 This is Bodybuilding 101. Today's topic, bulking and cutting, how to do either one. Let's go. Yeah, let's do it. Let's go. This, you know, popular topic. It is. And just like, I'm gonna go get a sandwich. I'm gonna work on my bulking one of you guys to get a sandwich. Yeah. I'll get some coffee. No, you know, I want to talk specifically around the, because as you think about this, right, we've been doing this for a long time. I think, oh, bulking cutting is very simple. But there's a lot of myths around both bulking and cutting, in particular, how you combine training with bulking and training with cutting and all that stuff. So I think this would be a good episode. I think that there's, one of the things that I thought I was, that I thought was going to be the norm when I got into the space was like just this brilliance around nutrition and exercise programming. And it was not true. And I don't say that to insult everybody. That's like a bodybuilder, because there's plenty of bodybuilders that are very intelligent that know what they're doing, that are nutritionists. Like, so obviously there's exceptions to the rule. But it was more often the rule that a lot of these guys and girls that were just not dieting properly for a show. Like they extreme bulked and they extreme cut. And there was a much easier and better approach to the whole process. And yet they couldn't figure out why each time they went into a cut for a show, it got harder and harder. And they can never bring a better version of themselves to stage. And they were until the point where they would run four or five shows like that. And I forget, there was a saying in the bodybuilding world that they call like show fatigue or something like that. And they would blame it on that of just like too many shows in a row. And it's like, well, that's what's not, it's not too many shows. It's not the getting up on stage and posing that causes this. It's the extreme dieting and bulking that is causing them to hit these hard plateaus. 100%. And by the way, I know this is bodybuilding, but bulking and cutting is important to understand for athletes as well. Athletes also, and we as we get into this, the same principles that bodybuilders typically are looking to to apply or the goals I should say that they're trying to get from bulk and cutting are similar to what athletes would get when they'd want to gain size or lose size. So athletes would want to gain size, particularly with strength. And some sports size can be advantageous. And it or if they're trying to get smaller, they're not trying to lose performance. They want to improve their performance while being smaller. So this episode applies to and then, of course, the average person who wants to, you know, approach bulking and cutting wants to do it the right way so that it's both sustainable. They don't have plateaus and they feel good why they do that. So bulking just loosely will define this as the attempt to gain muscle and size typically with minimal or no fat gain and or the pursuit of a fast metabolism. In other words, bulking is the process by which my goal is to gain muscle. And I say typically with minimal or no fat gain, because it's very rare where someone's purposely trying to gain body fat. Now, as cases where this will happen, I can think back to some female clients that would come to me after dieting for too hard and too long. And we needed to gain body fat to get the hormones to regulate. But for the most part, when people say, Oh, I want to bulk, they're not talking about gaining a bunch of body fat. In fact, they wouldn't need me for that. Well, you also say minimal because it's also almost impossible to be eating in a surplus, trying to gain and not gain some body fat with that. The goal is that, right? And then the other part is the pursuit of a faster metabolism. Bulking, when I first was a trainer, was pretty much relegated to just people who wanted to get bigger. Nobody else bulked. Now we're starting to see people use bulking as a way to speed up their metabolism so that it makes it easier for them to get lean, which I think is a great approach and we'll talk about. So bulking in this episode, and that's what we're talking about. When we say bulking, cutting is the attempt at losing body fat with minimal or ideally no muscle loss and no strength loss. So when people say they're cutting, they typically aren't trying to lose muscle or performance or strength. That's not what people are after. So that's the goal. Now, I guess we could talk about how to do it and get as close as you can to accomplishing those specific goals. Yeah, also that maybe some of the common mistakes in, you know, back to the original point I was making with the bodybuilding community. And I'm highlighting them because that's their sport. And so they're, they're the most professional at it. And yet they still make a lot of mistakes, which just in my, my, my point is that really highlights how much the average person who's trying to do what they basically do for a living, right? These, these people cut and bulk for a living or for, you know, for a hobby and then you have the average person who is, is trying to emulate what they're doing, whether they're trying to get on stage or not, they're trying to emulate that what these people have learned how to perfect, but the truth is a lot of them have not figured that truly out. And we see this extreme bulking and extreme cutting. And what ends up happening is if you were to actually do, and this is why I love to always