 First question is from Chamu WBFF Pro. What is the best way to keep muscle while cutting? Is it possible to still build the body part while in a deficit? Alright, so let's start with the first part. What is the best way to keep muscle while cutting? First of all, if you're anybody who's trying to lose weight, anybody who's trying to burn body fat, one of your primary goals should be to maintain muscle. Because every time you lose muscle, you reduce your metabolic output, meaning you slow down your metabolism. That means it's more difficult now to maintain a lean body weight. And the likelihood that you'll gain the weight back later on increases in response to how much muscle you lose. So this should definitely be a number one goal. Now there's two main ways that you prevent this from happening. The first one, lift weights, obviously. Lifting weights sends the right signal to the body. It says we need this muscle. Even though calories are low, we still need to be strong. Now to be more specific, in my experience one of the best ways to keep muscle while dieting is to train for strength. It actually works better to train for strength while you're dieting because strength is such a loud muscle building signal. The second thing is have high protein. High protein, low calorie diets by themselves, even if people don't lift weights, they turn out with less muscle loss. So regardless of how you're working out, if your protein is high with your calories are low, that alone will help you keep muscle. Yeah, which is definitely, like, again, this is counter to a lot of people's thought process when they're trying to lose weight because they're trying to really, you know, put all their attention in that direction. So they'll add on the HIIT training style. They'll add on the circuits and, you know, extra cardio and cut their calories kind of all at once, which, you know, again, inevitably we're going to do this long enough we're going to start losing muscle as a result, you know, as well as the rest of your body mass. So to focus your attention more on strength while you're cutting is such a more effective strategy. I'll add a little bit more to that. I don't think it's as simple as just strength training as far as your training. So if you just came out of a strength cycle and you're going into a cut, you're changing into anything that's novel to the body is ideal. So if I was training a 5x5 routine or I was lifting for strength right before I went into a cut, which was normally very common for me. A lot of times I was in a strength cycle when I was adding calories. When I switch out of that, I want to train what's most novel. So if I'm used to training a 5x5 or a strength routine, going to a more hypertrophy type of routine really kept more muscle on my body than staying in the 5x5 type of training. So it really matters what you were doing before you head into the cut. So I always like to change my client and my own programming when I transition from either bulking or maintaining whatever you want to call it to a cut for a show. So whatever your programming looks like, heading into the cut, I want to do something a lot different. So that's the first thing. The other thing is I also want to minimize how much cardio I'm doing in order to cut. I like to do it all through calorie and manipulating my training program before I start to add any of the cardio in there. A big mistake that the competitors that I would train would make or assume is, okay, I'm eight weeks or 12 weeks out from a show. It's time to start cutting. They introduce cardio right away. I think that's a mistake when you're trying to hang on to muscle. As much muscle as you have on your body going into a cut, it is not advantageous to keep all that if you're also running on a treadmill or doing the Stairmaster. The body will see that and go or feel that and go, oh, let's get rid of some of this expensive tissue because he or she is making me sit on this Stairmaster for 30 minutes or an hour every single day or in some cases, two hours a day. So minimizing the amount of cardio you're doing during a cut and using your calorie intake and the circulation of your training to create the caloric deficit is a far better strategy than just adding, than cardio. And then I think the obvious one, especially when you're talking to someone who's a WBFF Pro, I'm sure she knows that, you know, keeping up the protein is a must, right? So that's a must. I think that's an obvious one. The common offenders that I see with the competitors is they are following a routine that is similar to the one they were following before the cut and it's not going to send a very loud signal for the body to adapt and change and build muscle. So you want to change the programming and then the other big common offender or mistake I see is the adding cardio right away. I'm saving cardio for that peak week or maybe the week or two before I'm not introducing it until then and that was something that I think was really hard for a lot of people that hired me when I was coaching them to grasp when I would tell them, like, no, we're not doing any cardio. Not yet, not yet. I'm going to save it until the final weeks so I could preserve as much muscle as possible. Now, as far as possible, is it possible to build muscle while in a deficit? Yes. Is it likely? No. It's highly unlikely. On steroids. Yeah, if you're natural. That's when you see it. You can do it, but boy, you need to be at a very small deficit, meaning you're not trying to burn a lot of body fat. You need to have the right amount of training, high protein, good loud muscle building signal and then maybe what will happen is your body will take some of the calories and energy it needs from body fat and you'll have enough that you're intaking to fuel muscle growth, but it's very unlikely. It's very hard to build while in a reduced calorie diet. Now, if you're a beginner, I've done this all the time with clients. When it's a brand new, you're not lifting weights, you're coming to me and you're totally sedentary. I've gotten people to burn body fat and build muscle all the time. As you become more advanced, it becomes far more difficult to make that happen.