Bulking, cutting, and the yo-yo recomp cycle

Philip Pape 0:00

Bulking, cutting, bulking, cutting. If you've been going through that cycle and every time you bulk, you don't like all the fat that you put on, and then you cut for months and your strength and muscle disappear and you suffer through it, there's a reason that cycling might not be working for you. Today I'm covering the research on how shorter diet phases can produce 50% more fat loss with less muscle loss, the exact calorie and protein targets for a mini cut and mini bulk protocol, especially after 40, and the one mistake that turns this strategy into that failed yo-yo trap that hasn't worked for you in the past. We're gonna get into everything about mini cuts and mini bulks today for faster body recomposition. Stay tuned. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and this is a topic that is near and dear to me: body composition and the use of different cycling periods for your cutting and your bulking. Because if you are over 40 like I am, and if you've been trying to improve your body, build some muscle, lose some fat, maybe do both at the same time, you've often heard, hey, focus on one and optimize. I've said that myself. For many people, that is the right strategy. Focus on one for a while and optimize. We call it periodization. You might bulk for a few months. I usually recommend around six months or more. And then cut for a few months. I usually recommend maybe a couple months or even a shorter what we're gonna get into today, a mini cut. Just commit to one at a time. And in theory, it's quite reasonable. In practice, a lot of people end up spending, let's say, those first four or five months in a surplus, and they either they're not doing it effectively enough and they never quite get into a surplus, or they go too fast and they gain more fat than they wanted. And part of it is maybe they're not consistent with their training. Maybe they're not eating enough protein. Maybe they're not eating high quality enough nutrition despite being in a surplus. There's lots of reasons, you know, lack of sleep and so on. And then they're like, okay, I need to cut, and they switch to a fairly long deficit, four or five months in a deficit instead of much shorter that I would recommend. And then they might end up losing muscle and end up kind of where back where they started because of all the inconsistencies. And uh, a lot of this is the sustainability factor. And so this is a yo-yo recomp cycle that I've seen. And it's really, really tough the older you get, because you're more sensitive to these things not working the way you wanted to as they would when you were younger because of hormonal changes, limitations in your recovery, that accumulated frustration of feeling like I'm working so hard, but I don't have anything to show for it. So today I'm going to show you a different approach, strategic mini cuts and mini bulks. These are short focused phases with specific targets to keep your body responsive, to protect your muscle, to get some of that, those wins that compound over time, and ultimately the psychological aspect that allows you to be consistent and sustainable with the process. And I'm a huge fan of non-linear, what I call nonlinear approaches. And that is finding these different creative lengths and aggressiveness of these things that work best for you. So I want to give you all those options. Stick around to the end because I'm gonna share a specific warning sign that tells you that your mini cut needs to stop, even if you plan for it to go longer. A lot of you are impatient, or a lot of you want to keep going because you think you need to do it to get that extra pound off, but there's a warning sign you've got to look for. And it's a really important factor that I get asked about all the time when people are not sure when to end their cut. So here's what we're gonna cover today. First, why the standard long bulk and cut approach often works against you. Not always, but it often does. Second is the research on intermittent dieting, intermittent dieting. So I said nonlinear, but I think intermittent's a better approach that tends to change how you think about this. And then third, the exact protocol, numbers, durations, and of course, that mistake that can make this more of a trap than a benefit. All right, so conventional wisdom is you need to commit to a building phase for at least, I'll say, four or five, six months. In a calorie surplus, you're gonna gain muscle, you're gonna accept a little bit of fat gain, and then you're gonna transition to a cut for, well, fill in the blank. It depends on how much fat you need to lose. If you're already fairly lean, it could be two to three months. A lot of people end up doing it for three to six months, and you're trying to strip that fat off while keeping the muscle you had and then rinse and repeat. And if you are super consistent, if you've got a decent hormonal profile, which for a lot of people that means in your 20s and 30s, high testosterone, everything's good, everything's normal, fast recovery, your metabolism is fairly forgiving, meaning you have some room to work with. And ultimately, psychologically it works, then great, it can work for you. And by the way, when you're past 40, when you're past 50, that approach still works perfectly fine. But for some of the psychology behind it and the reality that life tends to get in the way, especially as we're older, there's there just seems to be more things that interrupt what happens, whether it's injuries and sickness, things with your family, your kids, your job. I just see it all the time. And that's why I wanted to kind of make this more practical for

