Jordan, have you always been able to maintain visible abs as you’ve gained muscle/mass over the years?
Is there a generalized strategy for maintaining visible abs when gaining weight in an attempt to gain muscle? I’ve heard a very slow bulk on a modest surplus can help with this but I have no idea if it makes that much difference.
I don’t think I’ve always had “visible abs”, no, though this is mostly to do with body fat levels as you know. If it’s too high, the abs aren’t going to show.
I do think that weight gain should be done slowly over time and most folks should get leaner before they gain weight. Do you have visible abs right now? Is that important to you?
Thanks Jordan, I have faintly visible abs right now but they are on their way out. I do like them from an aesthetic point of view and from a “pants fitting correctly” point of view.
Last year after completing the barbell medicine beginner program, I started a weight loss phase to get my waist down from 37 inches. I dropped my weight from 190# to about 158# over the course of several months. My waist measurement wound up at around 31 inches.
I got tired of dieting so I got really aggressive with calorie restriction and in the process I lost a lot of strength and probably some muscle. I’m very slowly gaining it back.
My weight is up to about 167# and my waist measurement this morning was 33 inches (actual measurement could be smaller. I may have been holding more water this morning).
Im afraid that my genetics are such that I can either have visible abs and be skinny or not have visible abs and gain some muscle.
It’s like the fat gain out paces the muscle gain when bulking and the muscle loss out paces the fat loss when cutting.
Yea, I think one problem with rapid weight loss is the potential for muscle loss and fat rebound when Calories are reintroduced without a maintenance period, e.g. the fat will out gain the muscle when calories are increased. The opposite almost never happens during weight loss though.
If you gained 9lbs and 2" on your waist, I don’t think that’s a good trade off.
I did employ a fairly long maintenance period when coming out of the weight loss phase.
Perhaps I haven’t been tracking calorie intake on the weekends as accurately as I should have been.
Should I go back into a weight loss phase, get my waist back to 31 inches, and try this all again?
What would be a reasonable increase in waist size accompanying weight gain? 0.5 inches per 10 pounds?
I don’t know that you need to lose weight and I’d be curious as to how long your maintenance period was, as there were no real timelines laid out in the initial post. That said, I think it’s likely that your Calorie surplus is higher than estimated right now and I would probably temper that.
While waist size varies from person to person, I think 1"/10lbs is getting close to the limit I’d like to see in someone with your stats.
Thanks Jordan,
My apologies for not providing any data. I had to go back and look it up and make a plot in excel. My weight loss phase was between 3/30/20 and 8/31/20. At that point, I switched to a maintenance phases. I didn’t record the period of the maintenance phase but looking at the plot, it appears to have lasted about 12 weeks, at which point I started gaining weight again.
On 8/31/20 I weighed 159.4# and this morning I weighed 167.8#.
Not sure this will change anything but I wanted to provide the data for some context.
With all that said, is your recommendation that I continue to gain weight but try to get my calorie surplus under tighter control?
I am not recommending you to gain weight unless you want to, but if so, I’d do a less aggressive surplus.
If your timeline is on point, it looks like you’ve gained ~9lbs in 6 weeks, which is far greater than the weight gain rate I’d advocate for. If the maintenance period was much shorter (or not really maintenance) then this becomes less of an issue.
I think we’re starting to get into the consult territory as we go along here, but hopefully I’ve provided some useful information here.