When To Bulk, Maintain, or Cut For Maximum Physique Results

Summary

Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization explores the different phases of dieting and training to maximize muscle gain and fat loss. He explains when to choose between bulking, maintaining, or cutting, emphasizing that each phase serves specific goals and comes with its own costs and prerequisites. Dr. Mike provides engaging examples and criteria for determining the best time to start each phase, ensuring listeners can strategically plan their fitness journey for optimal results.

Highlights

• Muscle gain phases require good body image and low training fatigue. 🎯
• Maintenance phases recover diet and training fatigue without visible body changes. 🔧
• Fat loss phases should start with low diet and training fatigue for best results. 🔥
• Plan phases considering life interruptions like events or travel to stay on track. 🚀
• Understand personal goals and phase requirements to choose the right path. 📘

Key Takeaways

• Understanding when to bulk, cut, or maintain helps you achieve maximum physique results. 🏋️‍♂️
• Muscle gain phases may add temporary fat but are essential for growth when training hard. 💪
• Maintenance phases act as a recovery period to prep you for future dieting efforts. 🌿
• Fat loss phases aim to shred fat while maintaining as much muscle as possible. 🏃‍♂️
• Timing your training and diet phases with life events is crucial for success. 📅

Overview

Dr. Mike takes us on a journey through the world of bulking, maintaining, and cutting - popular phrases in the fitness community. With his charismatic approach, he analogizes the phase choices to picking food at a restaurant, breaking down what each phase entails so you can choose what's best for your muscle gain and fat loss aspirations.

The episode delves into specific requirements and timelines for each fitness phase. With a playful tone, Dr. Mike explains the importance of having a body image that can withstand the added temporary fat from bulking and how maintenance phases are like a necessary 'weekend' break from the hustle of training, though they might feel unproductive visually.

Practical examples peppered throughout the talk highlight common situations: whether you're revved up for a fat loss after a year of intense lifting or prepping for bulk but find your body too fatigued – Mike's advice guides you to balance these phases and integrate them seamlessly with life's unpredictable demands for a successful fitness roadmap.