Metabolic adaptation during continuous dieting

Philip Pape 5:24

you. So the first thing I want to talk about is metabolic adaptation, a very common topic we address on this show, but it's very important to understand. Your body will start compensating for a calorie deficit right away at the first week of a diet. And within the second or third week, you can really see it in the numbers. So if you're tracking with, for example, Macrofactor, which is the app we use to track our food because it also helps track your metabolism. You should likely see your metabolism start to tick downward when you're in a diet. And that's normal. That's normal. But after about six to eight weeks of continuous dieting, you might have seen a drop of anywhere from, say, as low as 50 or 80 calories. But for most people, it could be several hundreds of calories. Depends on how large you are. It could be 500 calories, it could even be seven or eight hundred calories per day beyond what the weight loss alone would predict. And of course, you can't tease apart the two things. So, overall, let's just assume it's in the 500 calorie range, for example. That is not your metabolism being broken, right? That's your body doing what it evolved to do, protect you as you uh starve it of resources. And when we look at just the first six weeks of restriction of a diet, the numbers that I've seen generally is 90 to 100 calories per day on average reduction, but with a lot of variation. Some people don't adapt very much at all. And a lot of times that's newer lifters, for example, who are compensating the other direction because now they're having a better lifestyle. Others see drop of 300 calories a day or more. And that's in the first six weeks. When you prolong it beyond that, it can go even more. And that's what I'm talking about here. So that's metabolic adaptation. So keep that in mind because that's going to affect the logic here. Second is the hormonal disruption. So calorie

Hormonal disruption, testosterone, and estrogen after 40

Philip Pape 7:10

restriction directly suppresses many of your hormones, thyroid, as well as your reproductive hormones, like testosterone, men and women. And of course, in men, we know that testosterone is declining and women, but you know, men, because they have so much, it's a big, meaningful decline. One to two percent per year after 40. For women in perimenopause or menopause, we've got estrogen that drops. The estrogen receptors in skeletal muscle are involved in some of the things that help with regenerating those fibers and building muscle, and it affects fat distribution and fat storage. So you are adding this deficit-induced hormonal suppression on top of the other age-related hormonal things going on, not to mention thyroid, which is your metabolic regulator, and then all of these downstream cascades to affect things like cortisol, and cortisol itself tends to go up because you're more stressed during dieting, and then longer diets mean more exposure to elevated cortisol. You get my drift. So taking those first two together, you've got all sorts of adaptations and compensations going on. All of which is normal, but you've got to understand it and to what degree it could occur based on where you are in life and how aggressive and long your diet is. All right, the third factor here is the muscle loss that accelerates as we get older. And we know that an energy deficit, be just being in a deficit, is going to prevent you from gaining muscle or gaining lean mass mass, even though you're resistance training, it's going to limit it. And the bigger the diet, the more it gets limited to the point where eventually you risk losing some muscle as well. And again, this is if you are resistance training. If you're not resistance training, you're gonna just lose a ton of muscle when you go on a diet anyway. That is not who I'm speaking to. You should be resistance training. And if you're not, honestly, mini cuts and mini bulks are too advanced of a topic to even worry about. Go listen to some of my other episodes, such as your very first cut. Go look that up. It's a great episode. So we know that there's roughly a threshold of 500 calories per day on average of a deficit beyond which lean

Muscle loss acceleration during longer cuts

Philip Pape 9:20

mass loss may start to accelerate, but it also depends on the duration of the deficit, not just the aggressiveness of it. And sometimes we see that relatively lean people have it even worse. And you have to be a little bit careful on how you do that deficit. Now, what about recovery? Because the older we are, the longer it takes us to recover. We know that older adults take longer to recover to baseline strength because of the stressors on your body, especially after uh intense training. So when you're in extended deficit and you're training hard, and now the recovery is even slower, you're compounding the stress stack on your system. So you've got to remember all of these variables stack up as forms of stress, which

