Bulking Vs Cutting

The Decision…The process of bulking and cutting has been around for many years and was developed by old school style body-builders in order to gain a lot of muscle then shred fat and lean down to show all their muscle definition (usually for physic, body-building or fitness competitions.) A lot of the competitions around today consist of more ‘bikini’ and ‘fitness’ style contests, but the body-building world is so vast and is growing more and more every year. With fitness now becoming a Trend every girl seems to want a ‘small waist and big bum’ and all the boys want that V-tapered shaped back and big biceps. But the question is for us all?

Where do we start?

 

First, of all when it comes to the decision of cutting or bulking I like to think it depends on three main factors: your style of training, Body-type and overall body-fat percentage or weight. When I say style of training I mean what you do in the gym (if you’re already training) or even what your best at. For example, some people like strength training, so I would suggest a bulk where as some people prefer endurance training and steady state cardio, so I would then suggest a cut. But really this decision all comes down to one thing…

Yourself!

So, when you look at yourself in the mirror do you see yourself as ‘flat’, still skinny but with no muscle definition or shape? Then I would bulk! But if you feel that you have already got some shape (my gals with that hourglass figure) and don’t really feel comfortable in your own skin or even want to shed that bit of body fat then I would start cutting!

I love when I feel good in my own skin and when I have them body-confident days. That’s the thing about why I love about the gym. You are literally shaping and transforming your own body and I think as humans that’s amazing that we can sculpt it like art.

So now you’ve made your decision and your thinking…Where do I even start?

‘Bulking VS cutting’

Bulking is the process of growing muscle and increasing in overall body mass whether that’s muscle or body-fat it’s basically an increase in the overall percentage of size and this is done by eating in a caloric surplus. But it’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture while in this process just because you can consume a lot of calories this doesn’t mean you can eat whatever you want and go to McDonalds every day!

 

The best way to bulk is by ‘lean bulking’ which means you are still eating in a caloric surplus but you’re eating all clean unprocessed foods and trying to keep your fats low but your carbs and proteins high! Most people start lean bulking at first but it’s important to still have cheat meals just like when you’re on a cut as they can boost your overall mood, motivation and metabolism. I love the idea of cheat meals as it allows me to have my treat and something I want but as soon as I’ve had my sweet/fatty fix I’m straight back into my training especially on or after cheat days (to put all them cals to good work) and then forget about it / not punish yourself and move on with more clean/healthy eating for the next meal.

Bulking is a very common for fitness lifestyle/goal for men to follow as they want to become bigger and stronger. But this has also become very useful and popular for women if they want to grow their glutes legs or even back and shoulders (which are my favourite muscles to train!) I used to think that when women would lift weights or say they were growing muscles they would literally look like this……(no offence to Iris Kyle – she’s still amazing and has an insane strength!)

But let’s be honest this is not what the average girl wants to look like

The lifestyle of bulking and cutting is not for everyone, but I must admit if you’re like me and love food (especially carbs – ps. pasta is life <3) and also like to lift heavy and feel strong and empowered then the lifestyle of bulking and cutting might be for you and it  can produce amazing results. It gives you time to eat what you want and gain that muscle over the winter months and then shred your excess fat you’ve put on from all them extra calories and lean down for summer.

Cutting

The process of cutting is simply eating in a caloric deficit which basically means your consuming less calories than your body needs to maintain. This is often put into place with a clean/healthy diet and a training programme involving cardio: This burns extra calories therefore putting you further into a caloric deficit. When cutting for long periods of time: which is the safest and most effective way to do it!

 

-I say this because it’s important for us to try and maintain as much muscle as we can whilst cutting as you are losing weight you don’t want to lose all that muscle.

So, most people don’t like to start out with loads of cardio at first, they just start to cut down there calories slowly but steadily and this will then prevent plateaus and then allow you to introduce cardio when needed to burn extra fat. Also, this helps you decrease your bodyfat percentage levels at a steady rate and boost your metabolism. HIIT training is a big favourite for people who want to lose fat but keep muscle as its short bursts of high intensity exercises often involving body-weight/ resistance or even free weights which enables you to burn more calories in shorter amounts of time whilst keeping your body conditioned/toned with weight training.

 

It’s also very important to make sure you’r post and pre-workout meals are right in terms of nutrition to fuel your workout and then support your body’s recovery

Pre-workout meals

These are designed to give your body what it needs to perform to its best and prepare your muscles for your workout and essentially just get you through the start of the day! A good pre-workout meal should increase glycogen levels and prevent the body going into catabolism.