tell people to go get like a dexa scan or a, you know, a underwater hydrostatic way and, and find out your, your body fat percentage before you do something like this, because the scale won't tell you. Yeah. If you, if you, if you're okay with your current weight and you want to go through this process of, Oh, I want to bulk up and build some muscle. And then I want to then trim down, say for summer and lean out. And, and if you end up in the same exact position, lean body mass wise, so it's the same amount of muscle before you go on the bulk and, and then at the end, the end process of bulking all the way up, say 10, 15, 20 pounds and then cutting all the way down. And you're at the same lean body mass. Yeah. It was just like a lot of extra calories and a lot of extra work for the same body composition. And this happens all the time. I'm glad you said that. Cause here's what bulking is not gaining a bunch of body fat with minimal or no muscle gain. And here's what cutting is not losing weight or muscle with very minimal or almost no fat loss. And that's what ends up happening when people do it the wrong, the wrong way. Let's start with diet first. Um, and believe it or not, this is where the confusion, uh, this is where I don't think there's the most confusion. Now there's confusion here, but I think there's more confusion in other, uh, other aspects of this, but with, with diet, there's bulking and cutting actually have one thing, uh, strongly in common, whether you're cutting or whether you're bulking, that doesn't matter. You still should aim for your target body weight in protein. Both diets need to be high in protein. A cutting diet that's high in protein will burn more body fat and, and lose less muscle and a bulking diet that's high in protein will build more muscle and will gain less body fat. Now that, that's true. But would you make the case when, when coaching a client that it's even more imperative that we're hitting that or above for my client that's in a cut? Yes, even more important. Right. Because if you were hitting your protein intake, 80, 90% of the time with a few days here and there that are under and we're in a caloric surplus, the likelihood that we're going to pair down or lose muscle in that process, saying that everything else is controlled, that, you know, stress is fine and your programming is good. Uh, we probably won't pair down to lose muscle, but in a caloric deficit and, you know, pushing the body, right? Stressing the body like that and missing a few protein days here or there could be a lot more detrimental. Yeah. A calorie surplus is protein sparing. Um, so you can get away with less protein, but still at the end of the day, if you compare two bulking diets, everything else identical calories or anything else identical, but one's high calorie, uh, high protein. And the other one is it the high protein one's going to build more muscle and gain less body fat in a calorie surplus, which this is actually how I used to control, uh, my dieting of bulking and cutting when I was competing is I really didn't move a lot of variables because I needed to be so precise with this and I had timelines and things like that. Yeah, I would be like, I would, when in a bulk, I was eating two, two and a half cups of rice with all my meals and allowing some fats, like butter and extra calories that would come from things like that. When I would go the other direction, I would pull it from carbohydrates. I really wouldn't manipulate protein. Protein would kind of stay consistent all the time. The only thing I would kind of manipulate is my, my fats and my carbohydrates. It would be the way I would manipulate. It was just an easy way to do it. It's like, if I have, if I'm eating five, six meals a day and I'm eating two cups of rice with everything on that, and now I want to cut, say three to 500 calories of the diet. I simply just cut those, you know, serving sizes of rice in half and maybe a little bit less oil or butter. And I'm, boom, now I've got a 500 calorie deficit. And the other reason why, uh, protein is probably more important to cut is because it's, uh, it's appetite suppressing. This actually might make it a challenge in a bulk, sometimes hitting your protein targets and trying to hit a surplus of calories. And we'll get to what the surplus and deficit should be. Sometimes it makes it hard to hit a surplus, especially if you're like a skinny kid, you got fast metabolism. You're one of those people that's like hard gainer. Like, oh my God, I got to eat 3,500 calories and I got to try and eat 190 grams of protein. But when I hit that protein, I'm like, so full. In that case, uh, liquid protein, um, like protein shakes can be quite beneficial because, but with a cut, it's great. Like you want appetite suppression when you're trying to cut. So high protein is like super valuable. I remember when I, when this light bulb went off for me as a young kid trying to gain weight, um, and the other kind of hack to this was too, that when I was, when I was a hard gainer and trying to eat more calories and I knew I had a protein, I would just eat everything in sight and that would be burgers for everything. Right. And I would get so satiated that I wouldn't, I couldn't get to my, my protein. I actually found eating lower calorie leaner meats promoted me to be hungry again sooner. And you were prioritizing the protein. Yeah. And so it was easier. I would have never thought that me switching over to turkey and chicken and these like leaner cuts would