Bulk & Cut or maintaining for long term progress

Nutrition Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello BBM Crew,

I am a 26 year old male, who has been lifting for just over 2 years (corona lockdown included) for every main lift except the squat. These are my specs.

Lifts:
Press 67.5 kg
Squat 152.5 kg
Bench 95 kg
Deadlift 205 kg

Personal:
183cm tall
81.5-82.5 kg
I would guess around 17-18% body fat

My question is whether or not I can make progress in both hypertrophy and strength while maintaining weight. I was watching the video on YT where Austin and Jordan is talking about bulk/cut and says something along the lines of “I just don’t see how you are going to get around it”.

Even if strength was the only goal, then I guess long term hypertrophy gain would also have be considered.

But then when I was looking through the forums for similar questions I found this thread:
https://forum.barbellmedicine.com/forums/nutrition-q-a-with-dr-jordan-feigenbaum/70574-intermediate-lifter-can-i-just-maintain-weight
His goals and specs seem similar to mine and it would seem like maintaining could work for him given Austin comment.

And generally when looking online for information about this topic, there seem to be a lot of different and sometimes contradicting advice.

In your programming podcast you talk about becomming more resistant to training as your training age increases, does this mean that you can keep your body fat constant while making strength and hypertrophy progress up to a point, but later you would have to eat in a surplus given that you are “too resistant” to make progress on lower calories ?

So if I would like to make optimal strength/hypertrophy gains in the next 5 years, could this be done while maintaining my bodyfat ? I am somewhat avers to bulk/cutting given personal preferences.

Regards Jakob KJ

2

Jakob,

I can’t tell you what will be optimal for anything in the next 5 years training or nutrition-wise outside of some vague generalities. It is highly unlikely that your body fat won’t change over the time though and that would not be a goal I would have for you. Training age has nothing to do with body fat either.

As far as what you should do right now, that depends on your personal short- and medium-term goals in addition to your waist circumference, health status, etc.

Also, may I ask why you aren’t squatting?

-Jordan

3

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for your reply.

I am squatting now, when I first started out training I was not able to for 8 months due to having pain when extending my knee (due to trying to squat too much), the pain is gone and I have been squatting for the past 1½ year. It took so long since then I was under the impression that if it hurts then I should just let it rest, it was first when I heard Austin talk about graded exposure to provocative positions and I started squatting slowly again that the pain disappeared, so I wanted to give a huge thanks for that information.

About body fat and training age, thanks for that clarification. Regarding the maintance periods in between bulking/cutting, how long would you say those should be ?

Regards Jakob KJ

4

It really depends on the person, but I don’t think it needs to be longer than ~3-4 weeks to transition from gaining weight to weight loss. Probably more important to do a longer maintenance phase after weight loss.

5

Thank you for your replies Jordan, I got my answer.

Jakob KJ