Struggling to figure out whether you should bulk, cut, or maintain? In this video, Coach Sawyer breaks down the essentials of each approach and how to do them effectively without extreme drawbacks. Learn how to adjust your calories strategically, stay within a safe range, and fine-tune your progress based on how your body responds. Whether you’re looking to build muscle, lose fat, or maintain your physique, this guide will help you make informed decisions and stay on track.
Transcript:
You clicked on this video because you want to know which one you should do, bulking or cutting, and I’m going to try to give you some information on both of those so that you can make a good decision. What’s up everybody, my name is Coach Sawyer, I work at Vegan Proteins. I’m excited to get into this with you today.
So first off, right off the bat, I just want to get into what really matters, which is that you are the one that gets to decide which direction you want to go with your body. Not me, not anybody on the internet. And so it’s important to keep in mind that, you know, people can give you information, they can give you opinions on the internet, but you’re the only one that ultimately is responsible for making these changes, and you and your doctor should be on the same page about what you’re doing and why, especially if your health is at risk or you feel like you are more vulnerable for some reason.
Either you’re, you know, morbidly obese, or you’re very underweight, or you have some kind of medical condition that prevents you from being able to do things without as much worry as other people, or you have some kind of medical condition that precludes you from being as carefree about this stuff as other people might be able to be. So let’s start with cutting, because most people want to be leaner than they currently are, let’s be honest. We live in a world with abundance of calories, and it’s hard to be pretty lean in this day and age.
The first question with cutting that I think needs to come up is, how much muscle tone and definition are you aiming to have? Because a lot of people just assume that they’re going to have a lot of muscle definition as they get leaner, and you will have more lines and striations and things like that, but you might not have the kind of lean, toned, strong look that you’re thinking you will if you haven’t spent a significant amount of time trying to build muscle first. And so it’s not really just about getting leaner to reveal muscle underneath because you need to have muscle underneath, right? So I generally advise people to, and it’s just healthier in general, to do a slower deficit, so a smaller cut. So say your maintenance calories are 2,200 or something like that, you’d probably want to go a little bit below that, maybe 1,800 or so calories a day to lose weight at a reasonable pace, but not too quickly.
Because what happens when you lose weight too quickly is that you will start to risk muscle loss, and your body will have to adapt to that lower amount of energy so intensely that you might not have enough energy to actually work out or recover from workouts as well as you would otherwise around maintenance or closer to maintenance. Most people preserve the most muscle when aiming to lose around half a percent to a percent of their body weight, give or take. But it’s more nuanced than that because the two biggest factors here are, one, how lean are you when you’re at the start of your diet? So it’s a little bit nuanced because we want to make sure not only is the deficit not too huge to the point that it becomes too prohibitively difficult to actually build or even maintain muscle mass while you’re doing that deficit, but we also need to know how lean you are when you start that deficit as well because people with more body fat can afford to be a bit more aggressive, maybe even losing up to a percent and a half or so of their body weight per week because they just have so much excess body fat to lose.
And so that’s one of those things where if you have a lot of body fat, you can probably be a little bit more aggressive, but if you don’t have a ton, it’s probably smart to be slower. And in any situation, losing slowly is not a bad idea. The only downside to losing slowly is that it takes longer and it might be a little bit discouraging when it takes a long time and you feel like, oh man, I’m not really changing as quickly as this other person I know or whatever.
But basically they’ve done studies and where they compare people in smaller deficits to bigger deficits, people in smaller deficits tend to lose less muscle mass and even potentially can build muscle mass depending how good their training is and their nutrition is. And they also have less likelihood of rebounding in weight. And so that’s, those are two good reasons right there alone to lose more slowly in a lot of cases.
So don’t be discouraged if you’re losing a little bit more slowly. It’s also the case that a lot of people just have busy, crazy lives and they cannot afford to spend the time and energy and money it would take to be really all in and create a huge sizable deficit because that’s stressful and it’s hard, takes a lot of planning. One thing I do want to emphasize, if you do decide to do a cut is that you are going to want to make sure you’re eating enough protein and that you are training sufficiently.
