I’m a guy in his 20s training to slowly get stronger, lean out, and gain LBM. I like having numbers to set as goals even if they’re a bit inaccurate - it keeps me motivated and excited as I track my progress. I know body fat percentage measurements are unreliable and don’t necessarily align with the real metric people are often tracking unconsciously (being happy looking at themselves in the mirror or in a swimsuit).
That being said, have you observed whether there’s a range of waist measurements in men where they start to see abs or at least have a flat, muscular midsection? I’m at 34.5 inches, measured according to your video, and wondering how much farther I have to go.
I don’t think waist circumference reliably correlates to abdominal aesthetics. Bodyfat would be a better correlate. How much do you weigh and how tall are you?
If you can’t see your abs at that weight/height you either carry a lot of body fat in your trunk and/or haven’t been training that long. For reference, at that height/weight my waist was 30" and I was very lean (too lean for PL perhaps). So, I’d guess too much body fat in this case, but I could be wrong.
Yup on both counts, I am quite lean outside my trunk but also not very muscular. I’m guessing your rec would be to continue training using BBM programming (have been for about 4 months) and maintain weight?
Jordan, with that being said, what should his next step be? Should he cut, or should he be in a surplus? I am in a similar situation and I never know what I should do.
Yea I would think that if you train intelligently for the next 6 months your physique will look significantly different and you might not need to lose anymore body fat.
I am in almost the same position (5’9, 184lbs, 35” waist, flabby midsection) as the other two posters, and this answer leaves me a little mystified…
If we maintain good training and maintenance calories, how/why would physique change? We aren’t eating enough to grow muscle, but we are eating too much to lean out. Any insight to this?
I guess I was under the assumption that in order to increase muscle mass we would need to eat a caloric surplus, and to lose fat, a caloric deficit.
I don’t really see much discussion about the average lifter (which I’m defining as neither excessively overweight or underweight for their height; maybe around 18-20% BF). I also don’t see much discussion about body recomposition for this population of lifters, and wasn’t sure if gaining muscle while losing fat was a myth (unless you cycle weight gain and loss).
I think that we need to be very specific when discussing this issue.
I expect that untrained folks will lose a bit of fat and gain a bit of muscle while in eating maintenance calories. The amount of each will vary depending on training, genetics, and diet of course.
I expect the above to happen in much smaller amounts- perhaps even negligible amounts for trained lifters unless a person has very favorable genetics
I think that most trained folks will need to approach muscle gain and fat loss singularly
Sorry for hijacking this. and going off topic. But specifically, how would you define an “untrained” individual? Obviously someone just starting out would be untrained. But what about those lifting 3-6 months with good programming? 1-2 years? Or is time irrelevant, and “untrained” would be someone who is able to increase e1RM by a few pounds every week or two? How old would one have to be for age become more of a factor (20yo vs 30 vs 40+)?
Man… I wanted to ask that question a long time now since I’ve seen you regularly recommend other to keep their weight and train their ass off and this answer pretty much clarifies it.
So basically for novices that works well but for more trained lifters regular gaining and cutting cycles are more appropriate. I would like to spin this a little further if I may:
For the average trained Joe (let’s say bf in a broad range of 12-20% depending on current cycle, average strength/muscle size etc.) who wants to continue gaining strength&muscle, avoid plateaus and get/stay reasonably lean in the process (I’m thinking long-term and ignoring things like gaining or cutting for a competition, summer etc.):
What would be ideal gaining/cutting cycle lengths and maybe rates there? I’m aware that this can’t be said in such a generalized way… but for instance: we could probably say that 1 week cycles are probably uselessly short and 1 year is probably long. What about the weight gain/loss rates? I guess something between 2-5lb per month seems reasonable? And are shorter cycles with faster rates better than longer cycles with smaller rates?
I guess I’m just looking for a rough estimation of what would work efficiently in the long term as this has really been a bit of a problem for me over the years. I can both gain or lose weight whenever I want to… I just don’t seem to be able to do it in a way to efficiently maximize my results over time. I guess I’m looking for nuance.
It’s actually a source of contention in many circles. In general, most authors make a rather arbitrary distinction based on either training history or performance level compared to some reference population, sometimes even conflating elite performances with trained status. Still, the meaning of the word in the literature is that a “trained” person has a greater amount of fitness adaptations present than an untrained person.
For an exact measure, I think the best stuff on this from an anaerobic standpoint is the pooled Wingate tests that identify 7 distinct levels of fitness based on testing results. To what extent this is meaningful for prescribing training remains unknown.
There isn’t a one size fits all here that I would feel comfortable recommending.
Somewhere between 3-20+ weeks depending on context for duration seems reasonable (though kind of useless from a recommendation standpoint).
I wouldn’t recommend gaining more than 5lbs a month in most cases and- truth be told- I think that’s usually a little aggressive unless on drugs and/or favorable genetics.
What is your weight, height, waist circumference, and squat?
I was afraid so. Ok thanks for getting into the specifics then. So I weigh between 85 and 87kg (at 1,81m and around 35“ waist currently in gaining phase) depending on the time of day and which scale you ask, got pretty shitty genetics (started training with 60kg in my twenties, have been underweight my whole life until then so got a slim bone structure, got Hashimoto‘s since my early teens, hard to gain muscle and not lose it when I cut). I did a 175kg squat 2 weeks ago but I‘m a fairly consistent and hard training… I think people with better genetics would have reached that quicker. As a matter of fact I‘m training my gf, she‘s quite inconsistent at training and nutrition and she just did a 122,5kg RPE 9 squat and 72,5kg RPE 9 bench at 59kg bw in around 1,5 years of training and she‘s still making progress.
