Welcome to the Wits& Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and sustainable diet. I'm your host, Philip pape, and in each episode will examine strategies to help you achieve physical self mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition. Welcome to another episode of weights and weights. We are also streaming this live on Facebook. So if you want to watch for your future episodes live, just join our Facebook group using the link in the show notes. As always, I am your host, Philip pape, I'm the founder of Wits & Weights, nutrition coaching. And if you enjoy the show, if you enjoy the podcast or the videos and you find it valuable, educational, maybe mildly entertaining, please consider submitting a five star review for the podcast, or share the group to make sure others can find the show. And they could also benefit from the content as you have. Also, if you know someone who could use some of these strategies that we share, to work on their fitness goals, their health and fitness goals, you find an episode that they'll really enjoy, tell them about the podcast, you can take a screenshot of the episode, tagging it with some weights and post it to your story. Okay, let's jump into today's topic, which I'm very excited about, which is how to minimize fat gain and get lean using cuts and bulks. Now if I told you that you could be in a calorie surplus for most of the year for three quarters of the year, and constantly get leaner over the years, would that appeal to you? I know if I talk to my 20 something year old self, I would have found that unbelievable, but would have jumped at the chance. I just didn't know what I was doing back then. And I've learned a lot in the intervening years. So today's topic is near. And dear to me. It's something that ended many, many repeated unproductive cycles of Crash dieting. It changed my mindset to one of abundance, one of performance, improved body composition. I think it even improved my relationship with food. And of course it resulted in something sustainable that I could take with me the rest of my life. So today I'm going to show you we're going to learn how to periodize your nutrition with cut in bulk cycles to get leaner and leaner by minimizing fat gain while maximizing muscle gain. Now why do we periodized our nutrition anyway in the first place? You know why you so called cuts and bulks. Which by the way are the kind of the bro science terms that people are familiar with. I prefer to call them Fat Loss and Muscle Building phases. But cuts and bolts are easy to remember. So they're handy shortcuts that we can use. But why not lose a bunch of weight and just stay there, you know, it sounds easy, right? Lose a bunch of weight and just maintain it or gain a bunch of muscle and maintain it or gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. The Holy Grail that we call body re composition. The main reason is that our biology has thrown us a curveball. So assuming you're doing everything right, and you're past the initial newbie gains, when you lose weight, you do lose fat, but you also lose some muscle, it's just a cruel reality of life. Conversely, when you gain weight, you do gain muscle, but you also gain some fat. So again, this is if you're doing everything right, in terms of nutrition, training, and recovery. Now, this is one of the frustrating contradictions of the human body, that gaining muscle losing fat accompanies gaining fat and losing muscle. So therefore, here's the thing, why don't we just focus on one goal at a time and maximize our results for that goal. And that's exactly what today's discussion is about. So let's get some assumptions out of the way. Alright, for the purposes of today's discussion, I'm going to assume you're not brand new to this, you're not a total beginner, and that you've already dialed in to areas tracking and training. Alright, we'll explain why I will explain that if you're not there, what we can do about it first. So tracking firt The first thing is that you know how to hit a specific calorie and macro target consistently on most days. And that includes knowing what it's like to eat enough protein, right, which a lot of people don't eat enough protein. If you've never tracked before. If you haven't quite developed your consistency with this. I would focus on that before anything else. So I would work on establishing your true maintenance, your true calories where you don't gain weight based on that number of calories that you burn each day. And then dialing in the right macro balance regularly and consistently until you try to get into these. Moreover, strategies. So you can go back and listen to earlier episodes of the podcast. Or you can even reach out to me about coaching and we can help you get there. So that's tracking, the second is training. So this assumes you're already resistance training or strength training, you know how to go to the gym three, four or five days a week, on an individualized program based on progressive overload. You know how to train hard to get the proper stimulus for strength and muscle growth, you're using the proper rest periods, you're getting enough sleep. Again, if you're not training or doing it consistently, or if all you do is something like