actually help me in a bulk, but I actually found what would happen is that I could eat that turkey or chicken. And then two hours later, I was ready to eat again. Whereas if I had a big old juicy five guys burger, I would be full for the next four or five hours. And so I had an easier time hitting my macro targets by actually eating prioritizing the protein. That's, that's 100% what both of them have in common. I think that's very different about both of them is not carbs and fats or anything like that. Those you could play with, as long as you get your essential fats, you could play with both of them. It's whether or not you're eating more calories and you're burning or less calories in your brain. That's the difference between a bulk and a cut. Now the question is always, well, how do I know how if I'm eating more than what I'm burning or less than what I'm burning? The best way that I know that we know as of right now is literally to track your normal diet, don't change your diet. Track it for a week and then you get your average per day and your maintenance is probably around whatever that is. So you just eat your normal diet, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, whatever. Track everything on an app. At the end of a week, take your total divided by seven. There's your average. Now you know if you eat above that, you're in a surplus. If you eat below that, you're in a cut and that's a good place to start. Today's YouTube giveaway map sent a ball like advanced. Here's how you can enter to win. Leave a comment below this video on the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, because of this episode, we put the two most popular bodybuilding style workout programs that we have on sale. Maps aesthetic 50% off. Maps split 50% off for this episode only. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of description below. All right, back to the show. What would you say would be like the most common pitfall in terms of like being in a cut and now you're adding activity in excess or being in a bulk and not having, having enough stress and activity? I would say maybe putting the car before the horse in this situation, meaning that I would first want to figure out all this maintenance stuff before I started adding any more activity or anything else. And so, and I'll circle the entire back to the question that you're kind of alluding to, Justin, is that like you, one of the things that's important is that you track and figure this out because most people want to use like an app that guesstimates all this and I can't stress how often those things aren't precise. What's your age? What's your height? What's your weight? Here's your calories. And then they add in their exercise component and activity and all these things are going to start doing. And now they're having such a hard time figuring out where their maintenance is. So when I recommend the calorie tracking, I also tell them I don't want any, I don't want any outside activity that you would normally do. Yeah, keep everything the same. Yeah, I don't want you to go for an extra walk because you're trying to impress me. I don't want you to get on the treadmill after your workout. Like if you have been consistently forever working out four days a week, that's fine. You can stay doing that. But don't do any extra activity because I want to truly find this maintenance out. And so back to your kind of question is I think what a big mistake people make is they're excited. They're pumped up. I'm going to start this diet and they just start to do everything at once. And it's not how I want to do that. I want to slowly introduce activity and then eventually cardio and then cutting and we're kind of playing this game through the whole process versus trying to throw the whole kitchen sink at once. Now a good rule of thumb, I'm going to give a general number because this is really very widely depending on who I'm talking to. And in some cases I wouldn't do this. But generally speaking, a surplus or a deficit would be in the range of three to eight hundred calories, I would say. So three hundred to eight hundred calories above where your maintenance is would be your bulk three hundred to eight hundred calories below where your maintenance is would be a cut. Now, when would I not do this? Well, if your maintenance is so low that cutting you three hundred to four hundred calories puts you at twelve hundred calories or a thousand calories or thirteen hundred calories. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put you on the bulk and do what's called a reverse diet. So now, how do I know if this is the right bulk number? I would gauge it off performance. Here's one of the mistakes people make with a bulk. They look at the scale. Lean body mass doesn't come on very quickly. So if you're gaining two pounds, three pounds a week on the scale, you're probably not gaining muscle unless you're a complete beginner. That's not muscle. So it should be pretty slow. Like you should see your your weight go up a few pounds a month and and have correlating strength gains. That means you're on the right track. Don't make the mistake that I always made in bulks, which was, oh, I'm getting stronger, but I only gained three pounds. Let me double my calories. Make the scale go up more and then you'll get a body fat test and you find, oh, all I did was gain more body fat. It's crazy to think that we're having a whole, this conversation centered completely around bulking. So, you know, building or adding weight