Large vs. small surplus and fat gain during bulks

Philip Pape 10:06

again affects the logic of why we're talking about mini cuts and mini bulks. Now, that's all on the dieting side. What about on the bulking side? Well, the extended bulking side has some own some issues you've got to be aware of. There was a 2013 study. It compared large versus small calorie surpluses in elite athletes that trained the same way. And the large surplus group gained significantly more fat mass, but not significantly more lean mass. And this is consistent with many, many studies to come after that that showed us that a surplus doesn't need to be that big. And if you go too big, you're not gonna gain any more muscle, you're just gonna gain more fat. There was the 2023 study, I think Helms, that was Helms' study and his and his colleagues, compared the 5% surplus, or it compared maintenance to 5% to 15% surplus over eight weeks. And the two surplus groups had similar muscle gain, but guess what happened? The 15% surplus group gained even more fat. So the extra calories went to fat, not muscle. So if your anabolic hormone levels are lower, aka when we're over 40, and the quote-unquote nutrient partitioning shifts more toward fat storage, you may have even more sensitivity to that. Not necessarily, it depends on a lot of factors, but we've got to keep in the right window when it comes to the surplus. So the pattern looks like this. If you bulk too long or too aggressively, you're gonna accumulate excess fat. If you cut too long, you might risk losing muscle and suppressing your metabolism more than you really like, where it's gonna have to recover. And then you tend to be further from your goal than when you started in many cases with a lower metabolism and maybe less muscle mass. That's the trap that I'm talking about here when you're not doing those things right. Now, if you do long duration cuts and bulks with a lot of precision and control, you could avoid these things. But a lot of people have difficulty doing it that way, at least without a coach, without being in a program like ours, like eat more lift heavy, or having some way to double check that your numbers make sense beyond just calories, macros, and scale

