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Looking for Advice on My Diet and Workout Routine

Posts: 48 Member

Hi all,

I’m 42 years old and 172 cm tall. I’ve been going to the gym for years, but it seems I wasn’t doing it right in terms of progressive overload.

I made a post almost a year ago when I was around 65 kg with approximately 15% body fat. Back then, I asked for advice on whether to continue cutting, and most of the responses suggested I stop cutting and start a clean bulking phase. I followed that advice and bulked up to around 73 kg. I believe my body fat is now in the 16–18% range.

I’m now considering a 10-week cutting phase, followed by a deload/rest week or two, and then another bulking phase. But I have a couple of questions for the experts here:

During my bulk, I followed an upper/lower split four days a week (upper, lower, upper, lower). For cutting, should I stick to the same exercises and aim for the same volume as during the bulk? What if I can't maintain the same weights or volume—should I drop the weight, sets, or reps?

During the bulk, I was consuming around 2300 kcal. For the cut, I’m planning to start at 1800 kcal and adjust as needed—possibly going down to 1600 kcal if my weight stalls after 4–6 weeks. I've attached two sample days from my diet for review—would appreciate any feedback on that too.

I have attached a couple of screenshots for my diet examples and a bad picture of me

Thanks in advance, everyone!

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Answers

  • Posts: 2,437 Member

    your training program to put the muscle on will also help you maintain it during a cut so if it was working for you don't need to change it. You will use less volume, but you will use the same intensity.

  • Posts: 13,842 Member

    You are missing a few details for us to know if your calorie math is reasonable. You plan to drop from 2300 to 1800, a change of 500 calories, but you also say that the 2300 is your bulk plan. Depending on how fast you were gaining, cutting 500 calories per day may simply bring you back to maintenance, or still gaining albeit slower, or losing…not enough detail to tell.

    I'm on a cut now, and some of my weights have suffered (chest), while others have remained the same (back) or even gone up(legs). Even for the weights that dropped, some weeks feel almost normal, others weaker. Be willing to drop 5-10% weight any given workout, though I kept my sets/reps the same.

  • Posts: 2,437 Member

    try to get your carbs in about an hour or an hour and a half before you work out and definitely be using creatine

  • Posts: 2,043 Member
    edited April 21

    I'm glad to see you took the advice and that it's been working for you.

    What are your current reps? Because in a deficit, it's safer to go higher reps, say 10+, rather than say 2-3 reps. Although you probably won't be in a big deficit so maybe that's not critical for you.

    Try to do the same volume as before. As the weeks pass, you may struggle, that's OK. Frequency is important. Lift regularly. Even if you're not feeling it and just do half a workout, it's still good to get the frequency.

    Make sure your protein is at least as high as now, so you'll probably need to cut mostly from carbs.

    The fat grams count (and therefore calories) in your chicken seems high. What's that about?

    You can estimate your TDEE. When you were on 2,300 what was your weekly weight gain? Figure a bit under 3,500 calories per pound weight gain. If you were on 16,100 weekly you can figure it out from there.

  • Posts: 48 Member

    Thanks, man, for stopping by and leaving a comment. I remember you were one of the people who encouraged me to bulk instead of continuing to cut — and that was definitely the right call.

    During the bulk, I was doing sets in the 8–12 rep range, aiming to stay around 2–0 RIR most of the time. I think I get what you mean — I’ll do my best to keep the same volume until I truly can't recover, then maybe gradually reduce reps or sets as needed.

    Sorry, what did you mean by my chicken seems high? Do you mean in calories? I mostly eat chicken breasts, and occasionally lean beef or fish.

    I’ve never really gained or lost weight steadily — it’s always been a bit inconsistent. Some weeks I’d gain, then stall, then gain again. But overall, I was making progress at around 2,300–2,400 kcals per day.

    Also, I’m not sure if it was you who introduced me to Renaissance Periodization and Mike, but if it was — thank you! That’s been a total game-changer.

  • Posts: 36,245 Member

    @xMidox - Gain/stall cycles week to week, overall down trend in weight over many weeks? That's how weight loss works, generally, for many people. The slower the loss rate, the more it looks like that.

    Water retention fluctuations and varied amounts of waste in the digestive tract can vary by multiple kilos from one day to the next, even one week to the next, and mask continuing gradual fat loss on the scale randomly.

    Even quite fast fat loss is slow. Losing a kilo a week averages about 143g per day, obviously less at a moderate to slow fat loss rate. A kilo of water/waste variability would be very normal even for me as a smaller person.

    Strength training can trigger bigger water fluctuations, besides, though that varies individually.

  • Posts: 2,043 Member

    @xMidox Yeah I probably mentioned RP.

