Hi,
Thank you again for all the time and resources you put into this community.
I’m a 27 year old male, 179cm and at the moment weigh just above 70kg.
Despite my height I have a narrow frame and lots of abdominal fat with a waist around 34.5’.
Below is an overview of my training/nutritional background through the years and some questions.
Training/Nutritional Background
until 2015:
lightly active life, ocassional cardio sports (tennis/soccer/running), eating home cooked food most of the time (thank you mom)
2015-2018:
eating tons of junk (fast food, sweets, processed stuff like frozen pizza) during college and yoyo dieting/light cardio for 2-3 months at a time to keep it in check.
Gained weight but nothing extreme (top was ~75kg, lowest ~67kg), overall got stuck with a lot of abdominal fat during this period despite keeping weight more or less in check.
2018-2020:
I started working and stress/lack of time to cook led to overeating takeaway while being completely sedentary, gained a lot of weight to 83 kg and almost 37’ waist in early 2020
2020-2021:
Started the at home template in summer 2020 for around 6-8 months (not very effective due to being stuck with 2x10 kg dumbbells).
With the help of the template and carefully measuring calories I went down to ~67 kg and 33’ waist in early 2021.
2021-2022:
took break from all exercising, still ate moderately maintaining weight between 67-69 kg and waist around 33’-34’
nov 2022-present:
november 2022 I started barbell training for the first time with the beginner template for ~8 weeks (repeating week4 4 times), then took a 3 week break due to a really bad flu.
Afterwards I felt really weak and re-started with the first phase instead of moving to the 2nd in the template, re-doing week 4 for another 8 weeks, the final 5 weeks being more or less a plateau.
After these 16 weeks I had the below results and some modest muscle development:
Bench e1RM: 100lbs → 150lbs
Squat e1RM: 100lbs → 150lbs
DL e1RM: 140lbs → 230 lbs
After doing the beginner template for so long I took the mostly emotional decision to move to the Hypertrophy I template which I’ve been doing for the past 7 weeks. I have seen some more muscle development, but with numbers plateauing to values similar to those above. Starting at ~68kg in january and eating around/slighly above maintenance, I am now ~70 kg with a waist size of 34.5’.
Actual Questions
1. Do I cut, maintain or bulk considering my waist size?
I would like to be bigger and stronger ™, but I feel like I’m progressing very very slowly towards either of those goals, so I would like to bulk, but at the same time my health is the top priority and my understanding is I am quite close to the cutoff point waist-size wise.
2. Have I made a mistake moving on to Hypertrophy I so early? Should I return to beginner template phase 2 instead?
3. Is my progress normal? I feel really weak based on my numbers.
I feel like I should be stronger after almost 6 months of lifting, but my numbers are not that far off my numbers 3 months ago and this is taking a toll mentally. I believe genetics play a role into this: narrow frame, small wrists, long hands, as well as having never trained or done any strength adjacent sports until now. I am just wondering if I should treat it more as “I am failing at programming” or “this is a a normal progression for someone with my history/genetics and I need to give it time”.
Sorry for the wall of text, I am at a bit of an impasse.
Thank you!