CrossFit, or lots of intense cardio or high intensity endurance base work, without strength training, using progressive overload. Or let's say you only get four hours of sleep a night and aren't recovering, go back. And let's straighten these out and nail these down. As part of our habits before we go into cuts and books. And again, we you could reach out to me anytime, I'd be happy to get you on a path to success in these areas before going to this level. But if you are educated about tracking your macros and resistance training, then everything we talked about here regarding nuts and bolts, applies to you. And if it doesn't, that's all right, enjoy it soak in the information, so you know what the future holds. But make sure to cover the basics. So with that said, let's first outline what happens when we lose weight. And when we gain weight. And then we'll get into the actionable strategies. So first, when losing weight, which is what we're going to call cutting, from now on, to imply that we are intentionally trying to cut fat, not just lose weight. Alright, so when we lose weight, when we're cutting, we lose fat, but we also lose some muscle. However, we can bias that toward losing mostly muscle, or I'm sorry, toward losing mostly fat by doing everything possible to preserve or hold on to the muscle. And to do this, we have to prioritize three things, a reasonable caloric deficit, training, and protein. So as far as the deficit, a reasonable caloric deficit, that is not too aggressive, we're talking a quarter to 1% of your body weight per week, right, and we're gonna repeat these as we go along. But a reasonable deficit. Number two, you have to be resistance training, with enough sleep for recovery. And then number three, you have to have sufficient protein. And when you're cutting sufficient proteins around a gram, per pound of your target body weight, or a little bit more than that. So let's say you are 200 pounds, that's around 200 grams of protein, maybe a little more than that. If you weigh 250, and you're trying to cut to 200, I would still use the target body weight as your baseline around 200 grams. So it's simple, right? Just don't, don't lose weight too fast. Keep training as if you can still build muscle, eat lots of protein. Easy right? Now, we're going to come back to this. Alright, so that's losing weight. Let's talk gaining weight, which we're going to call bulking from now on. to imply that we're intentionally working to pack on or bulk on muscle to gain strength and size, we don't just want to get fat, right, we want to actually gain muscle. And for the for the women listening if you prefer the word toning to bulking feel free to keep that image in your mind because that is the end result, a more lean, defined figure, because you have improved body composition, even at a higher weight. And that's what we're going to get into here. So when gaining weight, we can either gain mostly fat, or a combination of fat and muscle. So just as a hypothetical, if we wanted to gain mostly fat, which is not something that I've ever heard anyone want to do intentionally in my life, but hear me out to gain mostly fat, we need to basically live our lives, like a typical American now I'm an American. So that's that's my frame of reference, but we're talking low protein, a sedentary lifestyle, no resistance training. Alright, and I wanted to start with this premise, because it's behind what Layne Norton termed body fat overshooting. So this is where every time you lose, and then regained weight. Without protein or resistance training, you first lose some muscle, and then you primarily gain fat back. So in other words, you get fatter and fatter at the same weight over repeated cycles of dieting, where you're not eating enough protein or straight train and when I say fat, I don't mean in size, I mean body composition, meaning your body fat percentage becomes greater and greater proportion of your overall mass. So now to flip this around, if we want to maximize muscle gain, even though we're going to gain some fat, but not nearly as much, we have to prioritize three things. First, a reasonable caloric surplus that is not too aggressive. So it's just the opposite side of the coin. And reasonable means point one to a quarter percent of your weight per week. So that's about 1% per month. So now when we talked about cutting, we said it was about 1% per week. On the upside. bulking is about a quarter that rate up to 1% a month, unless you're very new to this, and you could push it a little bit more up to maybe one and a half percent a month. So that's number one. Number two is resistance training with proper sleep for recovery. And number three is sufficient protein. So when you're, when you're bulking you don't need quite as much protein as when you're cutting. But still, we hover around one gram per pound of your target body weight. So I want to focus a little on the bulking side, because I think that that is maybe the most misunderstood and feared part of transforming your body. And I think a lot of this stems from the fear we have of intentionally gaining weight, right? It's a crazy notion for most people walking around this planet that you would intentionally getting away. Crazy, right? It seems