How To Lose Weight After Bulking Up

So you’ve packed on some pounds during the winter months, eating and lifting more than you ever have before. But now, summer is starting soon and you really don’t want to hit the beaches with your new flub.

With every good bulking phase comes a cut—caloric deficits, cardio, and lots of vegetables are the markers of this bodybuilding phase. However, there’s much more to cutting than just killing yourself on the treadmill and on the dinner plate.

A lot of your cutting strategy is going to come down to how you approached the bulking phase. Did you go balls to the wall in the kitchen, just trying to get as many calories into you as possible? Or did you take a more measured approach?

How To Shed Body Fat After Bulking Up

Whatever bulking decisions you made, getting shredded is entirely possible with the right plan. Avoid some common pitfalls to cutting and keep your eye on the prize, and you’ll be sporting a chiseled physique soon enough.

The bulking phase and cutting phase are important because they help you get out of plateaus, and over the long term, you’ll experience better and more consistent gains. Working out without switching things up only works well for newbies, when body composition is just beginning to change.

But for those who’ve already spent a few months training hard, the gains are going to come harder and harder. The bulking phase is done with a calorie surplus in order to let you gain more muscle along with some extra fat.

How To Lose Weight After Bulking

Often done during the winter months so the extra chub is covered in layers, cutting season follows during the summer months when temperatures are warmer, and shirts come off. Maintenance is also a phase, but it depends largely on the individual whether they want to maintain their current physique or progress.

If you’re reading this article about cutting, chances are that you’re not too interested in maintaining the weight gain from your bulking phase.

Once the gains start rolling in more slowly, it’s time to consider bulking. Normally, it’s recommended that guys only start bulking between 10 to 15% body fat percentage. This is relatively lean, and the leaner you are when you begin bulking, the more you can bulk without too much fat gain.

A Beginners Guide To Bulking And Cutting

For this reason, it’s also recommended not to bulk longer than 3 months. This will give you enough time to tweak your diet if you’re not getting the gains you expected. It’ll also give you enough time to reverse some of the negative health effects that might come with bulking.

The extra fat is mostly a superficial issue, but depending on the bulk you do, some of your blood values might fall into dangerous ranges. One example is cholesterol. However, these negative health effects aren’t permanent and can be easily reversed with a solid cutting plan and trimming excess fat.

This brings us to the next question: how did you bulk? There are two main ways to bulk, either the clean bulk or the dirty bulk. The former is focused on eating healthy foods, keeping an eye on your macros, and therefore, seriously limiting the amount of fat you gain over the months.

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The latter is exactly what it sounds like: fast food, junk food, everything is on the table. In fact, it’s often called the “see-food diet, ” since you eat whatever food you see. Obviously, the lean bulking is going to make your cut a whole lot easier.

Throw in junk food addiction and other things like increased sluggishness due to poor eating habits, and you’ve got a recipe for a very tough cut. That doesn’t mean dirty bulking isn’t without its benefits, but for most people, it’s highly recommended to do a clean bulk—or as clean as you can get it.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle and that’s entirely alright, but don’t be tempted to throw all caution to the wind during your bulk because you’re going to have to pay the price when you try to get shredded again.

Yes, You Can Lose Weight And Gain Lean Muscle At The Same Time With This Strategy

Whether you did a lean bulk or a dirty bulk it doesn’t matter. The only thing that’s certain is that now you’ve got some fat loss to take care of, and there’s a good way and a bad way to go about it. Even if you lean bulk for long enough, all the extra calories are going to add up and you’re going to slowly but surely start amassing more body fat.

The right time to start cutting will differ for most people. It’ll depend on how hard you’ve been training, what your goals are, and what your overall activity level is at. It also depends on how comfortable you are with the physique you have, and how mentally prepared you are to start cutting.

When it comes to body fat, it’s best to start cutting in the 15 to 20% body fat range. For women, it’s best to cut in the 23 to 28% body fat range. This will depend on how well your body carries weight and how much training you’ve been doing. If staying lean is important to you, then it’s best to opt for the lower end of this scale.

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However, if you know what you’re doing and you want to get as jacked as possible during your bulk, it’s best to try to max these percentages out. The end goal, after all, is to get more muscle. You don’t want to lull yourself into a false sense of security when you’re bulking, but don’t be afraid to push things further if you’re feeling good and know what you’re doing.

And of course, you need to be training hard enough to back these decisions up. Eating a ton isn’t going to get you muscles—it’s just going to get you fat. A good bulk will allow for a good cut—and then next season the process will begin once again, slowly improving your physique.

To some extent, cutting is just the opposite of bulking. You’re trying to lose some mass and get into shape again. The main point is to lose the fat, but through a calorie deficit you’re bound to lose some muscle as well (which is why it’s important to train hard and grow muscle as much as possible during the bulk).

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In many ways, it comes down to doing the exact opposite of bulking: fewer calories, clean foods (even if you’ve been lean bulking already), more cardio, lighter weights in the gym. However, some of these things aren’t necessarily true, and if they are, it’s important to keep things in mind in order to implement the cut as efficiently as possible.

One problem with the cut is that you might lose too much muscle if you go at it too quickly, with too much of a calorie restriction, or with a massive change in how you’re training. The perfect cut takes more finesse than the perfect bulk (partly due to the discussion around the lean vs. clean bulk) because you’re trying to carve out your muscles without destroying them as much as possible.

The key to a good cut is not to rushing trying to lose body fat. If you rush things, your muscles will feel the pain as much as your fat. And one of the key parts of not rushing things is also sticking to a good calorie intake.

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For most people, a caloric deficit of 10 to 25% will be optimal. For example, if you opt for a 20% deficit and your maintenance calories are at 2000 per day, you should be eating 1600 calories every day (since 20% of 2000 is 400, so you just subtract that from your maintenance).

It’s important to keep an eye on how many calories you’re eating since it’ll be easier to tweak your diet if you’re not getting the results you’ve been expecting. Going into an extreme calorie deficit will harm your gains in the gym, and will significantly harm the results of your bulk. However, calories are only part of the full diet picture.

Along with calories come the macros, and you need to make sure you’re keeping them in check. Your protein, carbohydrates, and fats are very important for maintaining your health—and yes, even fat is necessary when you’re cutting.

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Although the ratios of the macros might change when you’re dieting (to include less fat, for example), you still want to maintain healthy levels of each.

If you’ve been dirty bulking, you’re going to want to swap out the refined carbs for complex carbs such as vegetables, brown rice, legumes, and sweet potatoes. And when it comes to protein, you’ll want to be sticking to lean stuff, such as chicken and turkey. Fatty protein like fish is healthy as well, but pork fat is something you’ll want to stay away from.

This touches on another common misconception with the cut—you want to maintain healthy levels of protein intake. Once again, you’re not trying to lose fat as fast as possible because that will cut into your muscle gains in a very major way.

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Go into a calorie deficit, but don’t significantly diminish the amount of protein you include in your diet. Doing so might speed