When To Bulk, Maintain, or Cut For Maximum Physique Results Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization I have a question for you should you bulk no wait wait should you maintain Bo should you cut that sounds fun how do you know when to do the various diet phases to couple them with your training for best longterm muscle gain and fat loss results will wait no more the answers are coming now here we go before we tell you if and when and how you should be bulking or maintaining your
• 00:30 - 01:00 let's take a look at all three of the phases and explore a little bit of kind of what you're getting in each phase like if you're telling someone who's never been to a restaurant before hey do you want burritos or pizza or Chinese food they're going to be like what are all those things and you'll have to explain them so that they can make the right choice same idea with these phases first the muscle gain phase the goal is to put on muscle which automatically means that if you don't want to put on muscle that's probably not the phase for you at this time in your life life the
• 01:00 - 01:30 costs are that in almost every case a muscle gain phase will cost some temporary marginal addition of body fat and will result in a higher level of training fatigue because going hard in the gym absolutely beats you up and a muscle gain phase is best done when you're going hard in the gym the requirements before you start is that you have a good body image and loow training fatigue let's take
• 01:30 - 02:00 those one at a time good body image is because when you are going to be doing a muscle gain phase some added body fat is going to be in the equation for at least a few weeks after the phase until you can diet it off if your body image isn't amazing or the best it's been in a while and you're like hey let me do this phase where I get fatter that might not hit exactly as well as you had planned but if you have really good body image you're like fuck it I can gain a little bit of weight I don't give a fuck then you're at least in that respect ready to
• 02:00 - 02:30 do another muscle gain phase and low training fatigue means your joints feel good your the rest of your body feels good you're excited to train your muscles can get a good pump really easily you're not in this position where you're like man I want to gain muscle but like I don't feel like training that hard I'm beat up and tired you don't want to start a muscle game things like that so those are prerequisite conditions in most cases for even thinking of starting a muscle gain phase and the recommended duration of a muscle gain phase is for most better outcomes
• 02:30 - 03:00 is somewhere between 12 and 20 weeks in length which means if you do not have 12 to 20 weeks in length to dedicate to a muscle gain phase you can still do one but maybe it wouldn't be your best choice next the maintenance phase the goal in the maintenance phase is to recover from diet fatigue and recover from training fatigue now maintenance phase here we mean a dedicated phase that maintains your body weight but checklists a couple of actual goals if you're just training and you're not dieting to gain or lose and you're just
• 03:00 - 03:30 enjoying life that is actually called the balance phase it's not really a phase it's just the balance lifestyle So that's its own thing we won't talk about you're might be in that phase most people are by default in a state of balance so a maintenance phase the goal is to recover diet fatigue that you accumulated in another phase or recover from training fatigue that you accumulate in another phase so that you can get ready to do another more productive phase such as cutting or bulking fat loss or muscle gain those are the meat and potatoes phases that actually drive change the maintenance phases is like a cool off phase it's
• 03:30 - 04:00 like if you're a really crazy dedicated career person that's what the weekend is you don't do the weekend because it's some kind of want to go to a county fair or go to the park you hate that shit you want to be at your job making crazy productive things for the rest of us but you know that weekends are important to let you cool off relax so you can be ready on Monday to hit work hard again same idea for maintenance phases that's what they are to muscle gain and fat loss phases the cost of a maintenance phase is that you don't really see very impressive changes in your body body one
• 04:00 - 04:30 week goes by two weeks three weeks four weeks five weeks in a maintenance phase and you kind of just look the same and that's a cost because some of us really get addicted in a good way many times to like make shit looking different week to week in the mirror I'm either Fuller rounder when I'm a muscle gain phase or leaner and sharper and more cut on a fat loss phase on a maintenance phase you just can't expect to see really cool results because the fatigue and all that stuff that's decreasing is all under the hood it's not super visible the requirement before starting not a requirement but kind of the reason you
• 04:30 - 05:00 would do a phase and then Essence a requirement it's like if um you want to get your oil changed in your car the requirement is that some amount of time has passed before your last one now you can always just come in the next week after an oil change you're like hey Bob mechanic here to get my oil changed again he's going to be like is this one of those serial kill movies where you fucking come in too often and then time number three you stabed me in the eye why the fuck are you here your oil is totally fine you can always come in early but why you know what what was
• 05:00 - 05:30 Scott the video guy you know cars how often do oil changes happen every 3 to 5,000 miles BMW to oh the BMWs can go longer I'm just got the video guy I'm richy fucking rich and a Trader to our Great American Nation hash Byam I'm kidding everybody in any case sure you can do a maintenance phase for a few unconvincing reasons but if you don't have high training fatigue or high
• 05:30 - 06:00 diet fatigue you can probably just do a muscle gain phase or a fat loss phase so maintenance phase because it is to reduce fatigue is its primary purpose then having some kind of day diet fatigue or some training fatigue is probably a requirement to make the most sense out of doing the phase and the recommended duration for a maintenance phase is at the smallest time scale usually two weeks you can drop a lot of training fatigue in two weeks but if you have a crazy amount of diet fatigue especially after a psychotically insane fat loss phase they got you really
• 06:00 - 06:30 really lean you can maintain for up to 12 weeks and still see benefits in precipitously declining diet fatigue that entire time so 2 to 12 weeks is the duration there's of course a lot of individualization within that lastly but not leastly the fat loss phase the goal of a fat loss phase is twofold it is to lose fat for sure but also to retain muscle you don't want to lose fat and muscle at least not a lot of muscle because then people at work think you're sick
• 06:30 - 07:00 and say like shit like hey my condolences you're like what the fuck my condolences to my body fat they're like no to your muscle gains bro you're like fuck they got me so you want to maintain as much muscle as possible while losing fat those are the goals of the fat loss phase the costs of the fat loss phase is that your diet fatigue will go up you're going to get cranky tired hungry Sleepless all that crap and your training fatigue will for sure go up you're going to be a little bit of a broken off Mr Potato Head one arm
• 07:00 - 07:30 hanging off after a really good Diet phase uh it's just pay the cost to to be the boss kind of stuff in order to start a fat loss phase generally the requirements or best position you should be in is that you have low diet fatigue this is huge if you start your next fat loss phase and you are already trying to chew your fingers off the bone because you're starving where you think that's going after three weeks you're going to fall off the wagon and as you fall off
