What's going on, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj at www.SeanNal.com and last week I put up a video discussing how to track
progress during a bulking phase.
I’ll link that in the description box if you missed it. and today I’ll be going over
the other side of the equation by discussing how to track your progress during a cutting
phase so that you an maximize your rate of fatloss while maintaining lean muscle and
strength, possibly even gaining some, while also keeping your hunger levels and your energy
levels under control to make sure that you're actually able to stick to your cutting plan
over the long term.
There are actually a lot of similarities between tracking progress for bulking as well as for
cutting.
The same basic metrics are going to be used for both.
The two most important ones to pay attention to are your changes in bodyweight and strength,
and then you can use progress photos, measurements and optionally bodyfat percentage readings
to get some extra information that you can go by.
So, starting with bodyweight, a standard rate of overall weight loss to aim for during a
cutting cycle for most people is going to be between one to two pounds per week.
The vast majority, if not all of that, will be in the form of bodyfat if you're doing
everything in your program correctly.
You might see a faster initial drop of about three or four pounds in the first week or
so while your body flushes out excess water retention, glycogen levels go down a bit,
just the overall food volume in your system decreases, but it should stabilize somewhere
in that one to two pound range after that.
If you're carrying a more moderate amount of bodyfat, say, below about twenty percent
for men and about twenty eight percent for women, then you'll probably be closer to the
one to one and a half pound per week range.
Because as you get leaner it does become more difficult to loose bodyfat, and if you're
more on the overweight side then a full two pounds would be possible, sometimes even up
to around three pounds if you're significantly overweight.
At least in the beginning stages of your program.
But that would be fairly rare and for most people it’s going to land somewhere between
one to two pounds per week.
So to track this, you'll want to weigh yourself on a digital scale first thing in the morning
before eating and after using the washroom.
It’s important to keep the reading as consistent as possible each time and then compare your
average weight for the week to your average weight for the previous week.
Because, keep in mind that your weight can fluctuate up and down quite a bit between
any two individual days.
And like I’d mention in the bulking video, you don’t necessarily have to weight yourself
every single day, but at least every two to three days would be ideal.
So as long as you're landing somewhere within that one to two pound range on a consistent
basis then you'll know that you have a proper calorie deficit in place for fatloss and you
can just continue on with your current approach until or unless your bodyweight plateaus.
Now, if your bodyweight is decreasing at less than one pound per week, or if it’s completely
stagnant altogether, then that’s going to indicate that either your calorie deficit
is too small or you don’t even have a calorie deficit in place at all.
And that would happen either because you’ve set your daily calorie intake too high or
your intake is set at the proper level but you're accidently overshooting that number
without even realizing it.
So the first thing that I would recommend doing in this situation would be to conduct
what I would call a dietary audit.
That’s basically where you go through your entire diet piece by piece, making sure to
properly track every single item you're consuming.
Every meal, every snack, every drink, cheat meal, everything, without skipping over anything
and that’s going to let you see what your calorie intake is truly set at.
In most cases, in my experience, when people say that they can't lose fat even though they're
following a low calorie diet, they’re actually consuming far more calories throughout the
week than they realize.
This is an extremely common thing.
When you're in a cutting phase you hunger levels are automatically going to increase.
It’s a normal part of the process.
It’s something to expect.
But that’s going to make it a lot more likely that you'll unconsciously over eat.
And when you consider that a standard calorie deficit for fatloss is usually only going
to be about three hundred and fifty to five hundred calories below maintenance in most
cases, all that it really takes is a few errors throughout the day and the week to either
hugely reduce your calorie deficit or eliminate it altogether.
And also remember that it’s your average calorie intake for the week as a whole that
truly matters rather than your intake between individual days.
For example, if you ate five hundred calories below maintenance from Monday to Friday, that’s
going to be twenty-five hundred calories below maintenance in total; but then you when and
ate an extra thousand calories above maintenance on Saturday and Sunday as a way to reward
yourself, most of you deficit will have gone to waste for the week.
So, if after auditing your diet, it turns out that you weren’t actually hitting your
calorie target as closely as you thought then you'll just need to be more diligent with
your dietary tracking form thereon out.