to go counter to everything society's telling us, you think of the rampant obesity epidemic. And this incessant focus on thinness, weight loss, body image, the misplaced idea that somehow skinny is sexy, all of these kind of just topsy turvy notions we have. But remember, you as the listener here are not like the average American you are resistance training, or you will be you're eating enough protein, or you will be and you are into your intelligently gaining or losing weight at a reasonable rate. And I just want to take a quick pause and think and ask you to think why do we even do this? Why do we care? Is it all vanity? Is it to look good? Is it to feel good? And by the way? There's no shame in saying yes to any or all of these? Is it to improve your health markers, your cholesterol, your blood pressure? Is it to live longer and enjoy a more functional life? Is it to be able to eat more food and not have to restrict all the time? And the answer is yes, yes to all the above and many more reasons that you might be able to come up with. So if you go through reasonable cuts and bulks, you don't gain a ton of fat, or lose a ton of muscle. There's no disadvantage from a health perspective that I am aware of in improving your body composition, I can't see a disadvantage to this. It's pretty much upside, whether you're talking aesthetics, longevity, or performance. So let's explore what happens when we intentionally eat in a surplus while we train to gain muscle. So these are this is what's going on. So you have to be aware of these facts, and then you know how to make the decisions afterwards. The first fact of life is that you will absolutely gain some fat, okay, that's just we have to just be honest about it, you are going to gain some fat while bulking, it's unavoidable unless you use a very conservative surplus. And in that case, it's going to take you years to gain muscle, if at all, which is just a losing proposition. So my guess is that you want the results a little bit faster than that, you know, not, not two decades from now. But gaining a bit of fat is okay, because it's much easier to lose the fat than the gain the muscle. So remember that kind of like it's much, it's much easier to spend your money than to earn money, right? Building muscle requires enough calories to actually produce a muscle building or what we call anabolic environment. And I want to talk about this for a second. When you're going from a cut to a bulk, it's like turning a big ship around, it takes time for the increase in calories to signal to your body that it needs to start building back strength and size. And the first two, maybe even three months is just getting back to your original baseline. After that is when you start to get the momentum of additional PRs in the gym, additional muscle mass additional size we're talking months, four or five, six. Okay? So because it takes that long, you need to eat enough. But you also need to remain in that surplus for a decent amount of time, which is about six to nine months or longer. And if you're watching this, and you were that was the answer, you were looking for that you get to bulk and eat a lot of food for a long time, then I'm telling you that's the answer. None of this, you know, bulk for three months, I feel like I'm getting fat and I'm going to do a mini cut bulk for three months I'm getting fat mini cut, that is just a hamster wheel that's going to take you nowhere. So I give you permission to bulk for a decent amount of time, about three quarters of the year longer. Here's the thing though, the longer you stay in that surplus, the more fat you'll gain. So there's some contradictory forces at play. And we need to inject these short fat loss or cutting phases the cycles between or much longer bulking cycles to strip off that that, but without threatening too much muscle loss, because that's the other side of the coin people get caught in is cutting for too long. So based on how the math works out, that's about a two to one to four to one ratio of bulking to cutting, depending on how lean you want to get and how quickly. So if you're bulking for six to nine months, you would cut for about three months. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story, or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful, and how I can improve again, and incredible. Thank you for supporting the podcast, and enjoy the rest of the episode. Alright, so now let's talk about a few mistakes people make. The first mistake I alluded to already is not bulking long enough. You know, you notice the belt getting a little tighter, you notice the pants are a bit tight, your abs disappear, you start to freak out, you look in the mirror. And of course, we're our worst critic, and we just absolutely don't like what we see. And we say we need to cut. But when you do that, when you cut prematurely, you just don't give your body enough time in that anabolic environment. And then you end up just wasting all those months to get basically no results. The second mistake is the other end of the spectrum, which is bulking too aggressively. So earlier, I mentioned that you have to bulk at a reasonable rate of about point one to a quarter percent body weight per week, which is half to 