2-week intermittent dieting blocks vs. continuous restriction

Philip Pape 12:12

weight. Okay, so we covered why the long phase approach could be a risk for you. It depends. Now we're gonna look at when you shorten those phases and then when you alternate them more strategically. This is the fun, creative stuff that I like. All right, so the landmark study, the Matador trial, published in 2018, you've probably heard it many times. If not, look it up. It's pretty cool. They took 51 obese men and they assigned them to either 16 continuous weeks of dieting at a 33% deficit, or the same 16 weeks of dieting, but broken into two-week blocks, alternating with two-week maintenance. So two weeks of dieting, two weeks of maintenance, two weeks of dieting, two weeks of maintenance. And so it ended up taking twice as long, but the same weeks of dieting at the same deficit within that block. Does that make sense? So the only difference was the structure of it. Again, the one group took twice as long, but it's the same deficit over the same amount of dieting days. So the intermittent group that went two on, two off, they lost a hundred or fourteen point one kilograms versus nine point one kilograms in the continuous group. So that's 55% more total weight loss. And the fat mass loss was 12.3 versus eight. And the fat-free mass loss was pretty small, like the amount of muscle mass they lost, and it was similar between the two groups. So the extra weight loss was almost entirely fat. And the intermittent two-week-on, two-week off group, their resting metabolic rate dropped by only half as much, about 86 calories per day instead of 179 calories a day, which that is the crux of this, isn't it? It's not that one group was in a one group, it's not that both groups were actually in the same deficit, even though I kind of said that incorrectly the way I framed it. They were in the same intended deficit. But if your metabolism is dropping faster than the other guy, then your intended deficit just shrunk, didn't it? It just shrunk. You're not actually in the bigger deficit. I think that's where people get confused. And so at the six-month follow-up, here's another interesting fact: the continuous group regained almost everything, while the intermittent group maintained their significantly lower rate. And the two-week blocks was chosen because the rapid early phase of metabolic adaptation tends to happen around the two-week mark. And so they designed that protocol around that. Now, the the big caveat for the Matador study is it was untrained obese men. So then how does this translate if you are a trained lifter? Well, there was something called the ICE CAP trial that looked at intermittent versus continuous dieting in 61 resistance-trained adults at a similar deficit as the Matador trial, so 34%. By the way, when we say 34%, we mean 34% below your maintenance calories. So fat loss and fat-free mass retention were the similar were similar or the same between the two groups, but the intermittent group said they had significantly reduced appetite. And then there was a secondary analysis that found during the during one-week diet breaks, fat-free mass increased a little bit, 0.7 kilograms, resting energy expenditure increased, and there was no increase in fat mass. So a lot of these studies are interesting. As much, you know, as much as you can question methodology or sample size or what have you, it's it's just very interesting to see that, hey, your metabolic rate can be affected by how aggressively and how intermittently you're dieting. And I've talked about the weekend diet before many times. A lot of my clients do this now. We talk about and eat more lift heavy as well. The idea of going five weeks on your deficit, five days on your deficit and two days at maintenance to create a similar type of interruption and keep that metabolic rate a little bit higher, maybe hold on to a little more lean mass. So intermittent dieting may get you the same or better results, is my point, because primarily of the expenditure not dropping as much, even though the total dieting added up at the end of the day is the same. But of course, you're taking longer as well. So the average rate of loss actually is lower, which kind of comports with logic to me. Like it's not really, you're not really comparing the exact same thing, are you? You're really saying that we're gonna stretch this out and go slower. We're just happening happening to do it in this intermittent way, like full on, full off, full on, full off, instead of half all the way through. Does that make sense? There's also a study from 2020, and it showed that the weekend diet that we talked about, they looked at that, the 25% deficit, and they got two-day carb refeeds every week. And that study showed they preserve fat-free mass, dry fat-free mass, resting energy expenditure compared to continuous restriction. And both groups lost the same amount of fat. So again, refeeds are really powerful. So these are really relevant findings, I think. You have most people don't have as much of a buffer as they would like with hormones, with stress, with recovery. And so your risk of lean mass loss during dieting is probably higher than you think based on just pure numbers, which would then mean, okay, how do we compensate for that? Well, other ways to compensate are higher, you know, higher protein intake, potentially more training volume. But then that affects recovery, maybe more sleep. But are you gonna get more sleep? So shorter cutting phases can keep you more productive, is the way I'd like to put it. Keep your body more in that window before these deep adaptations set in. And then all the side effects like poor mood and psychological effects that just worsen the whole situation, not to mention the cascade against your recovery as well.

Saturday meal planning for tight-window phases

Philip Pape 18:01

So before I get into the exact protocol, I want to mention something that is very relevant to this topic. So a mini cut, it is a tight window. And it could be as short as like a three or four week cut. Anything shorter than that, I would call it rapid fat loss. That's a different topic. I think I'm gonna be doing another episode on rapid fat loss soon. I haven't done one in a while. But for mini cuts, if if you get off track for a week, it's more sensitive to the results, right? Because you're by definition in a bigger deficit, most likely. And so it could actually affect, you know, 25% of the window if you're off for a week of those four weeks, correct? Or if it's a three-week mini cut, it's it's a third of it. Meaning if you fall off track, so to speak, for a week, and maybe you just end up being in maintenance instead of deficit, there is a big is a bigger hit to the result, even though on the other hand, you also have more margin. So there's no way to recover if if you start to get off track, like just you just have to accept that it's now going to take an extra week, if that makes sense. So the difference between people who get the results from the mini cuts and those who don't, usually come down comes down to one habit. And that is you plan ahead. You have your weeks set up, you use a level of precision necessary to do this properly, and you've got your meal planning, your prepping, your groceries, your, you know what you're gonna eat, your tracking, all of that, right? Again, this is not for beginners. So this is where Fitness Lab, this is my AI coaching app, is really, really helpful. This is really helpful. I I have plenty of users that use this app that are doing mini cuts and mini bulks, and they love how the app is just the tool they need for the fact that this has to be more precise. For example, there's a Saturday planning feature. It's a meal planning activity on Saturdays where you spend about five minutes mapping out the week before the week starts, which is awesome, right? And you could tell the app if you want it to happen earlier, like on Thursday, so it's in time for your grocery shopping. The app is very flexible and can actually move things around for you. It's like your own little concierge assistant. So you can plan ahead, look at what's on your calendar, look at the social stuff, any parties, any travel days you know you're not gonna have as much time. And then the app will help you plan your meals, your protein around those realities. You know, not this fantasy version, like my week's gonna be fine and everything's perfectly prepped, and I'm gonna be able to hit everything just like I planned. Okay. No, you walk in with a realistic plan for that week, which is super important. And so during a mini cut, that one habit of preparing for your week properly is the difference between one that works and one that it ends up becoming like any other cut, and you get very frustrated. So if you want to execute these tight window phases and think that the weekly ability to plan your meals is helpful, we are running 20% off right now through Friday, May 8th, for the Fitness Lab app. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. You can learn more. You can take a free onboarding quiz and get your custom plan before you even buy the app. So you can see if it's right for you. So go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. All right, so we've covered why long phases sometimes break down, why the research supports shorter and alternating phases based on physiology, metabolism, and psychology. Now let's get practical. What does this actually look like? Okay, let's start with the mini cut.

