Transcription
I'm pretty lean and I stay that way all year round now by staying just above maintenance calories with my eating to keep a nice steady rate of muscle growth going and then making small corrections throughout the year with a few small mini cuts of about two to four weeks.
For anyone that's either tried to stay at a really low body fat in a cut at the same time or just do a particularly aggressive cut, you'll know how much harder that hits you when your body thinks it's really under hard threat of starvation and starts to pull back on things like energy, mood, recovery, really starts to ramp up that hunger and if you're not careful starts eating into some of that hard earned muscle growth.
Managing all of this got substantially easier for me when I realized that the way I train during a cut should not be the same as how I train the rest of the time. Unless you're a beginner, you're certainly not going to be gaining any notable muscle during a cut and this has been well established in the research now. This means that your goal during a cut isn't to try and keep growing, it's to try and maintain as much of that muscle and strength that you've already got while you lose that fat.
When you look at training volume studies that look at the volumes and the sets required for optimal muscle growth versus optimal muscle maintenance, the differences between these are huge and what you need to maintain muscle is far less than what's actually optimal to grow it, up to nine times less in some studies. When you're in a caloric deficit, your energy will drop, your sensitivity to fatigue will go up, all of this can potentially reduce your training performance and will reduce the amount of benefit that you actually get from that work that you put in.
Why try to force yourself to maintain the same volume and performance that you're doing pre-cut while you're in this cutting state when we know that those extra sets aren't going to help you grow, but they're certainly going to add to that fatigue and reduce your limited recovery capacity. Not only that, but when it's easy to tip yourself into a state of overtraining and under recovering, that extra work that certainly isn't going to grow anything extra actually has the potential to hurt the quality of your training and threaten the actual goal of your cut phase which is to maintain that muscle and strength effectively.
Instead, I recommend reducing your overall training volume by keeping your skill and strength based sets as top priority so that you can keep maximizing those neurological strength gains while you cut, while removing about 50% of your accessory and hypertrophy focus sets. This will keep you much fresher for training from session to session and allow you to actually potentially gain strength while keeping that muscle mass because your strength training volume will still be of such high quality.
Not only will this make the cut feel a bit easier, too, but it also comes with the added benefit of helping to improve injury risk while you're at your most vulnerable stage of your nutrition phase. And if you're worried about this reduced training volume affecting how many calories you're burning, just get your steps up. It's going to be a more efficient way to burn that energy without interfering with the rest of your training quality.
And if you really want to make sure that you keep all that hard-earned muscle and strength while you lose all that fat, check out this video.