Leah:

Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I am Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir. In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about how long our bulking and cutting phases should be and how we could potentially go about switching between the two and how we do that process in general.

So putting some definitions in place first. So when we’re talking bulking and cutting, so bulking is defined as a period of time we spend in a caloric surplus actively gaining weight, ideally with the outcome of gaining majority lean mass, but in any of these phases, there is often going to be some fat mass that comes alongside this lean mass. And then from a cutting perspective to define that, that’s a period of time that we spend in a caloric deficit with the main aim of reducing our weight and ideally most of that weight coming from fat mass and then retaining as much lean mass as we can.

So in cycling between bulking and cutting phases, this can improve our body composition over time by increasing our amount of lean mass whilst reducing the amount of body fat. So getting more jacked and leaner, which is a goal for many people in the fitness space and athletes as well. Obviously everyone’s individual goals and needs are going to look completely different and how you set this up. There’s really no right or wrong way to do it in that there is just many ways to skin the cat. It’s not a very good term for a vegan actually. I’m just thinking. But there’s plenty of ways that we can go about this. So we’re going to talk through some rough guidelines whilst trying to keep some like individual variation in there.

Aidan:

Yeah. And big emphasis on those definitions as well. Cause like every now and then I’ll see a video that’s like, you shouldn’t bulk, here’s what you should do instead. And then it will just talk about like a small calorie surplus. It’s like, no, like that’s still in the category. Like it’s still, yeah, like fits that definition that we just talked about. You could talk about quote on quote, lean bulking versus dirty bulking, et cetera, etc. But like anything that’s like an intentional calorie surplus for an extended period of time, that would be in this category.

But now something that’s harder than you’d think is talking about why does it make sense to commit to a goal like doing a calorie surplus for next time period of time or doing a calorie deficit, rather than just say sitting at maintenance or whatever, or any other alternatives to this. It is harder than you’d think because it’s, it’s not like we can just like whip out a study and be like, this is way more effective, but I’m going to talk about it from a few angles. The first one is while I normally downplay anecdotal evidence, there is one piece of anecdotal evidence that is like, you’d be an idiot to ignore this. And that is that

In bodybuilding, the sport is literally around body composition manipulation. This is what they do. This is what they obsess about. They’re always trying to find the best way to do this. Almost every single bodybuilder goes through bulking and cutting phases when you look at it through that definition that we talked about. They might do a contest prep. They go, they do a show and then they come out of that. They return to a healthy body fat percentage and then they start a long, slow off season of being in a small calorie surplus for an extended period of time. They might do cuts at some stage. They might go more aggressive and do a mini cut or they might do a slightly longer cut. And they just kind of repeat that cycle and it’s time to prep for another show.

Maybe they don’t cut it all in the off season. Maybe they’re just saying a calorie surplus, but you know what they don’t do? They don’t get to that healthy body fat percentage and then just try to recomp at that same body weight. And if it was more efficient to do that, I believe that the bodybuilding community is smart enough to have been like, this clearly seems to work better. Let’s do this. Obviously that’s just anecdotal. We are gonna talk about like rates of fat loss and stuff like that and stuff later, but like, something that stands out is in a lot of research looking at deficits, people seem to retain muscle pretty well if they’re having a high -ish protein intake and they’re doing resistance training. So you’re like, okay, well, clearly that’s more efficient if you’re looking to lose fat than it is to just sit at re -comping.

Then the other argument is that, muscle gain is just a very slow process. It makes sense to spend a lot of time in a situation where you’re in a good environment for muscle gain, for example, a small calorie surplus, and just do that for a really long period of time. Going away from looking at it from that lens, let’s look at it from other lenses. Let’s look at the physiology. The body does have a bit of a hormonal environment that’s set up to really favour either one or the other. It seems to be set up more so being like these hormones are aligned with muscle growth.

These hormones are more aligned with fat loss. So you could make the hormonal argument as well. But then another clear argument is the psychology argument. It’s clearer when you have a main goal in your head to just keep working towards that goal. And this is a bit of a cliche, but a lot of people quite unquote spin their wheels. There’s a lot of people who train for long periods of time in the gym and don’t necessarily see progress. Just looking around, it is incredibly rare for me to see people who commit to a a decent period of time in a small calorie surplus, gain a decent amount of size, then do this cutting process and then end up in the same place.

There’s exceptions to that. Often people who gain a lot of body fat very quickly and then do. There is exceptions, but if people are doing it in a well structured place, I don’t see them often ending up in the same place. Whereas there are many people who are just sitting at the same body weight year round who don’t really make that much progress.

Leah:

Yeah, there’s definitely, I guess, arguments to be made of like, there are ineffective ways to do bulking and cutting, but if you do it well, it is the most effective way to improve body composition over time. So talking through how long should a muscle gain phase be? For me, this is typically when I’m working with clients, something that I set a three month minimum on. Muscle building is an extremely slow process particularly if you already have a decent amount of lean mass and are wanting to gain more mass.