Mini-cut structure, rate of loss, and protein

Philip Pape 21:31

So the mini cut is a short, focused fat loss phase lasting roughly three to six weeks. It could go up to seven or eight, but anything less than three is more rapid fat loss that's just so aggressive. I wouldn't even categorize that as a mini cut. Now, the goal is not to get shredded. The goal is to peel off the accumulated fat from your building phase so you can get back to building in a slightly leaner, more insulin sensitive, more. Metabolic responsive state. And a lot of my clients who get in who've developed a decent amount of muscle mass love the mini cuts because of its short duration. They can peel off some fat, they can get right back to it. Getting shredded is a whole different topic because you want to go deep into even a mini cut, even if it's aggressive, you'll probably have to go deeper than you think or even want. And that's a whole separate topic. So we're talking about getting super healthy and super lean for sure, but it's not the same as getting shredded. That's a different topic. Okay. So what about the calorie deficit? Well, it's it's not going to be as aggressive as you would think. It would still max out at the 1% of your body weight per week, supported by the evidence before you lose muscle mass, unless you have a bunch of extra fat or a bunch of muscle already, right? There's there's categories where you can go more aggressive, like up to 1.2, 1.3% of your body weight a week. Typically, this is people north of 200 pounds body weight who have a high metabolism. Okay. So if that's not you, I would cap it at 1% of your body weight a week. So I don't go by percent deficits. I go by how much weight you're trying to lose per week, because then it's relative to your body weight, right? Not relative to your uh calories. Now, once you've done that, it'll you'll know how many calories you actually need to eat. And if it's too aggressive, you'll know, and you could always titrate it back. So there was an interesting study, this is about 15 years ago in 2011, and it compared slow weight loss at 0.7% per week versus fat weight loss at 1.4% per week. And this was in elite athletes. The slow group actually gained lean body mass while losing fat. So they they experienced body recomp in a diet. The fast group did not. The bench press went up 13.6% in the slow group and only 5.2% in the fast group. So slower is not just, you know, safer for the physiology and the psychology, it's also more productive in many cases, which is interesting because you would think, okay, I'm impatient, I want to get the result, but it's actually backfires, whereas slower tends to be more helpful. Now, protein during the mining cut should be as high as you can get it. So, what I mean by that is usually the upper range I recommend is one gram per pound, but I'm gonna say that's a minimum. So try to get like 1.2. If you can get 1.5, even better, because we're getting into that regime closer to protein-sparing type diets, where the calories are somewhat low, especially if you're going toward that pegged upper limit of 1% body weight a week. Okay, and this is higher than the standard recommendation for protein, and it accounts for the lower anabolic environment and the need to protect muscle mass. And also it's gonna keep you fuller, it's gonna be good for satiety. And it's so it's not necessarily the most exciting diet, but you could make it that way. You could get creative. So that's protein. I would keep it at least one, if not up to 1.2 or higher grams per pound. Training during a mini-cut, well, this is the same advice I would give for almost any fat loss phase. The goal, the key is to maintain your intensity. Intensity is the load, like keeping up to that, those heavier loads that you were already training with. You might have to reduce overall sets or volume based on your recovery. Maybe it depends on how much you were doing in the first place. But like if you were doing 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week, maybe now you go to eight to 12 hard sets per muscle group per week. So you can kind of do the math based on your program. It might mean switching to a different program, or it might be just cutting some sets out. And then of course, you've really got to focus on your recovery. And so that's sleep, right? And that's getting in your nutrition, even though the calories are limited, making sure to get that protein and where you get carbs, get them around your training. So that's really it for mini cut. I can go into a lot more details. This is something we help people with. Or again, we're we're running a promotion on our app Fitness Lab and it can help you with all of this stuff. You can chat with the coach in there and get as personalized a protocol as you could possibly imagine and all the help you need to make this successful, go to witzelweights.com slash app.

