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.