Confession: I keep seeing ‘should I bulk or cut’ sort of threads and people saying they’re stupid but I keep wondering the same thing.
My goal is to look better but I do not know whether I should do that by losing fat then gaining muscle or gaining muscle (and some fat probably) then losing the fat. I know over the long term it won’t matter but I still wonder.
And a further confession is I don’t really understand eating to support my training. I do not know how to tell if I am or aren’t doing that.
Confession: I am RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE doing the thing I moaned about above, which is screwing around on here rather than lacing up and getting after it.
But I seriously am going to put a period on this, click “reply,” and go.
I imagine only you can answer that. As someone who needed (generous past tense, there) to both lose fat and gain muscle to be strong and look good, I decided ultimately that being strong was more important to me than being not-fat and gained some weight. Hopefully a lot of it was muscle…
This is one of those “you will know when you AREN’T recovering” sorta things. Most folks tend to have the recovery part of training down, because that is eating and sleeping and we tend to be VERY good at those things. However, when you push the training stupid hard, suddenly recovery becomes more valuable.
I am also in this boat. Although I’m trying to learn by experimenting. @T3hPwnisher, I suspect lifts going down consistently would be the most obvious sign?
How long have you been training? How much weight/quality mass have you gained in that time?
The answer is dependent on where you are in this journey. For some people, training hard, eating, and gaining 20 lbs in a year is a good idea. For me, it’s not. I’m well past the newb stage and learned first hand that I’m not going to gain any significant amount of muscle in a short time anymore. I gained 30 lbs last year, and now I’ve lost 40. I’m leaner than I’ve ever been, but I don’t know if I added any muscle. For me, the right approach is going to be staying lean and gaining weight very slowly over the course of years.
I think a lot of people would do well if they could just identify where they are on this journey. That should tell you what you can realistically expect from your body.
@T3hPwnisher thank you, that is kind of the answer i expected and was helpful.
@Frank_C I’ve been training 3 years now and I have not achieved much. I’ve gained about 10kg at my heaviest and since lost about 6kg. I look better than I did but I don’t have very much muscle, most likely not enough to warrant losing anymore fat. Every year I look back and think ‘what was I doing’ and then do a little better the next but I’m still not there yet. Anyway, hopefully this year is the year - I’ve had a big mindset change.
It sounds like you should just try to make some steady progress with a reasonable “bulk”. We need to get away from drastic phases of growing and shrinking. Nutrition is a tool. If you want to grow then you need to eat a surplus, but many people use this as an excuse to declare open season on the buffet industry. It doesn’t have to be that way. You should just eat slightly more than you would normally, and continue to eat good foods.
Here’s a little nugget regarding fat. We all have fat cells. When we “gain” fat, we fill up the cell. Once the cell is full we have to create another cell if we’re continuing to store energy. This continues until we stop eating in excess. Unfortunately, once we create these fat cells, they never go away. They shrink, but they’re always there. What does this mean for us? Well, it basically means that it’s easier to get fat the second, third, fourth time around. It’s easier to fill a cell than it is to create a new one.
I think if a guy were to cut down prior to a bulk, then he’d just turn around and fill those same fat cells up when he started gaining again. As long as you’re not in the morbidly obese category, you might as well just focus on growing.
hmm, if that’s true, I’ve been “underrecovered” for most of my time training. I’ve been feeling amazing lately though. I guess I’m doing something right
At my job I started out as a driver for a landscape supplier. Moving heavy bags regularly, 10s of thousands of feet of pipe, high activity and such, and lifted with relative ease. Honestly I just felt great from being so loose.
Fast forward I’ve been moved to a much more mentally taxing position behind the counter, as well as a flood issue that took months of mental sodomy to get past.The days are overall shorter, and I probably move a quarter of the weight at work than I did then, and found my body falling apart. Old aches started creeping up, sleep was getting out of whack, 3, 4, 5 cups of coffee just to level off, and then somewhere I just started fucking eating. And ultimately cleaned up my diet a bit, while keeping the overall food intake up, and I feel probably about 80% now.
Tldr; my more mentally taxing job required me to eat more than when it was physical to feel better than roadkill. It was a night and day difference. I ate heavy one day, stretched my stomach a bit, and have just kept the pace since then.
This week is a deload which means tonight’s session will be a lot shorter than normal. This will give me time at the end to do some curls and get a good old fashioned arm pump. I am looking forward to this more than I probably should be !!
I was really struggling with presses yesterday and thought it was because of my squats. Nope, I was using the wrong plates and ended up pressing 30kg instead of the prescribed 25