Mini-bulk surplus size and the 4-to-1 ratio

Philip Pape 26:06

Okay, the mini bulk. Now, mini bulks are interesting because normally I would recommend that somebody bulks for at least five or six months to really get into that anabolic environment and really, really build muscle. But a mini bulk is a great entry point. And for many people, it's really just a more aggressive maintenance. In other words, a lot of people I work with will be in maintenance most of the year and they'll crank it up a bit for a while and get into this mini bulk situation and then kind of come back to maintenance. And then they may do a mini cut, they may not, right? So a mini cut or mini bulk is about eight to 16 weeks. So think about that. It's like two to four months. You're still getting up to that four months. It still can be decently long. And this is a very small calorie surplus. And by small, I mean about a quarter to half of your half a percent of your body weight a week. Now, half a percent, you're like, wait a minute, that's that actually could be super aggressive. That is only for the newest of new green lifters who have never done this before. And part of that, in my mind, is psychology. It's a stretch goal to make sure that you yes are getting in that surplus because I know what's gonna happen to you is your body's gonna start adapting upward, you're gonna burn more calories, and you're gonna fall behind very quickly. And you're like, oh, this is too much food. I can't eat all this food. I hear it all the time. And if you're laughing and you know that's you, raise your hat. You know what I'm talking about. So a lot of this is mind games. I get it. But the actual average gain of weight is probably gonna be around 0.2.3% of your body weight per week. So for a hundred seventy pound person, maybe that's a half pound per week. So that's a couple pounds per month. And so that's a reasonable amount to shoot for. If you're gaining much faster than that, then that's much higher risk of gaining too much fat. And then the cool thing about any bulk, especially a mini bulk like this, is well, now you've got this concentrated period of time where you're just gonna push it in the gym. You're gonna push it in the gym, you're gonna be able to handle more volume, you're gonna progress probably better than you have ever before, right? Even it even in an aggressive maintenance where you're eating close to maintenance and stay well fueled, you make progress. But in a surplus like this, even though it seems small, it's all you need, all your body needs to know that it can let loose and grow, grow, grow. And that's the important thing. Now, we've talked about a ratio of bulking to cutting before as something like four to one. The same thing happens here. If you notice the lengths I just gave you, you know, two to two to four months on the building side, no more than a month on the cutting side. So it's the same thing. You're just squeezing the time frame. And you're essentially, instead of doing what we talked about in Matador and Ice Cap of like two weeks on, two weeks off, or two weeks on, one week off, or whatever, you're going straight through, but you're keeping it short, if that makes sense. Now, you could take these and you could double them in length, and you could do two on, two off. You can try that. I wouldn't recommend doing that because that enter that introduces a new variable of frustration because it takes too long. Okay, and that kind of defeats the purpose of the mini piece of this. The hack that you can use is the weekend diet, where on the weekend you have a refeed within this, and then it might extend, like the cut might be a week longer. The bulk, of course, you don't have to do that during a bulk. I'm only talking about the cut, but the four to one ratio of bulking to cutting is kind of how you do the math. And you can just make that work within your, you know, time frame. And then between the phases, I always like between cutting and bulking phases to spend at least a week or two just around your maintenance, right? Coming back up immediately to maintenance that that's calculated maintenance, not estimated, but your actual maintenance based on your tracking, right? Like you should be using something like macrofactor affiliate code wits and weights, all one word. If you want to support the podcast and get two weeks free, macrofactor will calculate that for you. So then you just go right back to maintenance. So if you're coming from the dieting side, this is gonna let your glycogen replenish, your hormones will normalize, your performance is gonna come back. Like this is the recovery piece. Now, when you're going from bulking to cutting, I would also park a little bit in maintenance just to let your body kind of level out where it needs to be before you go into a cut. So let's say you did this for an entire year. What could that look like? Well, it might look like a 12-week surplus, a three to four-week cut, a transition week, 12-week, three to four-week cut, transition week, and then one more short build. So then you're actually building the majority of the year over 52 weeks. You spent up to 40 of those weeks in a productive surplus, and then only like six to eight weeks in short cuts for the whole year. So the net result, assuming reasonable genetics, consistent training, that's important, is six to 10 pounds of lean mass gained at the same or lower body fat percentage than where you started. So, guess what that is, guys? That's body recomp, but done in this nice, sweet spot, efficient way, right? Not so hard that you have those frustrations we led the podcast with, and not trying to do it purely at maintenance where you're just so frustrated because you don't feel like anything's growing. So it might not sound dramatic, but man, six to ten pounds of lean mass at the same or lower body fat percentage, you're gonna look like a completely different person. I mean, a completely different person. And you're gonna love it. So I think it's a great strategy for a lot of you. Now, I have to be honest about something here because mini cuts can be a trap.