1% per month. And if you're less advanced, you can push it a little faster to maybe one and a half percent per month. But any faster than that. And you're just gonna gain more fat, pure and simple. You can't speed up the muscle building process. Some people try to do it things like dreamer box where you go on the seafood diet and you eat everything you see. Or, you know, the bodybuilding lore of quick gains. But a lot of these guys are taking drugs. So neither of those apply to us, we need to go to reasonable rate. So we don't add too much fat, but we maximize muscle gain. And then the opposite is true that if you try to do a lean gain, we've probably heard that phrase lean gain and you're barely in a caloric surplus, it's just going to take forever, we talked about that before. And then you're still not going to get results. So we've covered what happens when you cut in bulk. We've covered the importance of training hard, eating enough protein using a reasonable rate of change. So what do we do with this information? All right, I want to walk you through an actionable process that we can follow. So the first step is to pick a lower and upper body fat percentage, where you feel comfortable, that you're going to stay within for your cut in bulk cycles. So we talked about the fact that you should already be training and tracking. But let's say you're still quite a bit overweight, you haven't quite gotten in, in view of your eventual settling point for the weight you want to be at. Alright, so you you want to you want to eventually get there. Alright, so let's say you're 250. And you really want to hover between 150 and 200, we're gonna have to spend time cutting for a while doing maintenance phases to reverse out of that cut, cutting some more and continuing back and forth until we get down to that, that lean range that we want to be in. So that's kind of outside the scope of today's discussion, and it's a little bit more of a beginner thing. That's where I would start my clients who have weight to lose, I wouldn't get them in the cuts and books, they have that actually favorable store of body fat already to work from that allow them to get some body recomp going. But we're not talking about that scenario. So let's assume you if you're a male, you're in spitting distance of 20% body fat, which is kind of slightly fluffy, I guess we can call it or, you know, you're starting to get where it's maybe a slightly unhealthy weight, but not really. So and for females, we would add about 10%. And then you pick the low end that you'd be comfortable going to without getting to a point where you're starving yourself or feeling like you're suffering. And that's usually between 10 and 20%. For me again for males just add 10% For females, but you might want a tighter window like 12 to 18% So meaning first step is to pick the range of body fat you want to settle within. And if this is your first time don't aim for body builder level leanness don't try to go sub 10% if you're male, alright, just pick something like 12 or 13%. Now, what does this look like if you don't want to measure if you don't want to use tools like that or devices? Just pick the level at where you might see your abs. That that's a good Good point, right and that that's a good measure for most people. And then on the other end, it's the level where you just feel like you're starting to get a little fat. I mean, let's use subjective things. This is all about what works for us, and works within our lifestyle, and something that we think we can live with. So we're not trying to use DEXA scans and you know, bod pods and water dunk tanks here. Now, I would use progress photos first. But if you're into data and you're into measurements, I would suggest googling the Navy formula, where you can just use a few tape measurements to measure your body fat percentage, and then track it over time. And I wouldn't trust the number, but I would definitely trust the trend. So you know, when you get to the leanest you want to be, and when you get to the heaviest you want to be, you'll kind of have a good idea of what that body fat percentage is for you. So that's, that's step one, I spent a lot long time talking about it. But the goal is to pick a range, it might be 12, to 18%, that you want to live within. The next thing you're going to do is cut to your lower target. So if you're currently a 16%, body fat and your targets 12, you know, your target is I want to see my abs, then you cut to that point, okay, and again, not like totally ripped and jacked and striated with vascularity, but I can see my abs. And so what are we going to do? Well, we're going to use a rate of a quarter to 1% of your body weight per week, like we've mentioned multiple times. Now, depending on how fast you want to lose it, how long you want it to take, how much you have to lose, and how few calories you can handle in your diet within your lifestyle. So we're gonna go with a simple example. Again, this is all from a male perspective. But same thing applies for females, let's say you weigh 180, and you want to lose 10 pounds to get to that 12%. And we're gonna pick half a percent a week, kind of in the middle. So that's about a 12 week cut, three month cut, which is totally reasonable. So