and cutting, cutting down or losing weight. And the scale is probably one of the worst things that you can use in both situations. It's not a good indicator of am I am I am I going about this the right way, which is also to back kind of back to Justin's point of our question is like, I want to get a really, and I can't stress the importance of the figuring out the maintenance first. And really sometimes I'll stretch somebody two weeks if we were really inconsistent for a week. It's like, I want to get enough data that we can confidently say, hey, if I just ate at 2,500 calories and kind of went through my life the way it is, I'd probably stay right around the same right around here. This is homeostasis for my body. Okay, cool. We know what that we know what that looks like. And I'm telling them to track steps to because I'm going to use this as a way to manipulate activity and the deficit. So I know that, oh, this person walks 4,000 steps a day on average, they work out three times a week, and they eat 2,500 calories. That is maintenance for us. Now comes in. And now that we know that, deciding whether we're going to bulk or cut is easy. Or like, now that's just a preference like what you said, oh, if it's really low calories, I'm going to bulk them in a reversed item. If they're in a healthy place, oh, we might might cut first. But finding that baseline out is maybe one of the most important parts of this entire thing so that you know how to kind of like methodically adjust. Yeah, if you base it off the scale, here's what you'll do. You'll overcut or over bulk, as will always happen. Even fat loss doesn't happen super fast. If you're losing, you know, three pounds, four pounds in a week, maybe the first week because that can be water. But if that's consistent, you ain't losing body fat. And back to Justin's kind of original question, like the biggest mistakes, this is one of the biggest mistakes is and whether you're in a cut or a bulk, the initial feedback of the scale tends sends a signal that you're doing the right things when many times you're doing the wrong thing. Yeah. So you go in a bulk, you add in all these calories and you're going after it. And the scale goes up two pounds. And so you get this confirmation like, oh yeah, I'm doing the right thing. I'm bulking, you know what I'm saying? Or the opposite is true. You're like, okay, it's time to cut to brem of the cardio, cut the calories, 1000 calories. Oh, I dropped five pounds this week. I'm doing good. It's like, no, it's like it's the opposite. It's like, I don't want to see much movement at all on to the scale. It's like why it's not even something you should really focus too much on is if we're going for lean muscle mass and like that's like our target goal of like gaining but we're it's lean tissue with that. It's a very gradual process to that as you found out like you can't like you can easily overdo that to the point where you're gaining mass and it feels like oh, I'm gaining size. But then when you actually reduce it back down, it's almost like you barely move so much to the point that okay, if I if you're a client of mine, and we figured out you have 2500 calories is your we figured that your maintenance out and I put you on your your your bulk. Okay. And Sal's 300 to 800 per so I put you on 500 calories. And you're definitely eating 500 more calories. But the scale goes down a little bit. I don't care. If you tell me you're getting stronger, you're feeling you have you have energy body fat and I know that I've added 500 calories to your diet. Hold the line. Yeah, that's right. We're good. Let's stay on this course. Stronger part is important. Yes. The fact that you're if you're responding and I because I know we figured your maintenance out and I know we're in a 500 calorie surplus right now. And just because the scale stayed the same or even potentially went a tiny bit down, I'm not tripping. You're you're probably building muscle just a slow process. I think it's a good idea. You want to find out your maintenance. You want to hit your protein targets, either cutting or bulking, you want to go in this surplus or deficit. And then get a body fat test every two or three weeks. That's the best gauge because then you can get a body fat test. And then you can weigh yourself. And now the weight is is a good metric because now I can relate that to my body fat and go Oh, I gained five pounds on the scale. My body fat percentage stayed the same or went down. Wow, it was all muscle or I lost four pounds on the scale. But my body fat went up a little bit. I might have lost the muscle. I want to add to that. So I never wanted to course correct until I had two negative body fat test in a row. So don't don't swing the pendulum the other way. That's right. A second test confirms it. Like so let's say I do my first body. It's two weeks in. I did the adjustment to Justin. He's got the 500 calorie surplus. We do a body fat test. And it's it's not in the most ideal situation. He didn't put on much lean body mass at all kind of stayed the same or like that. Oh, should I add a bunch more like no, let's wait and see what happens on the next one. And if it still isn't in the positive direction and it's going the opposite direction that I want, then I will course correct. Because sometimes you'll just have an off week or two or a stale. It's just the body's interesting the way it works. The body doesn't just and that's you're right it go it grows and shrinks and spurts to just like how children grow. Yeah, it's