Strategic cycling vs. phase-hopping

Philip Pape 31:32

It can be a real trap, a real honeypot if you use them wrong. Is that word like have innuendo these days? I think it does, but I'm gonna play clueless right now. Anyway, the distinction here between strategic phase cycling and indecisive phase hopping. Does that make sense? So I like the former. I like being strategic, cycling your phases. You have to have the right data, you have to understand what you're doing. It helps when you have coaching. I'm not saying you have to have a coach. If you like spreadsheets and you like figuring this out on your own, you could do it, right? Strategic cycling means you plan your phases in advance. You know before you start your build when you're gonna do your mini-cut, how long it's gonna last, what your exit criteria are. And you set certain targets. Well, you set a duration and targets. And what's gonna happen is you're gonna start with the duration, in my opinion. Like you pick the dates, and then you see what's gonna work within there and give yourself kind of a range of flexibility. Like, don't beat yourself up if you can't quite get to the optimal. And it really depends on your psychology of how which direction you want to go there. But that is different. So that's very intentional. The opposite is what a lot of you do, which is hopping around, program hopping, phase hopping. You step on the scale, you freak out, and then you start cutting. You know what I'm talking about. Or, you know, you start to feel flat, small, skinny, whatever. You're like, okay, now I gotta build, now it's time to build muscle. I'm good again, and then you feel fluffy again, and then you start to cut. That is anxiety. That is anxiety that you're disguising in some sort of strategy. It's not a strategy, it's just random, right? It's just reactionary. And we know the math shows it doesn't work. The psychology doesn't work, the stress that comes out of it doesn't work. Actual studies on these types of things, comparing going back and forth quickly to not doing that, we see it doesn't work. And a lot of times the changes that you're looking at are just on the scale, and all of it's from water and glycogen. And so you're not even getting the right data. You guys probably know Elaine Norton, better or worse, you know, he's a controversial guy, but he makes a related point here. He argues that his original mini-cut concept was specifically designed for relatively lean males. So it wasn't the general population. So for women with extensive histories of dieting, who already have suppressed metabolisms, repeated short deficit exposures can sometimes make things worse. And then if you don't feel comfortable at your current body fat level, if you're just not comfortable with your body, you're gonna keep defaulting to cutting, and then you never spend enough time building, which probably why I named my program Eat More Lift Heavy, to lean into how valuable that piece can be. So here's the rule: if you cannot commit to at least eight to 12 weeks in a surplus without bailing on it, you're not ready for this. You're not ready for this mini-phase cycling because you're not gonna get the full package. You have to build the psychological foundation first. You have to get comfortable with slow, intentional weight gain because you're not gaining fat. You're gaining muscle. That's a beautiful thing. You're gaining strength. Where in the past, when you gained weight, it was probably body fat because it was unchecked. It was without training, right? You get the difference. So you have to learn to evaluate progress by things like your training performance, your body measurements, your waste, not just the scale. Also your psychology, your biofeedback. And then plan out your mini cut and mini bulk on a calendar before you start and stick to it. All right, as we wrap up, remember that warning sign that I promised to give you that tells you to end your mini cut early. I'm gonna share that in just a second. If you want this data layer that we've been talking about or alluding to, that helps you catch these signals and know what's going on with your body and know how to measure things and track the right things beyond the scale.