you're gonna lose 10 pounds over three months. Alright, so now you are at your baseline leanness, here's where the fun begins. And now we can begin the bulk. Right. And the bulk should be anywhere from six to nine months or longer at something like a quarter percent body weight per week. But there's there's a caveat I want to talk about real quick here. When you go from a cut to a bulk, and this trips, a lot of people up, you will gain around five pounds in the first few weeks. And if you've never done this before, you won't, you won't, you might freak out, right. And if you have done it, you'll be used to it. But you've got fluid retention, glycogen, gut content, just from all those extra calories coming in. Now, if you use an app like macro factor, which is the food login app, I use, shameless plug discount code, WITSANDWEIGHTS, go download it, the algorithm in that app is designed to accommodate these fluctuations, so you don't really have to game the system or anything. And you can use something like the moving average of your weight, and then push past your goal weight. So if your goal is to gain 10 pounds, you're really going to push to like 184 185 on the scale, where the average has gotten up to about 180. Okay, that 10 pounds, so I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you. But just to simplify, you've gone from 170. Okay, you're gonna bulk for 26 weeks, which is six months. And accounting for that initial weight bump, which you kind of ignore, meaning you're trying to gain 10 pounds on top of that weight bump, you'll be at around 184 pounds. All right, now think about it, we started at 180, we got down to 170. To start. Now we're back up to 184, it's a little bit higher than where we were before the cut. And really, it's about the same because you have that extra weight. However, a good chunk of that 14 pounds, maybe three to six pounds, maybe a little more, if you're newer is muscle. Okay, that's the key here you are training hard, you eat enough protein, most of that a lot of that weight gain is muscle versus the average person who just over eats in their day to day sedentary life, it's all fat. So now you've gained maybe three to six, seven pounds of muscle and then the rest of its fat. Now we go the other direction, we're going to cut for three months. Okay, and after you've cut for three months, you're going to be a leaner version of yourself and likely at a higher weight. And now this kind of blows people's want people's minds as well when you think of the math but if you are here to start and you're here afterward, but more of that is muscle, then the percentage of the weight that's muscle is higher, therefore the percentage of fat is lower. So you've you've actually gained some fat and a lot of muscle as you bulk. And then when you cut you don't really lose muscle but you lose some fat right. So your overall you know addition of the two gets you to be slightly heavier than you were before. But you're at a leaner body fat percentage. That's how you look leaner. So you started at 170. Over nine months, you went from 170, to maybe 175. But all that five pounds, or most of it was muscle. Right. So it's kind of like magic, it's waving a magic wand. And there you go. extra muscle on your frame. It took nine months, but it was a fun nine months, because most of it you got to eat, that that's the part I enjoy, eat and train and make progress in the gym, right? So throughout the nine months, your weight fluctuated by somewhere around 15, maybe 20 pounds. And if you do this slightly more aggressively, or if you're a larger person, you could fluctuate by as much as 20 to 30 pounds. But the end result. And this is what we're looking for. The end result is you're adding desirable health promoting muscle tissue to your frame. Pretty cool, right? Alright, some final thoughts and things to watch out for. Alright, so I'm just kind of doing a lessons learned here to make sure we've covered everything. The first one is that I wouldn't go much beyond the body fat level you feel comfortable with, and is healthy for metabolic markers like blood pressure and cholesterol. And this is probably around the low 20 percents for males. And you'll know this if you get regular bloodwork. And I encourage you to do that don't just wait for your annual physical or if you don't get an annual physical and it's been years, I would get bloodwork it's pretty inexpensive. Get it when you're at your leanest, and get it when you're heavier. And you will see how these numbers change. And why it's important to kind of stay in that healthy weight range. So I wouldn't go much beyond that unless you have a specific goal, like you're a power lifter, and you need to push it for performance purposes. But then you're going to cut it, I would stay around that upper limit, or no more than the upper limit. The next thing is, as we've talked about, on other episodes, metabolic adaptation, so metabolic adaptation sets in at the extremes of both cutting and bulking, right, so when you cut, and you cut, and you cut and cut, and you start to get really lean, your metabolism just starts to drop, no matter what I mean, you have to put in a lot of steps, maybe get more active, and it just keeps dropping, dropping, dropping