After gaining 30+ pounds last year, and losing 40+ since then, I don’t understand why people are so quick to intentionally gain weight again after a cut. I think it’s a mental battle. Being on a cut sucks so once it’s “over” it’s tempting to unleash the Kraken and eat everything in sight.
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I think that, until you’ve reached a level of muscularity that you’re happy with and have established a good base, it’s not really an option to just maintain if you have goals.
Personally, when I eventually reach the amount of muscle I want to have on myself (will probably take around 5 years from now) I’ll get really lean and stay that way, possibly gaining weight very slowly from there.
I view it a bit differently.
We all know about yo-yo dieting and we’ve seen people kill themselves to lose 20 lbs and then immediately gain back 25 lbs. To lose weight, you have to be in a deficit which makes your body unhappy. If you’re too aggressive with your cut (ya know, like impatient) then your body might be in a bit of panic mode. When you put your body in this state it has the desire to store everything it can get because it’s afraid it might not get any more for quite awhile.
I don’t understand why people think it’s a good idea to do this to their body and then immediately go back to a surplus. I think the extra calories are probably instantly stored as energy. First, glycogen and then fat.
Why not cruise at maintenance for awhile and let your body adjust to its new weight?
I think this applies more to people who have been on a longer cut like the T-ransformation Challenge. If you just do a mini cut and drop 5-10 lbs then it’s probably not nearly as important to wait and extended period of time to adjust to your new body fat levels.
I’ve basically been cutting since October. I bet I’d just fill up my fat cells if I went back to a surplus right now.
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I see that you definitely have a point.
I’m just thinking that building muscle is such a slow process, that when you have a lot of it to build and you don’t want it to take a decade (literally), you probably need to accept a little bit of fat gain with the upside of putting muscle on a little faster.
When I finished my cut in November I was basically shredded and for how much I wish I was still that lean, if I had tried to stay that lean while building muscle or even waited a month to get into a surplus, I would’ve gained even less muscle than nature allows, and you really can’t afford it if you ask me when you need to gain a lot of it to build your base.
Correct! And there’s no fast forward button. I’ve been lifting for over a decade and I’m guilty of changing goals and bulking and cutting. I believe that I would have had better results if I’d adopted the slow and steady approach instead of listening to everyone else.
Last year is a perfect example. Prior to 2018 I was convinced that I wasn’t able to add much muscle at this point in my life. But I was convinced that I could. I read the articles and followed the advice. Now that I’ve recovered from all of that gaining I think it was unnecessary. I probably could’ve arrived at the same point with a very small surplus and the journey would’ve probably been more enjoyable.
When I think of guys like @robstein who competed, I see them come off the stage and go back into off season mode, but they don’t go crazy. They don’t gain 30 lbs with the hopes of adding a few pounds of muscle. They keep nailing their nutrition with a structured approach and slowly grind away at it. And the end result is that they add a bit of muscle. It’s not a ton, but it’s a little. And a little each year is how you get big.
I think constantly bulking and cutting is how you stay the same - especially as you get older and it gets harder to lose the flab.
My advice to a guy like you is to take it slow and try to stay in like a 10 lb window. Set a top weight for your growing phases and once you hit it, cut back 5 or 10 lbs on a mini cut and repeat until you get the desired results.
I think this becomes a theoretical argument/discussion. We don’t really know how much muscle you add in a certain amount of time. We don’t know if waiting to go into a surplus will result in less muscle six months from now.
If you gain weight faster, and possibly more of it, then it’s possible that you lose more muscle when you cut because you would have to be in a deficit longer than if you’d taken it slow.
This all sounds good in theory, but don’t you think that if you keep cutting every two and a half months (roughly the amount of time it takes you to gain 10 lbs if you gain 1 lb a week) your training would suffer (and hence your gains)?
I personally find I can’t really progress in my training if I’m not putting on weight, but I guess it’s not the same for everyone.
You have to have your training coincide with your nutrition.
When calories are up, that means volume is up. When calories drop, volume goes down and intensity goes up.
I’ve been setting lifetime PRs while dropping weight on my current approach to training. In the fall, I intend to ease off the weight and up the volume.
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Not to question your approach, as you clearly have way more experience and results to show than I do but, I usually have a hard time understanding why volume is so much more correlated to calorie intake than intensity is.
Isn’t it harder to train with higher intensity when you’re low on calories?
But have you put on muscle in that same period? (Side question)
Just to ensure we’re all on the same page, when I say “intensity” here, I mean it more in the academic sense of “percentage of 1rm” vs “degree of effort”.
In that sense, the reason calories correlate with volume is because volume is effectively the AMOUNT you are training. More training=more recovery need. More recovery need=more recovery agents. Your two primary available options are food and sleep, and though sleep is restorative, muscles are built with food. In turn, when you jack up the volume, you jack up the food to go with it.
On the subject of relationships, when volume goes up, intensity MUST got down, necessarily. To just increase volume and not decrease intensity is how one overreaches. The inverse is the same as well: when you jack up the intensity, the volume drops. This means you are training with higher percentages of weights, but training LESS in general, so you require less recovery.