• 07:30 - 08:00 the wagon you're going to fall into a container of Taco Bell tacos hard shell and you're going to eat all of them 800 tacos later you'll have to get your stomach pumped it's a terrible thing you should in almost every case only start a fat loss diet if you can truly tell yourself I am at peace with my diet I don't want a ton of cheap food snacks are fun but I can do without them for a while and I'm totally okay to plug in and for the next six 8 12 or whatever
• 08:00 - 08:30 weeks it is I can stick to a rigid diet and be okay so low diet fatigue is a huge check mark to be able to put in your little diet passport I don't know so that you can do best with that next phase and if you can't check it you need to maintain for longer or do a muscle gain phase or do something else you should also have low training fatigue training is Pretty Tough during a fat loss phase but here's the big kicker once you have a certain level of high fatigue those low calories don't let you drop it very much so even if your
• 08:30 - 09:00 fatigue during a fat loss phase in the middle is a little high it's just going to get higher and higher because how the fuck are you going to heal from that when you can't eat enough food to even maintain your body weight so low training fatigue prepares you it gives you that good clear Runway of hard training so that your airplane of diet fing fuck that an alergy and fuck that up lastly in the best case scenario to set yourself up for the best success probability you you want a
• 09:00 - 09:30 clear timetable of largely uninterrupted ability to eat the food you need to eat and train as hard as you need to train without a ton of weddings and travel and work events and all this other crazy stuff that gets in the way of your life that prevents you from being on point with your plan the best fat loss phases are ones in which you live kind of like Vegeta and Trunks did in the hyperbolic Time Chamber you're in there there's
• 09:30 - 10:00 nowhere else to go there's only food sleep and training now that's not our usual lifestyle but the closest you can get to that the better you sure shit don't want like oh yeah I've got a trip to Mexico it's two and a half weeks long in the middle of my fat loss pH I'll just diet through that if you ever been in Mexico that food is so good holy shit you're never going to die through that you have to be a realistic and how long of a phase you need well anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks is a typical duration there are mini cuts and other Advanced things we can talk about but generally good solid fat F loss phase is 8 to 12 weeks in length
• 10:00 - 10:30 eight weeks to do some really good fat loss anything shorter doesn't really lose a ton of fat anything over 12 weeks is more like competitive bodybuilder type stuff a lot of people get such high diet fatigue by the end of the 12 weeks that anything more is just risking falling off the wagon for no net gains taking all of that together the two questions that can answer the main question of what phase should you do now is first which phases goal appeals the
• 10:30 - 11:00 most to you right now do you want to put on muscle right now do you want to lose fat right now don't fucking say both yes of course it's both of course we all want to get infinitely jacked and negative body fat percent but which one right now is the one you want to tackle secondly do you meet all of the conditions of the phase which you want to tackle and if you don't meet the conditions of that phase which phase can you do that will allow you to meet the
• 11:00 - 11:30 conditions of that phase you wanted to do originally beforehand it's like you're driving to a friend's birthday party and you're like what am I missing fuck a birthday present what's going to help me solve that I'm gonna go to well let's see what is our friend I'm gonna go to Home Depot and get him a shovel because he always talks about how he hates his wife and he's gonna kill that quote stupid bitch someday and how is he going to bury her he's going to need a shovel so I'm going to get him a shovel and the Home Depot trip will potentiate my trip to the birthday party
• 11:30 - 12:00 and I show up to the birthday party this is for your wife and he's like thanks man I love you I hate that bitch and you're like okay I hope we're all joking by the way this whole time Mr friend because your wife's quite lovely but if she was to disappear I mean I don't know where she went in any case which phase's goal appeals to you right now and do you meet all the conditions for the phase let's do a few examples one for each phase so for example what do you get when PhD sport
• 12:00 - 12:30 scientists collaborate with Pro [Music] bodybuilders the most effective muscle growth training app ever made get yours now you've been lifting hard for a year straight you have no diet or training fatigue to speak of you are fresh as a pickle and you figure you really want to get like fucking lean lean for the first
• 12:30 - 13:00 time ever all you do is go to the fat loss phase and you look again at all the requirements and all of the different categories and you see if it lines up gold loose fat sounds like what I want retain muscle great costs diet fatigue no wor no worries I'm willing to pay that training fatigue no worries I'm willing to pay that requirements before starting low diet fatigue check low training fatigue check largely uninterrupted time to grind without major distractions o okay yep I do have
• 13:00 - 13:30 a wedding in October but I'll call them and tell them to move it for me into December excellent and I have 8 to 12 weeks Amazing then it's a fat loss phase is the answer number two you've been dieting for a while now and you really just want to get huge it's muscle gain time but you're really fatigued in training as well your joints are kind of eh your muscles are kind of H so we looks like
• 13:30 - 14:00 we can't do any more fat loss we don't even want to do that we'd ideally like to do a muscle gain phase but we need to reduce our training fatigue which phase reduces training fatigue it's a no-brainer it's the maintenance phase and if you go to the maintenance phase you check all the goals costs requirements recommended durations and you're like check Chuck check I can do all that then the maintenance phase is the answer lastly number three you say you're stoked to get bigger and you're one 100% comfortable with a bit of extra
• 14:00 - 14:30 fat gain for a few months no diet fatigue to speak of no training fatigue to speak of well shit you are absolutely queued up to do a muscle gain phase and that last thing of how comfortable are you with a bit of fat gain that's a thing that for a lot of guys is super easy super tractable but for a lot of ladies it requires some thinking some inner peace and ladies remember if you gain like half a pound per week after 10 weeks of muscle gain dieting and getting bigger muscles you're only up worst case
• 14:30 - 15:00 if you gain zero muscle at all which won't happen 5 lounds of fat the thing is 5 pounds of fat if you weigh 130 and all of a sudden uh 10 weeks later you weigh 135 it's highly unlikely that people at the gym or people at work like damn Debbie did you fucking eat Debbie the cupcake lady ho holy shit it's such a tiny amount 5 PBS is like period blo that's that's that is it awesome no dear br feel Tighter and you feel kind of
• 15:00 - 15:30 icky sure you want to wear more turtlenecks and sweaters fine but you can get through it and at the end just a couple weeks after you can do a little mini fat loss phase get all of the weight off all of the fat off and be left with Rippling huge enormous strided concrete dense rebar muscle you can finally come up to that fucking hot ass Antonio Banderas look like motherfucker at work and be like hey Hector and he's
• 15:30 - 16:00 like see and you're like watch this motherfucker and he's like I you this meal let's go right now to Albano where I will love your body up and down over and over ideally you say yes at that point ah sure your boss walks in you're like get out of here Frank I'm trying to fuck in any case ladies enjoy gentlemen hopefully you're Hector I'll see you next time