so it's so funny it emulates that if you ever watched the chart on a child, it's not like it seems like it happened overnight. Yeah, it does. It does. Have it. It happens. Like it was a big study on the yeah, the doctors won't see that the kid for six months and he grew five inches. It wasn't like he did a fraction all the way every single night. I was like most of it was in a block. Yeah, like two or three blocks of these books. Yeah, I feel the same way our metabolism is true. Like when you're building muscle, it's like I'm in a surplus. I'm stronger, stronger, stronger, stronger, no scale, nothing on the scale. And then boom, three pounds on the scale. So the same thing we're getting leaner, which is why I want two negative tests that come in a row before I just my plan. Awesome. All right, let's talk about training strategies. Here's where I think everybody has it. I don't think I know everybody has this backwards. Everybody does this totally backwards. Here's what people do when they're trying to cut. They're trying to cut so they ramp up volume, ramp up intensity, ramp up workouts. I'm trying to burn more calories. When they're trying to bulk, everybody does less trying to conserve calories. I want to conserve calories, whatever. Now, the opposite is true. If I'm in a cut, if I'm having less calories, my body can handle less stress, less volume. I can over train much easier. I don't want to try to beat myself up to burn those calories. I want to try and keep my body from overtraining. When I'm bulking, now I can handle the harder workouts. I can handle more volume. I could push the weights. I could push the intensity because I have the extra calories and the extra nutrients. Everybody does the opposite. You're looking at cutting workouts. I know they're like ridiculous, intensive volume. It's all from the calorie burn. It's seen off the momentum. A lot of times, people get caught in that sort of hamster wheel where it's like, I want to lose body fat, but really they want to lose weight and they want to do everything they can and add it all at once. But they need to preserve muscle and the only way you can preserve muscle is to do the right dose. The old adage in the fitness world in cutting workouts was all around calorie burn. It was that's what decided if a workout was for bulking or for cutting was based off of how many calories it burned. And so this idea of high intensity, supersetting, circuit training, hit training, all these modalities where you're burning tons of calories. Oh, that's going to aid in your cut. Well, it might aid in you losing weight, but it's also potentially going to aid in you losing muscle to your point because you're not feeding the body proper nutrition. Yeah, I mean it's it's anybody who's ever gotten a consistent cut or bulk will tell you like, you don't recover as fast in a cut. It's harder to push myself. My energy levels might be might be lower. And if you push it too hard, then you start to push your body into over training where it's going to want to hold on to body fat, it's going to want to ramp up cravings to make you eat more. This is a bulk. You get away with the volume. You can train harder in a bulk. And that's why you're stronger. You're by the way, when you get stronger, even if you did the same amount of sets better, your volume went up. So if all your lifts went up 10 pounds, that means your volume of training naturally went up. What made that happen? The extra calories? Well, and also we primarily use lifting weights to build muscle or send a signal to build muscle when it's most loudest and most likely going to isn't a calorie surface and a deficit that's going to happen. I used to tell my my clients that we're competing that, listen, the hard work, the body that's going to get up on stage and we're going to present that body that everybody is trying to cut towards is already built. If we're in the cut, it's already done. That part's done. The muscle is there. At this point, we want to preserve as much as that muscle we can while we just chisel away at just the body fat and there's a real art to that. Part of that art is knowing how to just stretch the body enough to where it carves away a body fat, but hangs on the muscle. One of the best ways of doing that is by doing it through diet and not through exercise, doing it through exercise, which is a stress and pushing the body really hard when you're not when you're not feeding it properly is you're sitting in a super loud signal for it to pare down. Right. So people are like, OK, well, high wraps, low wraps, which one's better for bulking and cutting? Both high wraps and low wraps build muscle and they'll build the most muscle when the most novel for you. So that that's true whether you're bulking or cutting both bulking when again muscle cutting, when at least keep muscle, you want to send a novel signal. So when you switch into a bulk or cut, it's a good idea to switch up your programming to send a novel signal. But the big thing to consider is when I'm cutting, I can't handle as much volume. So do not try to ramp up the volume at the attempt to try and burn more calories. That is a that is how everybody screws themselves up with their workouts when it comes to to cutting in particular. No. One of one of my favorite strategies, whenever I'm transitioning from a cut to a bulk or vice versa, is to switch programming to just for the for the novel stimulus. But when I'm in a cut, I'm the way I'm approaching the workout is like I've been training already for