So start weighing out your food to the scale to make sure that all of the measurements
are being done correctly and make sure that every single food and drink item is being
accounted for during the day and during the week.
And any extra cheat meals or cheat days, everything that’s included is being counted toward
your calorie total as well.
On the other hand, if it turns out that you really have been consuming the calorie total
that you’ve planned to eat then that just means that the actual calorie target itself
is too high and that it doesn’t represent a true calorie deficit for you.
So in that case you'll want to decrease your daily intake in increments of about a hundred
to a hundred and fifty calories every five to seven days or so until you're consistently
landing in that one to two pound per week weight loss range.
And if your weight plateaus again in the future, just apply that same process again.
Also keep in mind that in addition to adjusting your calorie intake in order to create a proper
calorie deficit, the other option is to increase your calorie expenditure.
Because calories in versus calories out, is the ultimate bottom-line here.
So performing some additional activity during the week, whether it’s an extra cardio session,
maybe some additional walking throughout the day, or just any form of physical activity
in general, that’s another route that you can go to.
Especially if you aren’t that active outside of weight training.
And doing a combination of both at the same time, eating a bit less and moving a bit more,
that’s an option, too.
It obviously takes a bigger time and energy investment to actively burn more calories
as opposed to just consuming less, so adjusting your intake is usually the more efficient
route and it’s the easier one to track as well, but if you’ve hit a point where you
don’t want to drop your food intake any lower; and this would especially apply if
you're in the later stages of the cut and you're already eating at a fairly low calorie
level, then you can go ahead and create the additional deficit through exercise instead.
So that covers what to do if your bodyweight is decreasing at too slow of pace and if it’s
dropping at too quick of pace then it’s basically just going to be the opposite approach.
It would mean that your overall calorie deficit is too large and you’d want to increase
your calorie intake or decrease your calorie expenditure or do a combination of both to
get yourself back down to the proper level.
Keep in mind, though, that if you are losing more than two pounds per week but you feel
fine in terms of your hunger, your energy and your strength in the gym isn’t dropping,
then you should be fine for the time being.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using a slightly more aggressive deficit, at least
in the short term, but if hunger is an issue for you or you're feeling really physically
drained then you'll definitely want to decrease the size of your overall calorie deficit to
help and offset that.
And one other situation that you could find yourself in is where your bodyweight is decreasing
at a slower pace but you're clearly seeing improvements in body composition from week
to week regardless of that.
So maybe you're only losing half a pound per week but your waist measurement is consistently
going down, your clothes are fitting better and you levels of visible muscle definition
are clearly improving from week to week.
If that’s the case, then there's a good chance that you're actually re-compositioning,
which means that you are losing fat but you're also gaining some additional muscle mass at
the same time.
So you're body is breaking down its fat stores but it’s using those calories to build muscle.
In which case, your overall bodyweight won’t change as significantly as somebody who’s
mainly just losing bodyfat alone.
If you do find yourself in that situation, which basically is the most favorable situation
you could hope for during a cutting phase, then you can just leave your nutrition and
your training as is for the time being.
Just keep doing what you're doing and use the other progress tracking methods that I’ll
talk about here in a second to gauge your results and only adjust your calories or your
cardio if those other metric starts to plateau.
So on that note, aside from your bodyweight, the other main progress tracking factor to
pay attention to during a cut is your strength in the gym.
Obviously the main goal of a cutting phase is to lose bodyfat but maintaining muscle
or possibly even gaining some muscles that should also be a primary goal as well.
And the single best way to determine if you’re doing this successfully is to monitor your
changes in strength.
The bottom-line is that if your strength numbers in the gym are continuing to increase form
week to week, or at the very least they're staying the same, and the rest of your program
is otherwise properly structured in terms of your training and your nutrition, then
you can be pretty sure that the vast majority, if not all, of your weight loss is coming
in the form of bodyfat and that you aren’t losing muscle throughout the process.
You're usually not going to gain strength in the same degree while cutting as you would
during a bulk, but you should still be aiming for progressive overload as the best you can
regardless.
