I’m a non-athletic guy that has been training since last summer. I did the huge mistake of gaining gross amounts of weight in a short period of time (thanks Rippetoe!!) and I just got fat and bloated. Upped my weight from 75kg to 95kg. Realized my mistake earlier this spring, and started to cut weight. I’m down from 91kg to 81.7kg since early July and I feel much better. I eat 1800-2000 calories and I still lose weight. I want to reach 78-79kg and maintain that weight and lean out and slowly add muscle mass again. I’m 5’10".
I’ve been doing the 12 week program and my goal was to maintain my strength and lose fat. It worked good week 1-7, but since I started week 8 my 1rm’s are slowly declining! The drop in volume and increased intensity just feels horrible, especially mentally. I was supposed to squat 3 reps @89% but my knees were caving in and my form broke down completely and it felt like shit!
I think the stress is inappropriate: I don’t have the energy to grind out heavy reps ; I need the practice/hypertrophy from higher volume to keep the muscle mass.
So I need some guidance here! Do I abort the “peaking weeks” of the 12 week program, and just start at week 1 again? I should reach 78-79kg BW within 2 weeks and after that I will increase calories to maintenance and hopefully start to gain strength.
Any input/advice on what I should do next is much appreciated, thanks.
It’s not recommended you run 12 wk strength on that large of a deficit. That said, if you had a good response on the first half, I don’t see the harm in rerunning it and seeing what happens.
But yes – it’s generally accepted that on a cut volume needs to go up and intensity down to get the “right” amount of work/stress in with a caloric deficit. If you really like the 4 day setup and want to run a program actually MEANT for your situation, I’d considering purchasing the new 4 day hypertrophy. I’m running the 3 day right now on a large deficit and seeing decent results.
Yes that seems very obvious now. The low volume totally screwed me up this time. Thanks.
I’m almost done with the weight loss so I think I’m gonna restart the 12 wk and eat maintenance calories. I also think I’m gonna add an additional set to the squat when the workload is only at 70-75% because I feel like my responsiveness to training is a little bit under average.
I would finish the 12 week program and I suggest eating at maintenance using the Muller equation for calories (https://tdeecalculator.net/). The Muller equation one of the more recent equations and tries to correct for errors in prior equations. This will help your body find a reset body fat/weight point. It is a thing Mike Israetel and Layne Norton like to use as does Eric Helms (who did a study on his PhD with it), both in dieting down or bulking up. Diet or bulk for a set number of weeks, say 6 to 8, then eat at maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks, then continue the diet/bulk.
In your situation it would work well. You have dieted for 7 or 8 weeks, now eat at maintenance for 4 or 5 weeks or whatever is left. Then diet again for another bunch of weeks and then eat at your new maintenance again for a few weeks.
Remember to re-calculate your dieting calories and maintenance calories at the start of each phase as your maintenance calories will change as you lose weight, as will your dieting calories.
That’s the equation I used before and it helped me estimate my tdee pretty accurately. Gonna use it again and try maintenance calories now. I’m going to try the approach you’re talking about (maintenance cycling). I feel like shit now mentally and I think about food 24/7.
About restarting 12wk or not: I just haven’t had any success these last 2 weeks with the high intensity because my form suffers badly. Knees are caving like crazy now and I’ve always sucked at grinding reps. Probably would help to eat more but I don’t care about peaking or testing my maxes.
So I still think I’m going to restart the 12wk, and just add a little more volume than last time around. I would argue that it’s actually more important to eat at maintenance or surplus during the developmental period (first 7 weeks or so), because that’s where the hypertrophy occurs. So I think I’m gonna try maintenance during these 7 weeks, then a slight deficit when the volume drops.
I think just remember that the consistent consensus is that you can’t gain significant muscle and lose weight simultaneously. I did the same thing, got too far during a phase and had to cut way, way back. Basically I cut 100 calories out of my diet every other week for a couple months, gradually relearning what volume of food is appropriate. SInce then I did the opposite, except took larger steps. This cuts out any differences between my body and the model that should be viewed as a guideline, really.
The other thing is, I don’t think you should really feel like you’re grinding out anything. I’ve been progression through 12 week and making consistent progress and nothing really ever feels grindy (other than the tempo squats.) If you restart 12wk and don’t do a calory surplus, you won’t build the necessary muscle to continue realizing gains and will slide backwards as your body consumes muscle to makeup for the surplus. Go to a surplus and just weigh yourself often, if you start gaining too quickly you just adjust what you eat the next couple days.
Yeah I agree with Teddy, that if you want to peak you should increase to maintenance for the remainder of the program. You can always go back down into the deficit on your next phase. In The Scientific Principles of Strength Training Dr. Mike I and Chad Wesley Smith state that in a peaking block you should ideally maintain weight, as changes in weight can effect your leverages, which will result in a less effective specialization phase. If you want to continue to lose and don’t care as much about testing, I would check out the hypertrophy templates, as those templates are a bit more ideal for a cutting phase than 12WS. As far as bailing on the program and restarting at maintenance, what are you trying to accomplish in doing this? What are your exact long term goals in order of priority? I would really need to know the answer to those two questions to be able to weight on whether that is a plan that would help to those ends.
Well, during the first 7 weeks of the program I lost 20lbs while maintaining my strength. To me, this sounds like I did it correctly and mostly lost fat and kept muscle mass. This is the argument for adding the volume back in, aka restarting at week 1 again instead of peaking and testing my max (which I really don’t care about at this time).
When I started on week 8-9, and lowered the volume/frequency drastically, I started to slowly lose strength so why would I keep doing something that which is making things worse for me? I think this was unproductive stress and I started to get detrained.
Now I have pretty much reached my desired weight of 175-180lbs. My goal is to get stronger while not getting fat again.
Ok, painted in that context I do think this makes sense. Since you’ve reached your desired leanness, why only maintain weight? A slow and steady weight gain might be worth considering. If you do decide to go that route, I still think that running one of the hypertrophy templates might still be beneficial, since you are already pretty deep into a development block. A bit more drastic change of variables might prove beneficial, as well as help to stimulate some hypertrophy which if followed up immediately by running the 12 week strength template again could lead to more results. Just a little food for thought.
And yes, I would agree that substantially lowering volume while in a caloric deficit is not a good recipe, and I think that your suspicions are definitely correct there.