Bonus: one reason to end a mini-cut early

Philip Pape 35:18

Fitness Lab will help you do that. It is my AI coaching app that if you've been listening to this podcast any length of time, the stuff that I love and I'm passionate about helping you with is baked into that app in every respect. And it's gotten so much better even since launch. People loved it when it came out, but now it's faster, it's more responsive. It's got training feedback, biofeedback, pattern recognition. It gives you custom metrics on the fly based on what it realizes that you need. We have this new Saturday meal planning feature. We now have a pre-meal check-in, not just a post-meal check-in. We have daily activities that you need and want, and you can change those activities, like if you need stress reduction or you need to be reminder to go for a walk or drink your water. All of it's in there. And they're 20% off right now. All plans through Friday, May 8th. Go to without com slash app. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app. I think you're gonna love it. I love the app. I'm proud of it. It's helping so many people. Check it out. Link is in the show notes, wits and weights.com slash app. All right, so here is the number one warning sign that tells you you have to end your mini cut right now. All right, very, very important here. If your gym performance has dropped for two consecutive sessions on the same lift, you could be risking muscle loss. Now, we got to be careful here because one bad day, everyone has those, everyone has an off day, everyone has bad recovery days. But two consecutive sessions where you can't match your previous performance on something that you've gotten progress on before. So, like you're getting fewer reps at the same weight, or the same reps are feeling significantly harder, then your deficit has started to cross the line from being productive to potentially risking things. Now, this is in a mini cut. And I'm telling you this to be proactive, not to scare you. In fact, a lot of coaches might be listening to this thinking, what is Philip doing? Of course, you're gonna lose lose strength during a fat loss phase. What matters is you keep your relative strength. I'm talking about the case where you have been slowly but surely progressing, or at least maintaining, and all of a sudden, two weeks in a row, you drop and then you drop. I've seen that before, and I know when that happens, there's something going on with recovery, sleep, or food. And because you're in a diet, obviously food is probably a big factor. And the question is, is it going to snowball now? Or do we need to adjust something, like slow down the fat loss phase or get out of it altogether? So I just want to put that in your head, not to scare you. You should be training hard and trying to get those reps. In fact, I'm almost hoping it has the opposite effect of make sure you're pushing in the gym, even in fat loss, to get those reps. You might feel a little bit winded or wiped, but get them, get them. And if you just can't at all, then we can look at do you just need a quick diet break? Move to maintenance calories for a few days or a week, get your performance to stabilize, and then decide whether to resume the cut. And I tell you this out of love because what I don't want you to do is start to have this cascade of poor biofeedback and performance and muscle loss. And it really, the muscle loss piece isn't because your performance is going down. It's because that'll lead you to make poor decisions and not go to the gym as much and not push as hard. And then it's just gonna cascade. Does that make sense? So I want you to use these very subtle signals to help you be proactive. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the physique that you want gets built with precision in intentional phases that compound over time, not by grinding it out forever or constantly switching around. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.