And clear strength losses should only be happening during more prolonged cutting phases where
you're dropping a large amount of bodyweight or where you're cutting to a very lean bodyfat
percentage.
And even then it still shouldn’t fall much beyond, maybe, a couple reps for smaller isolation
lifts and a very slight reduction in weight on those larger compound movements.
So as we talked about in the bulking video last week, your training logbook should be
given full attention as a progress tracking tool.
You should be recording all of your exercises, weights, sets and reps for each session, and
that you should be striving to improve on those numbers whenever possible or at least
maintain them as a minimum.
And if your strength is noticeably dropping throughout your cut even though you're continuing
to train with sufficient intensity; as I talked about before, roughly one to two reps short
of muscular failure on most sets, then that could mean a few things.
Either your overall calorie deficit is too large; your calorie intake is set too low
or you're performing too much extra cardio for the week, or a combination of both, your
macro nutrient intake could be out of balance, like if you're heavily restricting carbs or
you're not getting enough protein or fat; another possibility is you might need to reduce
your overall training volume or frequency, since you might be having issues with the
recovery if you're eating in a calorie deficit but you're still on the higher end of the
scale in terms of total training workload.
So in that case, you could try cutting back on the total number of weight training workouts
that you're doing per week; so that could mean going from five workouts down to four
or four down to three, or you could also cut back on the actual volume per session in terms
of total sets.
Usually twenty to twenty-five percent reduction is a good place to start.
So, those are the two most important things to look at in terms of tracking progress during
a cutting phase.
Your rate of overall weight loss and your strength levels in the gym.
If those two factors are on the right track then you'll pretty much know for the most
part that your cut is moving along successfully.
You're dropping fat at a significant pace and you're maintaining lean mass at the same
time or possibly even gaining some.
And then beyond that to fine-tuned things further, you can also add progress photos
into the mix, like we talked about in the last video.
So you can take those once every two to four weeks first thing in the morning using the
same lighting and angles each time. and then you can also take body part measurements as
well, the standard areas for that are going to be your neck, your chest, your upper arm,
your forearm, thighs, calves and the most important one during a cut is going to be
your waist line.
And photos and measurements become especially important in the case of recomposition because
they let you see how your levels of leanness and muscularity are changing even though your
body weight might be going down at the slower pace.
And then lastly, of course, are bodyfat percentage readings.
And the main reason why you want to know your bodyfat percentage is because that going to
help you determine how much of your weight loss is coming from fat versus lean mass.
But as we just talked about, you can pretty easily determine this without actually needing
to measure your precise bodyfat level.
You can do it by just looking at your overall rate of weight loss, your changes in strength,
your measurements and your pictures.
And then on top of that, getting accurate bodyfat readings is really difficult to do
in the first place.
There's usually a pretty big margin for error involved and if you are getting incorrect
or inconsistent reading, it could potentially throw your program off track.
Maybe the readings are telling you that your bodyfat is stagnating when in fact it actually
is decreasing or that it’s decreasing when it’s actually not.
And that could affect how you carry out your program moving forward.
So I would say, in most cases, tracking your precise bodyfat isn’t really necessary but
if you do have a method in place that can give you consistent readings, maybe a scale
or properly used calipers or even a dexa-scan, then you can optionally use those to track
the relative from week to week, but just don’t put too much stock in the objective reading
itself because it can easily be off by several percent in most cases.
So just use it to give you a bit of additional insight into your overall cutting progress.
And depending on the size of calorie deficit, I would say somewhere around one percent bodyfat
being lost every one to two weeks, that would be about right.
So, that covers the topic of a proper progress tracking during a cutting phase.
Hope you guys find this helpful.
If you do want to grab a complete step-by-step fatloss program to actually apply these methods,
too, that will maximize your overall rate of progress including the workouts, meal plans,
and supplement guides, all laid out in a fully structured step-by-step manner that you can
follow, then you can check out my Body Transformation Blueprint by clicking here or by heading over
to www.BTBluePrint.com suing the link in the description box.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
I’ll see you in the next video.