What’s up, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj www.SeanNal.com-www.BodyTransformationTruth.com and in this video here I’m going to be explaining
how to properly transition from cutting to bulking once your fatloss phase is over and
you’re ready to start building some more muscle.
This is something that a lot of lifters don’t do properly.
The main consequence being that they end up putting on excessive amount of unwanted bodyfat
during that cut to bulk transition.
If you’ve put in the hard work and the discipline to carry out a complete cutting phase right
to the end, you’ve dropped a good amount of fat and reached your goal in terms of overall
leanness then you’ll want to make sure that you handle this post dieting period with care
so that you don’t end up regressing and erasing the progress that you’ve made.
So, how do you properly transition from cutting to bulking while keeping bodyfat gains under
control?
First and foremost, if you’re serious about doing this the right way then it’s very
important that you do have a concrete post diet plan in place.
The reason being is that if you’ve been in a calorie deficit over a prolong period
of time, you just start eating on instinct as soon as your cut is over, based purely
on hunger and cravings, you’re pretty much guaranteed to go overboard on total calories.
Remember that your body is really just a survival machine when it all comes down to it.
It’s still programmed for a time when food was scarce and it doesn’t care about your
desire for lean abs or, you know, delt arms separation.
As far as your body is concerned, an ongoing calorie deficit is basically equal to famine,
so as you remain in that deficit for longer periods of time it will start making hormonal
adjustments both to conserve energy and to motivate you to find food and eat.
So , important hormones that regulate your hunger and fatloss like leptin, testosterone,
T3, those will all decrease and you’ll also experienced a drop in what is called Non-exercise
Activity Thermogenesis or NEAT, for short.
And that basically refers to all the small actions that you take throughout the day that
you probably don’t even think about.
So things like, fidgeting in your seat, tapping your fingers, small head movements, and you
might think that those little movements don’t really count for anything but the calories
burned from NEAT can pretty easily add up to several hundred calories or more per day.
But the bottom line is that once your cut is over your appetite and cravings will be
at their highest and your body will be physically primed for maximum fat storage at the same
time.
And so that’s why eating purely on instinct can very easily lead to large amounts of fat
gain over the course a few weeks and months.
And it’s also why so many people end up regaining the weight that they’d lost on
their initial diet.
Now, when it comes to transitioning from cutting to bulking, this usually gets exaggerated
even further because people will justify eating those large amount of calories by saying that,
you know, since they’re bulking now their body needs all of that extra food.
However, the reality is that it only takes a small surplus of a few hundred extra calories
at most to maximize how much muscle your body can build in a given day, and so any calories
that you’ve taken beyond that point are just going to be stored as fat.
Now, if you’re going really high on calories just for a couple days to reward yourself
after your cut is over then that’s not going to do you much harm as long as it doesn’t
spiral out of control.
But all in all, the underlying approach of your cut to bulk transition is to make sure
you increase your calories in controlled amounts so that you can move back to your calorie
maintenance level and into a surplus without going overboard.
Now, in terms of actually doing that, a lot of people will recommend what’s called reverse
dieting, which is basically a method of increasing your calories in small increments from week-to-week
until you get back to your calorie maintenance level.
Reverse dieting does seem to make sense at first glance.
It’s something that I used to do as well.
It can work fine for some people but for the vast majority of trainees it’s just not
going to be necessary.
I mean, if you’ve reached your desired level of leanness and you’re not aiming to lose
any more fat then it doesn’t really make sense to only increase your calories by, say
five percent because doing that would actually keep you in a nett calorie deficit during
that time, which means you’re going to keep losing fat to a certain degree and you’re
also just prolonging the amount of time that it’s going to take to get your metabolism
re-elevated and your hormones and your appetite back in balance.
So instead of slow drawn out reverse dieting, a better approach is to just move straight
from your deficit right back to your calorie maintenance level as quickly as you can.
Remember that your maintenance calories are what it takes to maintain your current weight.
And so you’re not going to magically gain fat by doing that.
However, the key thing to understand here, and this is the big mistake that most people
make when they transition from cutting to bulking, is that your calorie maintenance
level at the end of your cut is not the same as it was at the beginning of your cut.
Your overall bodyweight is obviously going to be lower after you’ve finished cutting
and your metabolism has adapted to a certain degree and so your maintenance level is also
going to be lower as a result of that.