a while. I already came out of a bulk. I'm now in the cut. I've already built up all that muscle. It's like go in there, do the work, touch the weights. It's like it's the stuff that I've been doing consistently as far as how much weight I'm not trying to hit PRs. I'm not trying to stretch the extra set. I'm not trying to go to failure. I'm not doing any of that stuff like that. You go in there and you consistently touch those weights while feeding the body properly. You're going to hang on to that muscle. You will for the most part when you start flirting with pushing it and really stretching yourself or really cutting hard or really starting to ramp up activity like cardio is when you sacrifice. By the way, here's what here's the main theory is to why that happens when you push the body with lots of stress, exercise of stress, calorie deficit is a stress and you overcome your body's ability to recover and adapt to that stress. What it does is what it's it's it's like it's a you know, like commercial where there's like a button you push and it gives you the answer. Your body has this button that is that what it's the button that it pushes when it's under too much stress, which says get rid of muscle store body save energy. Right. Because muscle is calorically active in the sense that it burns a lot of calories, it's expensive tissue nutrient wise. Body fat's not body. That's also a great insurance policy. If I have a lot of body fat on me and that's just and we're starving or I'm under a lot of stress and I can't get food, I'll survive. So if you push the body too hard in the cut, you're already in the deficit now you're pushing it with training. What you're essentially telling your body is get rid of muscle hole on the body fat, which makes it very, very difficult to continue to get leaner. That's what causes most of the plateaus in that type of process. All right. So let's talk about mental hurdles. Here's where I think the discussion gets interesting because the mental hurdles, even when you do everything right, are really hard for bulking and cutting, especially because the people that tend to bulk tend to be insecure about being too small or too skinny. This was me and the people who tend to want to cut tend to be insecure about being, you know, too, too fat or whatever. And so that poses challenges. The reverse also poses challenges. If you've always tried to bulk and now you're going to cut and you lose a little bit of size, it freaks you out and vice versa. If you've lost a lot of weight, you're going on a bulk to speed up your metabolism, feel a little bigger, uh-oh, reverse gears. So let's talk a little bit about. So I don't, I can't speak for the other competitors out there, but I definitely looked like the stereotypical bodybuilder with the big old oversized hoodie over his head and headphones on and like just baggy everything. And I used to train this way. Now, I know why I was drawn to that. It wasn't like a fashion statement. Like this, the psychological game was so big and so impactful that I didn't, I wanted to fool myself. I wanted to cover myself up and not allow like the, how much my pumps or what I look like today or if I knew too, there was days when I would be carrying a little bit of inflammation. And so then it would look, I literally look when you start and the leaner you get, the more this is like this where you like, oh my God, I feel I'm doing everything right. But yet I look fatter today. Like I had those, I had all those challenges. And so I, I'm such a numbers person and I believe that I did the work. I did the work and figure out my maintenance. I've done the due diligence of like tracking my stuff. It's like, I know I'm hitting my protein thing. I know I'm doing it like I got to trust the process and part of trusting the process and getting over this mental hurdle. Knowing that you were going to mess with yourself if you looked in the mirror. And so I would cover myself up. I would stay covered up purely for the mental game of knowing that I would get in my own head and start to measure that the scale is the same way. It's like it's like another way of I think the scale and the mirror sometimes can lie to us and that can really get in your head and then make you course correct. And so I would cover up like that. Yeah. So with bulking, if you're the hard gainer, okay, the mental games with bulking that can happen, hurdles is wow, if the scale is going up, I must be doing good. That was me. Like if the scale is going up to the point, here's how bad it was. And this is just a little self-awareness. But as a kid, I would always weigh myself at the end of the day after my last meal because I knew I was heaviest at that time. I had to see that number go up. And if a particular dinner made me hold more water, it made me gain a little bit of weight on the scale. Well, guess which dinner I would have most nights, right? The most inflammatory meal I could eat. So for that person, bulking can be a challenge because anything going up on the scale is a good thing, even though it may all be body fat. And this is what would happen to me. Now, for somebody who is afraid of gaining body fat, somebody who let's say you've lost a lot of weight, now you're doing a reverse diet or let's say you're a female. This is more common for women. And you're like, okay, I know I'm supposed to go into calorie surplus to build, let's say the butt I want or to build the curves I want or speed up my metabolism. Now any pound that goes up on the scale is like