You’re giving your muscles enough intensity and volume every week, meaning you are giving, you’re pushing yourself hard and you’re doing enough sets every week to make sure you at least preserve muscle mass. Because when you are in a deficit, it’s a stressful state for your body to be in. And it’s, you can potentially lose some muscle mass if you’re not careful about how you do them.
Either you lose too quickly, you don’t eat enough protein, you don’t resistance train at all. Any of these things can lead to muscle loss. And so we want to make sure that we have those ducks in a row when we do start the deficit.
One last part about deficits, I feel like it’s in my professional responsibility to mention, is that they’re inherently stressful. With a smaller deficit, you’ll be able to maintain it for longer for one thing, and it will be less likely to interrupt a lot of the aspects of your life. But also eventually you’ll, no matter if it’s a small deficit or a big deficit, your body is going to ring the alarm bell, I like to say, louder and louder and louder for more food and more rest and all these things that your body is, basically these deficits are taking a toll on you.
And when we have so many diet fatigue symptoms that you’re no longer losing any weight or you’re feeling super lethargic or hungry all the time, it becomes counterproductive to continue to try to be in a deficit. So if that is what’s happening to you, usually only after several months of dieting is this happening, depending on how lean you are when you start. But yeah, if you’re starting to notice these kind of red flags, then it might be time to take a break at maintenance calories and just kind of rest for a while.
Because again, these deficits are taxing, they’re very hormonally taxing, they’re very systemically just fatiguing. And so you need to give yourself breaks instead of trying to push deeper and deeper into this deficit. You might need to just take a break at maintenance for a while.
And rule of thumb that as coaches use sometimes is a third to a half the time that you were in a deficit for, you might need to spend around maintenance to recover from that deficit. Of course, feel it out. It’s very different again, based on how lean you are, genetics, how hard you pushed it, those kinds of things.
But basically, you just need to know that there’s going to be an amount of time where you need to rest after that weight loss journey to just regain your sanity and your faculties. And then you can go back into a deficit if you still have more weight to lose. But you need to make sure that you’re staying on top of the fact that you’re not too starving, you’re not too energy deprived, you’re not too stressed.
And that is going to require probably some breaks. Okay, so now that you know a bit about cutting, let’s talk about bulking. So when it comes to bulking, I really don’t think many people need to consider it, especially in early stages, there is a point at which you will notice a diminishing returns from your training and your nutrition, if you’re staying in a deficit, especially, but even staying around maintenance.
And that’s because as you get conditioned, and you as you become accustomed to training, your body becomes less sensitive to it less adaptive, less, less reactive to training. And so you need to give yourself a little bit of surplus calories to help you recover and to add tissue to your frame. When you have enough body fat that you can synthesize that energy and turn it into muscle tissue, then it’s not as much of an issue.
You when you have more body fat, you don’t really need to bulk and add calories above your maintenance so much unless you’re very advanced. But if you’re relatively lean, and you notice that you’ve hit kind of a plateau in your training and in your journey where you just can’t seem to gain strength anymore, the same way you’re having a hard time just gaining any muscle. That’s that’s typically when it makes sense for people to actually start doing intentional bulks or surpluses.
You don’t need much in the way of extra calories to get the benefits of doing this. And in fact, a lot of people, myself included, would recommend doing longer, slower bulks, as opposed to really fast, really intense bulks, because you can only synthesize muscle tissue so quickly. And you’re going to have more body fat to pull off later if you go too quickly.
So usually I recommend aiming to gain between a quarter of a percent to half a percent of your body weight per week. So typically for a newer lifter, you could probably be a little bit more aggressive in this surplus if you wanted to be. If you’re really, really going home for building muscle, you could gain a percent of your body weight per month or so.
If you’re more intermediate, if you’re starting to get into that phase where you’re noticing, okay, these gains are really slowing down, maybe half a percent to one percent of your body weight increase per month is a good middle ground. And then if you’re more advanced and you’re really kind of trying to push the upper limits of your muscle building potential for your genetics, then I would say, you know, maybe a hundred or two hundred calorie surplus a day. We wouldn’t really want to go that high at that point because your muscle building potential is low and you don’t really need that many excess calories to gain, you know, very little muscle.