You know, a lot of people will start off with a maintenance level of, say three thousand
calories, they start their cut at twenty-five hundred calories, they end off at two thousand
and then they immediately jump right back to three thousand calories, or they might
even go and add in a few hundred more on top of that because they’re trying to create
an extra surplus for muscle growth.
When it reality, their actual maintenance level might be more like twenty-five hundred
calories rather than three thousand and their calories from muscle growth at that point
might be more like twenty-eight hundred calories rather than, say thirty-three hundred.
So, there’s no perfect way to know precisely what you’re exact maintenance calories are
going to be after your cut is over.
It’s not going to be a hundred percent dead on but a good way to estimate it, assuming
you’ve cut down to maybe twelve percent bodyfat give or take as a male or about twenty
percent give or take as a female, and I don’t recommend committing to a full on bulk unless
you’re somewhere around that level anyway.
So if you are much above that, you’ll probably want to lean down first but if you have gotten
down to around that level then a basic body weight multiplier should work fine.
I’ve typically recommended that people multiply their bodyweight in pounds by fourteen to
sixteen and if you take into account some of those metabolic adaptation that are going
to occur at the end of a cut, you can just go with the lower end of fourteen to be safe.
So just take your bodyweight in pounds, multiply it by fourteen and then treat that as your
approximate new calorie maintenance level.
Another method you can use is your rate of weight loss instead.
So if at the end of your cut you’re losing about a pound per week, which would be pretty
standard, that should represent about a five hundred calorie deficit, in which case you
can just go ahead and add back in five hundred calories to put yourself around your maintenance
level.
Again, these calculations are never going to be perfect and being off by a bit isn’t
a big deal, but this should put you around the right level.
So, now that you’ve gone from a calorie deficit to around your calorie maintenance
level you are likely going to see a small amount of immediate weight gain.
But keep in mind that as long as you’ve only made a moderate increase to your calories
using one of those methods that I just gave, this isn’t going to be the result of fat
gain but it’s just going to be from increases in glycogen levels, water weight and just
from having more food in your system in general.
But give that a few days to fully kick in and then from there just watch your overall
bodyweight and see what happens.
If it stabilizes at that point then you’ll know that you’ve hit your current calorie
maintenance level and you can just move right into your calorie surplus from there.
Or if you’re still losing weight then you’ll want to increase your calories further until
your weight does stabilize.
So, maybe add in another hundred calories or so, give it five days, add another hundred
and just continue until you hit that stabilization point.
In terms of your actual calorie surplus, anywhere form about two hundred to three hundred and
fifty above maintenance per day that’s going to be a good figure for a lean bulk.
Beginners can go with a higher end, since they’re going to have the highest muscle
building potential and more intermediate trainees can use the lower end.
And if you’re a advance trainee then I’d go even lower, maybe around one hundred to
one hundred and fifty per day on average since muscle growth will be happening quite slowly
at that point.
But that’s really all there is to it, guys.
Estimate your new calorie maintenance level once our cut has ended, find the intake that
stabilizes you weight and then move into a calorie surplus for lean bulking.
There’s no need to turn this onto a super long, drawn out process.
Your basic goal is to just get back maintenance and into a surplus as quickly as you can but
to do it a controlled manner.
Also keep in mind that once your calories go back up and your hormone levels get back
into balance your actual metabolic rate will increase as well.
And so even though your maintenance calories or your calorie surplus target might seem
a bit low at the very end of the cut, it will start o gradually increased and you should
be able to steadily eat more food without actually gaining bodyfat.
And lastly, also keep in mind that some bodyfat gain is inevitable when you’re moving from
cutting to bulking.
It’s just part of the process.
So it isn’t going to be perfect, especially if you had cut down to a very lean bodyfat
percentage.
But the main thing here is to just minimize it rather than going all out like so many
people do after their diet ends.
Achieving significant fatloss is a tough process that requires self control and discipline
and the lasting you want to do is go ahead and throw all that effort down the drain by
just binge-ing once your cut is over because that’s a very common thing that you will
see unfortunately.
So I hope this was helpful.
If you do want to grab a complete step-by-step plan that shows you how to lay out a complete
bulking or cutting phase from A to Z.
The workouts, the meal plans, supplement guides and one-on-one coaching then you can check
out my Body Transformation Blueprint by clicking here or by visiting www.BodyTransformationTruth.com
the link is in the description box.
Make sure to follow me social media here, the links for that are also in the description.
The official website is www.SeanNal.com and if you did enjoy the video make sure to hit
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Thanks again for watching, guys.
And I’ll talk to you again soon.