nails on a chalkboard. It's like terrible. Uh-oh, I went too high in a surplus. Back out type of deal. So the scale can really, I would say is your enemy unless you combine it with other metrics and you're objective about the metrics. Scale, body fat test, once every two weeks, otherwise don't touch them at all. And then like Adam said, if you get two consecutive measurements that are going in the wrong direction, then you start to make some adjustments. Now with cutting, if you're always a skinny guy and you're all constantly on a bulk and now you're like, you know what? I think I want to get really lean. It's terrifying to feel yourself getting smaller. Uh-oh, I'm getting smaller. I'm weaker. This isn't good or whatever. And then you'll reverse out. And then the person who, you know, is always dealt with being small or dealt with being fat or whatever. Any pound that goes down, I should say, is now a plus even though they're losing muscle. The irony of this is that even though these are two completely different individuals and are insecure about two completely different things, it's exactly the same thing. It's exactly the same thing that's going through their head. And that's why too, I don't like, the other part of this is recognizing that this is a really long process and slow process and accepting that. It's just not like part of why this is so challenging and there's such a mental hurdle here is that we're marketed to and we're constantly see these 30 day challenges and these before and afters. And there's always this example of somebody who did something crazy radical in three months or six months. And so we have this perception that, man, if I'm dialed, I'm doing all these things, I should see all this. And then when we don't, we assume it's wrong or we're not doing something right. And then we course correct. And when we course correct, we many times over correct and we just shoot ourselves in the foot. And so part of that, then this is why the very beginning of this conversation, I started off with how important the maintenance thing is, how important of really figuring out what do I, you know, if I stayed consistent with these calories and I did my daily habits, this is my routine. I go to work, I do this. It's like, that's pretty damn, that's like 90% of my life outside of random vacations and different stuff. Like that's what I do. And you know what it takes to kind of just maintain your body. That's so important. Cause from there, you can make these little adjustments and you just, it's a hurry up and wait. Here's your objective measurements that you can use. And I do not suggest you do these daily cause it will mess with your head. I think literally once every two weeks is a good place to look, but it's weight, body fat percentage, circumference measurements. These are all good. If you do all three of them better cause you can compare all of them. And then lastly, here's my favorite metric to pay attention to, which is performance in the gym. If you're stronger, whether you're bulking or cutting. First off, if you're bulking, you better be getting stronger. If you're getting stronger while you're cutting, you are crushing it. You're doing amazing. If you maintain your strength while you're in a cut, you're crushing. You're doing very good. So those four things are what should drive which direction you go. Not the subjective feeling of, I feel fluffy or I feel small or I feel big or I'm gaining too much or what's going on. That will 100% point you in the wrong direction. I mean, that was one of my favorite things about going through that process was again, up into this point in my life, even though I had already been a trainer for over 10 years, I had never tracked this diligently and I never really got to like see firsthand how much our body can fluctuate because of sodium and water and inflammation and how much of a mind fuck that is even for a trainer who thinks he knows what he's doing. It's like that was, and so that was really enlightening for me to go like, wow, how many of my clients go through this? Where they eat a food. They don't even know, they don't even know, they don't even know that they have an inflammatory response to a food. It's a food they eat all the time. So they think that it's okay, but they've never even tracked diligently enough to know that, wow, every time they eat that food, they get slightly inflamed, their body holds on to an extra few glasses of water, which looks like another 2% body fat on your, on your body out of nowhere. What it had nothing to do with actually body fat going on there and it's temporary and it'll go away in the next 48 to 72 hours, but you don't know that. And so you see that and you wake up after a day of what you thought was perfect. I did my walk, I worked out, I was perfect on my diet, anything perfect and then you wake up and you look worse than what you did the day before. You gotta know yourself. Like for me, if I felt bigger, then I was moving in the right direction. And so objective measurements would have really helped me quite a bit. For someone else feeling smaller might just be like, yeah, I'm going in the right direction even though they're losing muscle and getting weaker. So those objective measurements every couple of weeks are really important because read those, deny your feelings, look at those numbers and go, okay, here's what's actually happening. All right, last, let's talk about when to stop the bulk or the cut. Now for me, I think that with a bulk in particular, I