So those are kind of the general guidelines that I like to give people, but obviously test it out yourself, see what feels good for you. It’s just that as you get more advanced, the less muscle building potential you have. And so it makes sense to have a smaller and smaller surplus as you go, because you’re not necessarily going to feel more muscle gains.
You’re mostly just going to be adding more fat mass. So something to keep in mind, calorie surpluses are very comfortable for most people. They’re not as physiologically taxing as deficits in other words.
So basically people can bulk indefinitely. You might have a little bit of diet fatigue in the other direction of feeling kind of sick of food or feeling kind of bloated a lot. Those things can happen.
But in a small enough surplus, you’re really not going to notice too much discomfort. In fact, it’s, you know, pretty easy to coax our bodies to eat a little bit extra calories. I mean, there’s so many ways to do that now.
You know, you could have a little bit of dark chocolate that’s like this big that could add 200 calories to your diet. So yeah, slight surpluses are very, very comfortable for most people. And really the end of a bulking cycle or a phase is mostly just determined by getting a little bit too squishy for somebody’s comfort.
So, you know, in terms of like risking negative side effects, all we really need to worry about is gaining a little bit too much body fat because there’s no way to make sure that you gain no body fat when you’re in a surplus. Yes, the smaller the surplus, less likely you are to spill over into body fat stores. But eventually you’re going to realize there’s just no way to gain purely lean muscle, especially as you get more advanced in your career.
But hopefully you’re starting to notice a trend in the advice that I’m giving here, which is that you don’t need to turn the dial up to a thousand and you don’t need to go back to a negative a thousand either. When you know about what your maintenance calories are, it’s a good idea to hover around that and just kind of tilt the scales in favor of one thing or another, depending on what you’re trying to do at any given point in time. And if you’re hitting plateaus, right.
It’s also really important to listen to your body, especially when you’re in a deficit and you start to get more hungry and more fatigued. These are things that you should listen to and you can mitigate by doing things like eating more fiber, eating more protein, more leafy greens. There’s a lot of things you can do to mitigate the hunger, but eventually you will need to take a break with books.
It’s like stay around and stay close to maintenance. Small surplus is a good idea. You can be a little bit more aggressive if you’re newer to the gym and you have more muscle building potential, but eventually you will need to decrease the calories because you’re going to have accumulated some fat by then.
And that’s okay. Ultimately, I think it’s important to know how to do both of these things. Well, I guess all three of these things, cutting maintenance and bulking, because if you want to make long-term progress, there’s going to be a time and a place for each of them.
Now, if you are someone who has spent a lot of time weight training without thinking about these things and just naturally kind of been bulking or maintaining and gained enough muscle to feel pretty good about it, then yeah, maybe all you need to know is maintaining or cutting and maintaining because sometimes it slips and then you get back to, to where you want to be. But for the most part, people are going to need to know how, how to do all three of those things. And hopefully this video today gave you an idea how to do those things effectively and without too many drawbacks.
Unfortunately, there are going to be some drawbacks of each thing, no matter how you do them, but we don’t have to risk the most extreme of drawbacks. As long as we’re staying kind of within the safety zone, which I would say is somewhere around maintenance, right? It’s within a bounds of maintenance that makes sense for you, where you’re not experiencing the extremes of too little calories, too many calories, because there are going to be drawbacks the farther away from maintenance we go. So if you want to play it safe, just start by turning up the calories, turning down the calories a couple hundred, see how that feels, see how that affects your body weight and your body composition.
You can lean in a little bit more if it feels good. You could stay right there if you need to, and you can take breaks of maintenance whenever you need to. All right.
I hope this was helpful. Again, I’m coach Sawyer at Vegan Proteins. If you’re interested in our coaching one-on-one, go ahead and check out veganproteins.com. Also comment below if you have any questions for us, or if you have any nuances you want to add to this conversation, I’ll be checking those out for sure.
All right. Have a good one guys.
