When transitioning from a cut to a bulk, it is better to calculate the calorie increase needed using your progress data than making a fresh calculation with a calorie and macro calculator. This is because the equations behind calorie calculators only give estimations, and they cannot factor in any reduction…
When transitioning from a bulk to a cut, it is better to calculate the calorie reduction needed using your progress data than making a fresh calculation with a calorie and macro calculator. This is because the equations behind calorie calculators only give estimations, and they cannot factor in any bump…
This may shock some of you, but my advice to physique competitors after a contest is to get fat again. I wish I could tell you that you could stay shredded all year, but you can’t. Your priority must be regaining body fat to healthy levels before trying to find…
Picture this: You’ve finally finished cutting. You’re now lean enough to bulk and excited to finally eat a good amount again. What’s the last thing you want to do? — Gain back a bunch of the fat you’ve just lost. What’s the first thing that most people do? — Gain…
When we bulk, we want to maximize our rate of muscle gain while minimizing fat gain. (I talked about the consequences of failing to do the latter here.) But how do we do that? To recap from my guide to bulking: This article focuses on the second and third parts….
As already discussed, past a certain point, we need to alternate bulk and cut phases to keep progressing. This is the only way to continue gaining muscle over time while managing body fat levels. To do that, we need to make calorie and macro adjustments. This is because our energy…
If you are anything like me, once upon a time, you dreamt of getting as jacked as your favorite movie star. (Being an 80s child, naturally, mine was Arnold Schwarzenegger.) You gave up on that dream when you realized the level of steroid abuse that would require. So you set…
There are two types of assessment and adjustment needed to be successful. The first involves assessing your initial calorie calculations and correcting them if you need to do so. I will cover this for both bulking and cutting in this article. The second type are the ongoing adjustments needed to…
In my articles on how to set calorie intake and when to bulk vs cut, I presented the following sketches representing fat, muscle, and weight changes for cutting and recomp phases over several months: But in reality, the body weight line will look more like this: The short-term fluctuations rule…
We need to make adjustments to our calorie intake as we diet if we’re to be successful with our fat loss goals. This is because a calorie and macro calculator can only give estimations, and our energy needs change over time due to various compensatory mechanisms. Weight fluctuations often mask…
You know that your macro calculations are just a start point, and you will need to adjust your diet to keep progressing. But what are you likely to see in your body measurement and scale weight progress tracking data? What’s normal? What signals that you’re doing something wrong? If you…
I’ve made changes to the rates I recommend people aim to gain weight at when bulking. This was sparked when I received a comment from a reader last week on the Calorie and Macro Calculator, asking why the calculations there did not match what I have in my How To Bulk Without…
Reverse dieting — the latest thing the fitness kids have decided to flex their orthorexia about. I thought this shit had died a few years ago, but alas, I’m getting a fair few questions about recently, so let me put this one to bed before explaining how to finish a…
If you are putting in a serious amount of effort with your training and nutrition, you owe it to yourself to take the ten extra minutes each week to track your progress seriously. This will help ensure you get the results you deserve. I’d go as far as to say…
There is an absence of quality diet advice out there for people trying to bulk. ‘Eat more!’ lacks the detail and finesse to optimize things, ‘Calculate your macros, train hard’ – misses the fundamental point that as we progress, calorie and macronutrient needs change and adjustments are necessary to keep us progressing.
You can eat a lot more and maintain most, if not all of your leanness, after dieting. But people screw this up. They either diet blindly without ever thinking how they were going to maintain it, diet too hard for too long and then can’t maintain it, or they mess up a calculation…
A diet break is a planned and purposeful break from dieting, anything from one day, up to two weeks. I get all of my clients to take them, as they help prepare them psychologically and physiologically for the next phase of dieting. Adherence is easier, results are better, skip implementing…
In the previous article, we covered Why You Need To Make Adjustments as You Diet. This is the guide on how to do it. Your diet progress has slowed or come to a stop for 2-3 weeks, diet adherence has been good, you’re sleeping well and there is no additional stress…