think once you stop gaining muscle, once the body fat percentage starts to climb on its own, like muscle's not going up, body fat's going up, that's a pretty easy sign, but here's another good sign to stop the bulk. You just, you can't eat that many calories anymore. This is one that people run into. It's like, oh man, I'm eating 3,500 calories. This is like a total chore. I'm force feeding myself. Like if you start to get to this mental state with your bulk, it's probably a good idea to reverse out of it because you're not, you're not training anything good by doing that. Now with the cut, when do you stop a cut? Well, if your performance really starts to decline in the gym, if you notice low libido, if you notice lots of fatigue, if you feel ravenous, not just like normal hunger, but like all you're doing is obsessing about food. And if you've never really done a hard cut, especially competitors, bodybuilders in particular, will tell you about this, they'll have dreams of apples and strawberries and stuff like that. You start to obsess about food. That's probably a good idea to come out of the cut. That's so you know you're getting lean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when you originally put this, I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna communicate this because I find that there's a bit of an individual variance here, right? And mostly what that variance looks like is how long we've been cutting or bulking and or where we at body fat percentage. For example, if I'm in a cut for somebody and I'm cutting somebody who has, they're 35 plus percent body fat. They have a lot of body fat to lose. Taking a four to stay in a deficit and a cut for a longer period of time because they have so much body fat like that, that person I might allow to stretch out longer, three, four, five, six weeks in a row of doing a cut without interrupting that. If I have a client who is getting ready for stage and they're 8% body fat and we've been cutting for a week or two weeks, I'll probably have a refeed day in there or a maintenance to surplus week and then go back to the cut. So it depends on where somebody's body fat percentage is and how long they've been doing it on when I would probably interrupt that. I think what you gave with like the way you feel is a good general idea. Yeah, cause like, I mean, you could have someone at 35% body fat in a cut, but their metabolism is just so slow and they've been cutting and now they're showing signs of nutrient deficiencies and fatigue and I can't sleep. Well, in that case, I'm gonna pull you out of this even though your body fat percentage is high. So another way to look at that would be like, again, going back to the original rule of the two tests in a row. So that would be a course adjustment, right? So let's say this person is like, you're saying 35% overweight and they do a body fat test and we don't really move the needle much. Again, we're not gonna course correct, stay the course, we do another one and they again don't. Okay, we probably need to reverse out of this. So that's how I would probably gauge that. It's like, again, going back to the test of I'm gonna, two bad tests, two bad tests means we're not moving in the direction that I'm supposed to be moving. If we're in a cut, we're supposed to be. I'm glad you said that because a bulk can be used as an effective way to break through a plateau in a cut and a cut can be used as an effective way to break through a plateau in a bulk. In other words, what Adam just talked about was somebody who was eating low calories. And so this is not somebody who's eating a lot of calories and isn't losing weight. They're eating already low calories. We're already down to 15 or calories, 16 or calories. And they're not losing body fat, two weeks in a row. The reason why he would reverse them is because now let's go into a metabolism boosting two or three week period or maybe even just a one week period to get that metabolism kicked up so we could start the fat loss process over. Same thing with being in a bulk for a long time. The whole feeling of I can't eat anymore. Oh my gosh, I'm so stuffed. One of the remedies to that oftentimes is to go in a small deficit. Small deficit for a week and then your appetite comes right back and you probably lost no muscle. In fact, oftentimes that you really well and then you go back in the bulk and then everything responds again. And again, I like using that kind of like, I know it's generic to say like two tests in a row but like that's a cool. I think that's a good way to do it is like give yourself that time that you're not just having a bad week or you just had some things that were inflamed you or like you've got enough time of consistently back to back tests that didn't move in the positive direction for you. Okay, now let's make a course direct adjustment. And in the case of where you're at calorie wise and how long we'd probably dictate that. Like you said, like if you got somebody who's got a long ways to go body fat wise but they're already down to 1700 calories or what about that? I don't have a lot more room to keep cutting that person. We might be due for a reverse diet and go the other direction for a little bit before we cut down and that really is dependent on where they're at. That's awesome. Now because this episode was titled with bodybuilding and bodybuilders or people who follow bodybuilding are the ones that really get interested in bulkhead cutting. 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