It only gets to be a slower and slower process when obviously doing it naturally. So three months is like minimum, ideally, we’re spending a majority of our time in this state of focusing on building lean mass because of how slow the rate of lean mass gain can be. So ideally, we’re gaining at a rate that is allowing us to gain as much lean mass as we can in a period of time, but with not gaining too much excess body fat. this, like the size of the surplus is really going to depend on the person and their ability to gain lean mass.

But in terms of length of time, there’s not any maximum term. For a lot of people, they will stop once they have accumulated more fat mass than what they would like and want to take some kind of cutting approach, want to be in a deficit for a while to lean out a little bit. It’s rare for me to have clients that are sitting in a caloric surplus for like more than eight months, but there have been times absolutely where I’ve had people in a surplus for a year and it’s just been this like very, very slow rate of weight gain.

But a lot of the times it’s gonna be around that kind of three to eight month period in a bulking phase when done correctly.

Aidan:

In terms of when you should end it, when would you end it?

Leah:

I think this is like a very personal preference thing for a lot of my clients. It’s usually gonna come to a point where, okay, because there has been this slow increase in fat mass over the period of time, they get to a point where they’re like, I’m kind of feeling slightly uncomfortable. I want to lean out a little bit. So we do it from that perspective. It might also be around just kind of general health. So if we’re gaining so much body fat, because it’s such a long period of time that it impacts health, that could be something to consider. And then if it starts to impact things like performance, particularly in like a weight making sport, like powerlifting, like that’s something we have to consider. So we might look at like when you’re actually competing, when you need to be certain weights and then plan these things around that.

Aidan:

Yeah, that makes sense for sure. And I like a combo of just doing both of those things. So what I mean by that is like having a bit of a set like minimum about being like, I’ll do it at least this long. So you’re kind of committing to the phase, but then also monitoring for those things. Cause say somebody like one month in might feel uncomfortable. It’s like, hang on.

Leah:

It’s only been a month. Yeah.

Aidan:

Yeah. Particularly if they haven’t like their body hasn’t physically actually changed much at all. Like sometimes people get in their own head, but it’s like, I think it makes sense to monitor for all of these things too, to be like, okay, that’s probably why I’m going to end it at this phase. Now we’re going to talk about how long should the cutting phase be? And same kind of thing. There’s no right or wrong. I have a general guideline of I don’t like them being planned to be more than 12 weeks long in most cases. I have rationale for that guideline. Like I have rationale related to things like the psychology about being like, it’s easy to do things when you know that you’re only making certain sacrifices for 12 weeks. It’s easy to commit to those things. Hunger, we see hunger often increasing over the course of a deficit, feelings of restriction just in general.

You could talk metabolic adaptation, you could talk about changes in desire to eat. You could also talk about how far away from somebody’s goal are they? Like, they even need a really long time or anything like that? But although I have those general guideline, I break that general guideline all the time, like, there are many cases where I have people significantly exceed that number and they still do very, very well. If somebody has good momentum, they feel good. They’re not running into any of those issues that I of mentioned and they still want to lose more body fat. There’s no reason that they need to stop for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can even just look around and see like many, many, successful case studies of people who’ve gone well beyond that number. So it’s like I have as a general guideline, it’s something I think a lot of people do better if they’re kept in mind but you can break that guideline heaps.

One of the very good things though, is that we can lose body fat way quicker than we can gain muscle. Muscle gain is a slow process. Depending on how you look at it, fat loss is a quick process, but obviously, that’s subjective. But I think 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week is a great target. Example, if somebody is 100 kilos, let’s simplify down to half a kilo to one kilo per week. If somebody’s smaller, smaller numbers. If somebody’s larger, larger numbers.

I would only go lower than that number if it just happened to fit somebody’s lifestyle better. Like if they felt every time they were going at least that 0.5%, they just felt hungry or like it just felt restrictive, they whatever it is, right? If it’s significantly easier for them to do slower than that, it’s like, sure, let’s go slower than that. But if it’s not that much of a difference and it’s all the same to them, I’d like to go in that range just because otherwise you’re taking longer than you need to to achieve this goal. And it’s like, say somebody had a fat loss phase that could have taken 12 weeks, but it turns into 24 weeks. That’s suddenly a very long time to be focusing on fat loss.

Downsides are going faster at 1%. We’ll typically be in relation to a lot of things I touched on with hunger restriction, et cetera, but also talking about stuff like performance and recovery suffering as well. If anyone plays sports, they train hard or any of those things, it’s a lot harder to train hard when you’re on relatively low calories in relation to your normal needs and a complex topic, but potentially more muscle loss with a more aggressive deficit as well. But I think that topic is a bit more complex than a lot of people give it credit for, which we’ll talk about that too.

