then eat eat maintenance for two weeks so you can have awesome workouts and keep/strength and metabolism up.
Another way could be eating at a deficit all week and simply having a “cheat meal” or “carb up” or “refeed” once or twice, timed around your biggest workouts.
And if you decide to focus on muscle building and gains, you can run it the opposite way. Eat in a surplus 5 days to fuel Mass then switch to maintenance or deficit or some kind of fast for 2 days so you don’t get too fat while gaining.
Worrying about insulin and cycling calories to “trick the body” is over complicating things. Have you all looked at his last thread?
He was untrained went on a dumb bulk got scarred of the fat gain and went on a cut. Just like most beginners and people who want “abs” he is just spinning his wheels.
He never needed 3600 calories to bulk, and I doubt 2500 calories was his maintenance.
He is now over training and undereating (not even a gram of protein per pound).
Not only is his training bad but, I doubt he is training correctly. Given his physique I really doubt he is hitting those numbers. Honestly, the intensity and volume may be low enough that the lower intake is a good maintenance. Probably why he is not tired.
Isn’t that the highly respected Jordan Peters full body routine?
Not any I have seen.
Latest one from the video series is closer to:
M-W-F
A-heavy (6-10) upper body and light (15-25) lower body.
B-light (15-25) upper and heavy (6-10) lower.
C-heavy (6-10) upper body and light (15-25) lower body
D-light (15-25) upper and heavy (6-10) lower
And that is why I recommended eating frequent low glycemic, protein meals (six meals per day). Then you have fixed the insulin concern, and thus there is no insulin worry.
Since the 1970’s that was my meal frequency and I didn’t know insulin management existed. But my clean frequent meals kept my insulin from spiking. I never worried about insulin.
It seems clear to me that OP knows about as little about weight training as he does diet for optimal body composition. That is the other course correction he needs.
Maybe the full body routine this dude is following is great. Or maybe it really sucks. It just could be full body isn’t a great fit for this particular dude.
So from here, what’s the best path forward?
Trying to come up with the best possible full body routine and see if it works better? And then if it doesn’t work move on to something else?
Or just immediately make the jump and try some kind of simple 3 or 4 way split like the majority of physique focused lifters use?
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Holy crap, you’re running every day?! Yeah, so your lack of results is completely understandable now. I actually would’ve been surprised if you had made any progress with your current diet and training now knowing you’re running everyday. The thing about running is that as you get more and more conditioned for it, you essentially train your body to burn fewer calories. It doesn’t elicit the same metabolic response of something with more variance like weightlifting.
At this stage if I’m being completely honest, it sounds like the biggest hindrance to your progress is your neuroticism. I think you missed my original point, so I will be more explicit: you should not be thinking in terms of bulking, cutting, recomp, maintenance calories, calorie counting, etc. You don’t even know what your maintenance is. Throw away your scale and your food scale, and stop counting calories and just focus on kicking ass in the gym and making smart eating choices throughout the day as @RT_Nomad perfectly laid out “frequent clean protein meals.”
Your bench press has gone from 200lb for 6 reps to 10 reps since Dec. 2022? If so, this is very poor progress. I’ve seen guys at your strength level add 3-5 reps to their bench just from shifting their technique/form. You should be seeing this kind of progress in about a month of hard training. Focus on that!
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Thanks, I think this is a good approach going forward. I’ll start doing what you’ve suggested here and see what happens.
The original routine is from Steve Shaw.
The example I gave is lower volume, as I’ve dialed it back as I got further into the cut. The reason I have the side raises and rear delts in there, that might seem a bit overkill, is that I just like doing them, and their recoverability is good so I don’t really have to worry about overdoing it.
I do really like the full body, three days per week way of doing things, where you then have two consecutive days off at the weekend.
I think because there wasn’t much guidance so far as volume and intensity in that video, I went and researched that stuff myself and inevitably got it wrong.
When I was on those ridiculous bulking calories, I was doing three sets to failure on each exercise (apart from squats and deadlifts). I tried to figure out the proper volume and intensity ratios (I knew 12 sets per week per body part was a good range), but I worried that given the calories I was eating (that I thought I needed), I had to ere on the side of being too intense than not doing enough.
Of course, progress crawled even though it progressed a bit, and I did end up putting on too much fat because of the diet.
Nearly all the progress I made on, say, bench, was after I started the cut and had reduced the volume considerably.
Blockquote. Holy crap, you’re running every day?! Yeah, so your lack of results is completely understandable now. I actually would’ve been surprised if you had made any progress with your current diet and training now knowing you’re running everyday. The thing about running is that as you get more and more conditioned for it, you essentially train your body to burn fewer calories. It doesn’t elicit the same metabolic response of something with more variance like weightlifting.
Interesting, haven’t come across that. Basically I added that amount of running in so I had a bit of a buffer to have another protein-based meal, because the calories were so low.
Blockquote At this stage if I’m being completely honest, it sounds like the biggest hindrance to your progress is your neuroticism.
Blockquote Your bench press has gone from 200lb for 6 reps to 10 reps since Dec. 2022? If so, this is very poor progress. I’ve seen guys at your strength level add 3-5 reps to their bench just from shifting their technique/form. You should be seeing this kind of progress in about a month of hard training. Focus on that!
Honestly, I think you’re right and that I do have an issue with this. As I said to the other poster above, most of that progress came during the cut as well, because when I was gaining I was doing way too much.
Blockquote think you missed my original point, so I will be more explicit: you should not be thinking in terms of bulking, cutting, recomp, maintenance calories, calorie counting, etc . You don’t even know what your maintenance is. Throw away your scale and your food scale, and stop counting calories and just focus on kicking ass in the gym and making smart eating choices throughout the day as @RT_Nomad perfectly laid out “frequent clean protein meals.”
I think this is the clear approach to go with, thank you.