    I mean your chicken is 120g with 7g fat and 210 calories. Those two numbers seem high. Is that because of how it's prepared, or is that an incorrect data entry?

  • Posts: 48 Member

    Not sure why the number is high, it's just normal grilled chicken breasts, and I pulled those macros in myfitnesspal database as they are… but I double check on google and it seems maybe just 10 caloires more

  • Posts: 48 Member

    Not sure why the number is high, it's just normal grilled chicken breasts, and I pulled those macros in myfitnesspal database as they are… but I double check on google and it seems maybe just 10 caloires more

  • Posts: 48 Member

    Sorry I missed your comment earlier. I initially thought 2350 kcals was slightly above maintenance, but as you know, sometimes I think I'm hitting 2350, when in reality it could be quite a bit more—especially on weekends when I tend to eat more. So maybe I was actually around 2500 kcals… sorry if that caused any confusion!

    Honestly, I can't imagine going below 1700 kcals. If you take a look at my current diet, I really don’t know where I’d cut another 200 kcals from if my weight stalls.

    I think I am around 17% bf maybe a bit more and I hope after 10 weeks of cutting I will reach to 13% bf

  • Posts: 13,842 Member

    Let's do some quick math checking to see if that's a reasonable goal:

    Weight: 73kg
    BF%: 17%
    BF: 12.4kg
    LBM: 61.6kg

    If the weight you lose is 100% BF, you would reach 13% BF at 70.8kg, which is a loss of 2.2kg over 10 weeks, easily doable. Except reality is you will lose some muscle along with the fat, so a more realistic ratio is 75% of whatever you lose is fat, 25% is muscle. This means you'd reach 13% BF not at 70.8kg, but a little lower at 68kg, which is still only a loss of 5kg over 10 weeks, still doable.

    To lose that 0.5 kg/wk goal, you need to eat at maintenance minus 450 per day. So if we can just figure out what your maintenance is, we can calculate a daily goal.

    The problem is you're not giving us the numbers we need to properly calculate maintenance. By your own words, your logging was inconsistent, with some days being a few hundred different from other days. So the best we can do is some rough approximations, based upon your first post:

    Start: 65kg
    End: 73kg
    Gain: 8kg
    Time frame: 365 days ("almost a year")
    Average daily calories eaten: 2300
    Weekly exercise: 4 days lifting x 250 calories burned per session

    Crunching the numbers, this gives a maintenance of 1989 calories. Since we're working with rough estimates all over here, let's just round this off to an even 2000.

    So in order to reach your goal of 5kg loss in 10 weeks, you need to average 1600 calories per day, assuming you keep up with lifting four days per week.

    If you want to stay at the 1700 level, you will still lose weight, just at a slightly slower pace, and you will need longer to reach that desired 13% BF. Alternatively, you can eat 1700 per day and still make goal after 10 weeks if you increase weekly calorie burn by 700 per week, maybe through 2-3 cardio sessions. (A couple 30-minute walks on a treadmill, set at walking pace but raising the incline, should be enough.)

  • Posts: 36,245 Member

    Piggybacking off what @nossmf said:

    Please don't look at body composition exclusively in terms of body fat percent. It can mislead.

    If a person's main goals are improved body composition - relatively more muscle, relatively less fat - please also convert the body fat and lean estimates into pounds or kilos, too.

    For body composition improvement, we want the ratio of fat loss to weight loss to be as high as possible - to lose mostly fat, or (if bulking) to gain mostly muscle.

    It's true either goal, but let me use a weight loss context as an example: If I lose a bunch of weight, my body fat percent can decrease significantly alongside a significant lean mass decrease, which is not what we want at all.

    Let's say I start at 150 pounds (or kg, doesn't matter for a mere example) and lose 50. I start at 35% body fat. I'm at 20% body fat when done (this is OK, I'm female 😉). Great? Not so much.

    At the start, I had 52.5 pounds/kilos of fat, and 97.5 pounds/kilos of lean mass. At the end, I have 20 pounds of fat, and 80 pounds of lean mass. When losing 50, 17.5 pounds/kilos of the weight lost is lean mass, so 35% of the loss (17.5 divided by 50) was lean mass, or looked at as a ratio, it's 35:65 lean mass to fat mass lost, when we'd like to see a result of 25:75 or better if we can accomplish it.

    We're always going to lose some lean mass, and if there's significant weight loss, we likely want to. I'd look odd if I still had the same blood volume I had when my body was around 30% larger, just to give a silly example. There can be other forms of lean mass the lighter body may not need, besides that.

    Things that will help improve that lean to fat loss ratio are good nutrition (especially but not exclusively protein), exercise (especially but not exclusively a good progressive strength training program faithfully performed), and a small deficit for fat loss in preference to a big deficit and fast loss.

    Look at the fat/lean weight, not just the percents.

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