Leah:

Yeah. And next thing we’re going to have a little chat about is thoughts on aggressive mini cuts. So from a body composition perspective, we can definitely see the merit in approaching things this way. Like if you’re in a long bulking phase and like, look, I’m gaining a little bit too much body fat, maybe aesthetically or performance perspective, it’s not ideal doing this kind of aggressive mini cut could be something that you look at. So even looking at that, like going up to that 1 % loss of body weight per week, like arguably like that’s decently aggressive or even going a bit beyond that.

There was one study in elite athletes where they compared a loss of 0.7 % per week to 1.4 % of body weight per week, which again, quite aggressive at 1.4%, while they were also resistance training and consuming a good amount of protein. And the 0.7 % group gained a small amount of muscle while the 1.4 % lost a little bit. So when it comes to aggressive cuts, like obviously the more aggressive you are, even if you’re ticking those other boxes, there’s more likelihood of having some amount of muscle loss in that process of being quite aggressive, where if we lean to the less aggressive side, there’s still potential maybe to be continuing to gain lean mass throughout that process or just better at retaining that lean mass overall.

The gaining of the muscle is kind of crazy. Like we wouldn’t see that in every single context because when you think about it, if you’re in a deficit and you’re set up for fat loss, it’s like, there’s no guarantee that you’re obviously going to be gaining lean mass like that. I wouldn’t say an outlier, but not going to happen in all circumstances depending on who you are.

Aidan:

Adding my two cents on that, like these people are elite athletes, but they weren’t lifters specifically. So they were more likely to be able to do this. But I like that kind of outcome as a bit of an example of like, I’ve seen people literally say to somebody, you’re in a deficit. So like, we’re just trying to retain also like there’s no way you’re going to be able to build muscle or anything like that. It’s like, no, like we see this in research a fair bit. Like sometimes people do gain muscle. Like, and like 0.7 % is not slow.

Like that’s, it’s still like a moderate deficit and they gained a bit of muscle. So it’s like, if I’m speaking to somebody about being in a deficit, like obviously I’m realistic and stuff like that. I’m like, I like giving people a bit of hope and being like, it’s possible. You still might be able to get, like it makes us to try to train, to try to build some muscle still. And then whatever happens, happens from there.

Leah:

Yeah. And even for the group that, lost a little bit of muscle. It’s like, okay, well you also did it far more quickly in that then you get to spend much more time in a growing phase because you did the cut more quickly. So is there benefits to that? So it’s really kind of like zooming out rather than being so focused on, I think those outcomes, but like the overall process in general, right?

Aidan:

And this is also part of why it’s pretty common in the bodybuilding world, particularly these days for people to do these long off seasons where they do these slow bulks for a long period of time. But when they cut, they go pretty aggressive. Like they do an aggressive mini cut as we kind of talk about for like four to six weeks where they’re often losing 1% or more of their body weight per week, which like if you were somebody who’s like, the bigger the deficit, the more muscle you lose, you’d be like, well, that seems dumb for a bodybuilder to do. But this is part of why we often see this as an approach because it’s like the difference in muscle gain versus muscle loss isn’t huge, but they get there twice as quick. And then they can go back straight into their off season and trying to make more improvements too.

Leah:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think in a lot of contexts this can make sense, but then there’s the flip side of when we do things really aggressively that comes or can come along with a lot of other downsides in dieting this way in that it’s usually very restrictive. Hunger is often more of an issue. Performance typically suffers during that time. So it’s like, is it worth those particular outcomes for some people? Yes, for some people, no, but it is something to consider.

I think like also taking into account like consistency, it’s like something that I would utilise in terms of aggressive cuts. It’s something I would utilise with someone who is like really consistent and kind of can get in, get it done and get out. Where someone who struggles more with those, like with the hunger and being consistent, they’re like less likely to be a good candidate for this approach.

Aidan:

Yeah. It’s a bit of a catch because often the people most drawn to it aggressive diets are also people who have struggled with consistency. I do have that at this stage as a bit of a prerequisite, whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong, but it’s just like, I’ve seen a lot of people do aggressive diets. The only people I’ve really seen succeed with it being a useful tool that has then led to better progress down the line are people who have just, they’re just consistent all the time anyway, or almost all the time anyway. The people I’ve seen where it not work out are the people who have struggled with consistency in many areas anyway. So it’s like, that’s a prerequisite for me just being like, if we were going to do this approach, let’s have a track record of consistency before we start this approach. Actually, think you get, you know, we could link into the show notes is the webinar I did on planning body composition changes that goes through bulking cutting.

Leah:

If you wanted to. Is that okay? Yeah. Cause we can just, I can just link it in cause I put it on YouTube. Yeah. If you are interested in learning more about planning your bulking and cutting phases and planning out these timelines, I actually did a free webinar on this, which is currently on YouTube. So I’ve just linked that in the show notes for you guys. It goes through how to utilize Dexter scans to make a plan for body composition outcomes and how to plan out your timeline. So again, going way more into specifics there.

Aidan:

Perfect. Well, apart from that, this has been episode 161 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. As always, if you have not left a rating or review, we would massively appreciate that. But apart from that, I hope you enjoyed listening.