You’ve been training for months, or even years. You’re eating right. But when you look in the mirror, you see… no definition, no size. You’re just stuck.
Many people call this skinny fat.
Here’s an example of someone who started on the skinnier side of that:
Here’s an example of someone with more muscle who started on the fatter side of that:
This article will teach you how to break free of the skinny-fat trap, like Dominik and Tariq.
I’ll explain why you’re stuck, the nutrition phases of bulking and cutting you’ll need, and most importantly, how to win the mental battles that you’ll go through that are likely stopping you from succeeding right now.
Alright, let’s get to it.
SKINNY FAT AND THE SKINNY FAT TRAP
Skinny fat is primarily a problem of a lack of muscle.
- Your doctor would say you’re at a “healthy” body weight.
- In clothes, you look similar to someone who is considerably leaner.
- You’ve been training and looking after your diet, but progress has stalled.
- A recomp is no longer working, but you don’t feel jacked enough to cut, nor lean enough to bulk.
You feel trapped.
I’ve been there. And this is when the shiny objects thrown up by the fitness industry get us.
👉 Cold plunging. Saunas. Sleep tracking. Supplements.
You feel a little better, but nothing really changes with your physique.
Next, you try less-gimmicky things:
👉 Switching up your training, looking after protein timing, higher carb, lower carb, or sleeping a little longer.
These are sensible things to try, but not things that will significantly move the needle for you, unless they were horribly off in the first place. So you end up a few years down the line, with no new progress to show for your efforts.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most people don’t want to hear:
You will need to embrace discomfort if you’re going to break it out of the skinny-fat trap.
BREAKING FREE OF THE SKINNY FAT TRAP
The only way to break free is to build significantly more muscle.
To do this, you’ll need to spend a prolonged period in a sensible calorie surplus while training hard so that you give your body the fuel it needs to put on muscle. This is commonly referred to as a bulk.
BULKING: BODY WEIGHT, MUSCLE, AND FAT MASS CHANGE OVER TIME
You will gain weight, and some fat gain is inevitable.
If you don’t accept this, you’ll end your bulk phase too early because you feel too fat. You won’t have gained enough muscle to make a meaningful difference to your physique, and when you cut down again, you won’t feel that it was worth it.
There is a cure to this, and while the medicine is not easy to swallow, it’s the only way out of physique purgatory:
Push past your comfort zone.
You have two options:
- Bulk, and accept that you’re going to feel a little fat for a while.
- Alternatively, cut, and accept that you’ll feel skinny for a while.
Both are hard to do, not just physically, but emotionally.
Feeling “fat” or “skinny” is subjective. It affects bodybuilders just as much as it does regular people, but it doesn’t make it less emotionally real.
Not only will you have your own fears and feelings, but you’ll get comments from people on your appearance, which can further fuel the fire to second-guess your decisions.
If you choose to bulk:
To stop your emotions messing you up, I recommend putting some guidelines in place. Bulk for at least ten months and gain at least 10% of your body weight. With any luck, half of that will be muscle.
For that 10% figure, don’t include the large amounts of weight gain you experience in the first one to two weeks when you first start bulking, as that will be mostly water, gut content, and glycogen.
With Dominik, we bulked for 15 months, and then cut for four. Throughout the time we were bulking, he experssed concerned about fat gain. But look at the difference it made to his physique!
This broke him out of the skinny-fat trap, the first phase of his transformation.
If you choose to cut:
It can be excruciatingly hard to follow through on when you’re doing it for the first time.
This is because we all have less muscle mass than we think. It’s the same for everyone. So you’ll need to get lighter than you have in mind before the definition comes through.
And feeling skinny when you’ve been training hard sucks. Being called it, really sucks. I’ve experienced that myself.
Even so, many clients choose to cut because they find it to be the lesser of two evils: they prefer to get temporarily skinnier than they like, rather than fatter than they like.
So, if this is you, keep reminding yourself:
Your discomfort is temporary, and you’re doing this so you can bulk for a long time and gain a life-changing amount of muscle.
This is how you break free from the skinny-fat trap.
That was the biggest part of my job, coaching Tariq. Because to get this look, he had to lose 19 lbs, and in the first half of the cut, he felt he was just looking smaller.
That’s the trap. It’s a mental one. Push through.
Now, once you’ve bitten the bullet and completed the first phase, you’ll believe in yourself and be excited for further progress.
So here’s what’s next.
THE PATH TO BUILDING YOUR DREAM PHYSIQUE
To build your dream physique, you’ll repeat cycles of bulking and cutting.
CUT AND BULK CYCLES: BODY WEIGHT, MUSCLE, AND FAT MASS CHANGE OVER TIME
I’ve explained this in How Cut and Bulk Cycles Should Look. For now, let’s look at another client example:
Chandler felt stuck, skinny-fat. Not big enough to cut, not lean enough to bulk.
- First, we cut to a point where he felt uncomfortably lean. (Top right image.) This set him up to bulk.
- We then bulked for five months and then cut. (Top left image.)
- We then repeated that for a much longer period, resulting in the physique you see in the bottom right image.
We set our emotions aside. Tackled everything in phases. And permanently escaped the Skinny Fat Trap.
Concluding Thoughts
Escaping the skinny-fat trap is as much of a psychological challenge as it is a physical one. However, I hope that by sharing these examples, I’ve given you a concrete roadmap for escaping it.
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Question? Ask me in the comments. 🙏
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