Caloric goal for beginning my training journey?

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The background:

29m, 6’5” @ 230lbs. I have never had any serious or structured training in my life, and never been very athletic or active, other than working moderately physical jobs most of the last 11 years.

I have spent the past 11 weeks running body building style splits with a pair of adjustable dumbbells, a bench, and some resistance bands 4 times per week. I have cut my weight from around 255 to my current 230, incorporating a lot of LISS cardio via walking, and fairly high intensity outdoor cycling of about 1-2 hours total time weekly.

I now have a complete rack and barbell/weight setup, and I am very excited to jump into the BBM beginner program after a couple of weeks doing 5x5’s working on form with the big lifts.

My confusion and my question is about my particular nutritional starting point. I have been cutting for 11-12 weeks fairly aggressively. I feel and perform a lot better overall and am definitely thrilled with that. Coming into a true beginner program has me excited and wanting to start getting strong for the first time in my life, and set things in motion for the ‘long game’ of lifting from here on out. It is hard to come by information/recommendations for someone of my height though, and I’m ultimately wondering if I should be aiming to stay roughly at maintenance throughout this beginner program, or even continue cutting at a more moderate deficit than I have been. I didn’t measure my waist at the beginning of my cut, but after watching the BMI/waist correlation video with Jordan this week I measured properly and my waist is 39-39.5”.

Based on as many podcasts as I’ve been able to listen to and many articles read, it seems as though the recommendation for me would be to stick at maintenance, and I’m just looking for some input from the community and or BBM themselves as to whether this will best suit my starting point, or if I should cut lower.

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Assuming dietary RPE isn’t too high I think you should continue to cut at least until your waist circumference is under 34"

There are probably health benefits to having a waist circumference under 34" and it indicates a decent body compositiion for aesthetics and weight class sports.

Maintaining weight and decreasing waist circumference is a reasonable expection if your training is about to get a lot more effective, but I think that dropping 5" on your waist is going to require cutting.

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Hey Remm! Welcome to the BBM side of life, here’s an article from Dr. Feigenbaum that helped me cut from 230 as well as gain some of it back.

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@Remmi91 First, congratulations on the progress you’ve made so far. I was in a similar situation a few years ago. Second, I’ll second IanES’ recommendation to read the “To Be A Beast” article. It’s a great starting point for learning about nutrition. Nutrition and recovery are just as important as programming in the long run to make sustainable progress.

While you probably won’t have to track macros and calories forever, establishing a baseline and good habits will be helpful in the long term. There are several apps that are helpful for tracking. Lots of folks use My Fitness Pal or Gravitas, among others. The To Be A Beast article can give you a good idea of how to set your macros. As for overall calories, I’ve found this tool that Jordan recommends to be helpful: Body Weight Planner - NIDDK

I’d start by just tracking for three weeks to collect data. For consistency and at risk of TMI, I weight myself every morning immediately after I void and before I eat or drink anything. Once you’ve collected a few weeks of data, you’ll be in a good situation to figure out your maintenance calories and then plan from there.

The next step would be to establish a reasonable deficit. Aggressive cutting is ok for brief periods. But isn’t a good idea long term as it can impair your progress. Ideally, set a deficit between 200 and 500 daily calories and be consistent.

Consistency is the key. Slow and steady wins the race. If diet fatigue (diet RPE) gets to be an issue, what has really helped me is to take diet breaks and/or refeeds. So I will run 5 days of deficit followed by 2 days at maintenance calories. Another option is to run 4 or 5 weeks in a deficit and then 1 week at maintenance. Overall, the trend is still a deficit but it’s a bit easier to adhere to. For me, it’s helpful to think of calories in a weekly chunk instead of daily. So it gives me some flexibility but keeps me on track too. Also, I found eating four smaller meals a day easier to adhere to than three. But you do what works best for you.

Enjoy the Beginner Template! I ran it last winter following three years of spinning my wheels and making little progress on other programs. I ran every week of it. All three phases. I thought it as a lot of fun and made good progress. It’s a well designed program. Just enough variety to keep things interesting. Nice blend of strength and hypertrophy.

Do yourself a favor and do the GPP work. Yes, the template says it’s optional. But it will help you in the long run – especially the conditioning. When you start, you can do the GPP work after the lifts during phase 1. I found going to separate days necessary by phase 2. Otherwise, the workouts were pushing 2 hours. I do the conditioning work on separate days too. So Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I lift. Tuesday and Saturday I do GPP. Thursday and Sunday I do conditioning. (HIIT or LISS. Whatever the template says.) In addition, I do a 5 minute general warm up before lifting and GPP sessions. Skipping rope is my go-to. On my non-conditioning days, I try to get as many steps in as I can. Start with something easily achievable and titrate up from there. Usually this means I take a 20 or 30 minute brisk walk in the morning and/or the evening. Shorter training sessions work better for me. By the time you get to phase 3, I’d plan for lifting sessions to take about 100 minutes unless you can superset. (I train at home too. I only have one barbell. The one I want to add is always out of stock.)

Good programming and good nutrition will keep you on the gainzZz train. Don’t forget to make sleep a priority too. Recovery is the third leg of the stool, and often unappreciated. Once you get all three in place and are consistent, long term, sustainable progress will happen. A little patience helps too.

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I’m very new to this as well but I second the GPP recommendation, the more consist I have been with it the more stable more weight has been.

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