to the calories are just unsustainable. Again, unless you're a bodybuilder. But the opposite happens when you're walking, your metabolism actually starts to climb, climb, climb, and you get eventually get to the point you're like, I can't even eat another, you know, piece of food today, how can I possibly 30 504,040 500 calories. So we're trying to avoid these points of diminishing returns again, unless you're an athlete with a specific goal. Now, if you like making gains in the gym, raise your hand. If you like making gains in the gym, it's much more fun to be in a nice long, steady bulk for three quarters of the year or longer. And then, and then you can get the cut over quickly. Here's a little hack. All right, to make this all work even better. Consider timing these cycles so that your bulk overlaps the indulgent part of the year the in the US it's the end of the year holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, my birthday happens to be in October. So bam, I've got three straight months of enjoyment when it comes to food within my plan and per my, my calories and macros and all that. But if I time my bulk at that time of year, it's it's less restrictive than if I were trying to cut it that time of year. And then you could have your cut coincide with the spring going into summer, or vice versa in the southern hemisphere for my friends down in Australia, right and that's if you're going for that six pack look or whatever, you just want to feel better for the beach. Again, no shame in that. And then there's a lot we didn't cover today. There's a lot of nuances like carbon protein timing, distributing protein throughout your day for muscle protein synthesis, a lot of nuances that we cover them in other episodes. We'll cover them in this community. And of course, again, a shameless plug a good coach can help with all of those as well. Alright, so let's recap to make a long story that hopefully wasn't too rambling and you found valuable. Let's make it short here. All right, number one, train hard. Always train hard, pretty much train hard the rest of your life. It's fun. Once you get used to it, you get good at it. You're just gonna feel great. And of course it helps you build muscle train hard. Number two, get enough sleep. This is like the most neglected aspect of nutrition in my opinion. Even I struggle with this a lot because we don't give it as much credit as it deserves. But getting enough sleep. Number three eat your protein. Roughly one gram per pound of your target body weight. You know you could you You can play games with this and find perfect numbers. But that's that's the ballpark number four. Cut until you're reasonably lean. Do you like what you see in the mirror? Are you comfortable with yourself? Are you at a level where the calories are okay, you know, whatever your goal is, get to that point of leanness. And then you start your bulk. So that's number five bulk for at least six months, at a quarter to 1% per week. Number six, you then cut for around three months at point one to a quarter percent per week, rinse and repeat, become strong, become lean, conquer the world. All right. So that's what I have for you today. Last but not least, if you are interested in getting accountability, and support to finally achieve, and not just achieve, but sustain your results. I do offer one on one coaching where we can develop an individualized plan just for you to help you improve body composition. Like we talked about today, with all the nuances for you. You can DM me on Instagram or Facebook and go to witsandweights.com/coaching. And the way it works, it's a six month program. Because we need that time to establish the foundation for success. We want to get you going on these periodized phases so that you can learn to keep those results for the rest of your life. It includes nutrition, and lifestyle coaching weekly check ins by recorded video, weekly live called Office Hours access to our Private Client Group live training calls and 24/7 Unlimited direct message access to me. So you can ask me questions whenever you need to. And then best of all, here's the thing I guarantee that if you don't achieve results by the end of six months, I will work with you absolutely for free until you do, because that's how confident I am. That we will get it done. We'll get it done together. So again, just DM me on Instagram at Woods and weights or Facebook, or go to witsandweights.com/coaching The process is quick and easy. I asked a few questions, see if we're a good fit to work together. Your situation has to work with the type of clients I'm able to help and if it is, I'll invite you to join my coaching program and we'll get started. If you found this helpful, if you have any questions, just comment on the video, click the link in the show notes or email me at Philip at witsandweights.com and stay strong. Thank you so much for joining me today. Before you go I do have a quick favor to ask. If you enjoy the podcast, just let me know by leaving a review in Apple podcasts. This will help others find the podcast in search results, which makes a huge difference. Thanks again for joining me, your host Philip Pape in this episode of Wits & Weights. I'll see you next time and stay strong.