I have no reliable means to measure that I am, but I imagine the answer is no, simply because I’m not eating or training in a way to put on muscle. But I’m STILL progressing.
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Yes that’s what I meant too. What I meant by “training with higher intensity” being “harder” is: if your recovery capacity is lower due to diet, all things being equal, isn’t it going to be harder for you to hit a higher weight (higher intensity) compared to what you are used to in your “normal” training?
Yeah, and here’s when context becomes key in my opinion. If I train for hypertrophy (and I know this is delicate topic having read your blog lol) and I go through a period of dieting where I manage to keep my strength or even increase it a bit (but really we could argue that if I just up the intensity as in I use a higher % of 1RM I may not have gotten stronger, but rather I may have realized the strength I already had by just upping the weight still within my capabilities) but I don’t put on muscle, have I really progressed?
I guess my actual question is, if you were me and trying to get big as hell, would you rather push the bodyweight a little more and for a little longer, or try and strip off the extra fat regularly, knowing that you won’t be putting on muscle during those periods? (i.e. Like you said, you’re not eating or training for mass)
It will be harder compared to when calories are up, for sure, but it will be easier compared to trying to recover from a high volume training block when calories are low, which is the point of the design.
It’s no secret that more calories will always be better than less calories as far as training goes, but there are blocks of training that you can expect success on while calories are low compared to others.
Absolutely. Think of the benefit you’ll have when you transition to a higher volume block of training and can move heavier weights compared to where you were before.
I couldn’t say what I’d do if I were you. When I reduce calories, it’s typically because my lifestyle can no longer sustain high calorie intake and weight gain. During that time period, I push intensity, so that I can progress.
Yes you have a point, definitely wasn’t thinking of that.
I guess my issue right now is that my body fat is creeping up and I’m starting not to feel comfortable with my bf%, especially with summer approaching.
But right now I weight 175 lbs, which is the highest I’ve weighted. Every year I reach the neighborhood of this number, and I cut down, and the circle repeats. I want to cut and have abs, but I also realize that I’m weak and with little muscle, so I can’t afford to do that, which is why I have chosen to not care about it too much and keep pushing the weight to see where I get, for once.
I have a feeling that if I cut down now, it’ll all just be a giant déjà vu. If I keep at it, though, I will have been putting on weight for more or less a year and maybe I’ll finally some progress on the size side (hopefully not only of my gut).
Something that took me MUCH longer to learn that it should have is this: when I’m training to gain muscle, I am going to HATE training. When I am training to lose fat, I am going to hate EATING.
I ran into the same traps: I’d gain weight, get fat, lose weight, get small, and just keep coming back to the same weight. The two programs that really kicked things into gear for me muscle buildingwise were Building the Monolith and Deep Water, and those are the two programs that have EVER made me want to quit training. Like, forever ever. Like, I looked at how much money I had spent on building a home gym and wondered if I had wasted it, because I never wanted to train again. Like, staring at my feet in the shower contemplating all my poor life choices. I f**king HATED training like that, and goddamn did I put on some muscle.
The solution may be to keep going full steam ahead but also train just absolutely mindbreakingly stupid.
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Why would my training suffer? I’m training for purely physique reasons right now. I don’t really care how much weight is on the bar. I use it as a guide to make the workouts harder over time, but my ultimate goal is fatigue and stress to try to stimulate muscle growth.
If you’re worried about performance then why would you care about your abs? Perhaps you would benefit from the ol’ “Seasons of Training” approach where you pursue performance goals while eating at a slight surplus and then just worry about physique goals when in a deficit.
Cutting can be very beneficial to reaching a physique goal but it has no place in pursuing a strength/performance goal. I’m not sure if I could match my PRs in the gym while also matching my best physique. If both are important to you then you have to change your mental approach when pursuing each one.
I find calorie intake has very little noticeable effect on my strength gains, as someone in the same ballpark as you strength wise. It would be interesting to find out where the difference is.
May be mental. I tend to psych myself out a lot on everything in life.
I agree with you on this, but what I was trying to convey earlier is that cutting fat is beneficial for physique but only if you have enough muscle to begin with. I have done a serious cut and as much as it was good to have abs and striations and everything, I looked skinny as fuck.
Because performance is closely related to muscle mass gains. If you can’t lift as much weight for as many reps you’re probably not gonna put on a whole of muscle.
I plan on starting BTM as soon as summer ends, and this is really encouraging. Lol
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You’re doing fine, young man. You’re young and have many years ahead of you. If I could go back in time then I would opt for a slower rate of gain over time compared to the more aggressive bulks and cuts.
A surplus could be 100 calories a day. You don’t have to get carried away. And I’m not saying that you do or you are; just throwing out a friendly warning so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.
Paul Carter advocates getting lean before trying to gain. I think he’s recommended a person be 10-12% body fat. I laughed because that’s about as low as I’ve ever been. I considered that a goal; not a starting point LOL!
But this past year has made me think he might be right.
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I know really… That’s the approach he used on me when he coached me last winter haha
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