Glycogen – (a large molecule in the body produced in the liver and stored mainly in the liver and muscle cells its practically the main way the body stores energy for later use)

Catabolism – (catabolic state – basically where your muscle tissue starts to break down L)

So, try and include a slow-digesting carb and protein to prevent hunger cravings and support muscle growth!

Fat loss and Macros

When starting out in the gym or your fitness journey I think its best if you firstly decide whether you want to bulk or cut (gain size of loose fat.) Your decision can be based on many factors such as: insulin sensitivity ( how well you tolerate carbs and other key nutrients in terms of metabolism, over-all body fat level and your personal goals. But what I think it comes most down to is how you feel within your own body. For instance, if you have a decent amount of muscle (or are athletic) and would consider yourself very lean and thin, then I would bulk up or try and gain muscle mass. But if you’re fairly skinny but don’t have any or a lot of muscle mass (toning/definition) ,then I would firstly loose that bit of extra body fat and then start a lean bulk once your body fat percentage has dropped. Body fat is an important fact to consider not just for how you look but this will effect your health such as blood sugar levels and function of your insulin plus it plays a key role in maximising your performance and recovery time.

‘When starting your fat loss journey, it’s important to make sure that you are eating the right number of calories. Whether your cutting or bulking!’

If your aim is to lose fat, at the start of your cut you don’t want to drastically drop all your calories at once and increase your cardio levels by a big amount. This is for numerous reasons: one of the main being that if and when you hit a plateau the only way to stop this is to increase that energy expenditure therefor doing more cardio or decreasing calories (and if your cardio levels are very high and your calories are very low there’s not a lot you can do to break your plateau.) So, at the start you want to be consistent with your diet and training and slowly start to introduce cardio in. This will help with your metabolism and make sure that you aren’t damaging all the muscle you have worked so hard to get. When you are in a calorie deficit it’s important to maintain all the muscle you have spent so long creating. It’s better to slowly start cutting over a longer period of time so your body gets used to your new diet plan and training and you keep muscle.

So how do I work out my calories?

So first of all, you need to work out your maintenance calories (to maintain your weight) and this can be done by a calculation or easily put into an online calculator that does this for you!

https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/macronutcal.htm

As the online version won’t be as accurate as it’s based on averages it’s still a good way to estimate your calories when you’re first starting out. It works by measuring your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) against your goals eg: weight gain, weight loss and maintenance.

How do we use this in terms of our goals?…Macro’s

Macro’s are important when it comes to fat loss or even muscle gain as they are able to give your body exactly what it needs in terms of calories and micronutrients. This is great for cutting as it can maximise fat loss and still support muscle maintenance while delivering the best results. Macros are essentially your whole daily calorie intake split into three groups: Fats, Proteins and Carbs and they are all put into percentages according to how many grams of each we are consuming. For example, every gram of carb or protein is four calories and fats are nine calories per gram.

IIFYM / Flexible dieting

‘If it fits your macros…’

This is an unrestrictive diet plan that allows you to eat all food types while hitting your calories for the day and still being able to eat the foods you love. It works by meeting your daily macronutrient targets in terms of carbs, fats and proteins. Lots of people use this flexible dieting plan because you can still eat some of your favourite foods like chocolate and fit it in with your diet plan.

Calculating your macros

(skip this if you don’t want to know that maths)

‘Trying to work out your Macro’s like…’

1. First of all, we take our body weight in lb and for every pound of body weight we multiply (x) by 1 gram of protein.

1. For example, 120 lb would = 120 grams of protein.
2. Your protein would be 120 grams x 4 (4 calories per gram of protein) = 480 calories of protein per day
3. Fats can range from anywhere between 0.3 and 0.6. Then this is where personal preference comes in. If your someone who enjoys fatty foods like cheese, bacon, egg yolk, avocado and nuts then a high fat would suit you and then your carbs would decrease so that your macros all add up to an equal number. If you’re just starting out with fat loss I would recommend somewhere around 0.4 to start out with. So, let’s pretend your maintenance calories are 2000, then you would multiply this by 0.9 and this gives you a 10% caloric deficit giving you 1800 calories making you lose fat at a healthy pace.
4. Your fats would be 0.4 x 120 g (body weight) = 48 g of fat x 9 (calories per gram of fat)= 432 calories of fat per day
5. So… after this we add both of these numbers together (calories of both fats and protein) = 912 calories
6. Then we take this away from the original TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) for your cut with a ten percent deficit which was 1800 -912 (total fats and protein calories) = 888 calories of carbs
7. Finally you then divide that by four (because each carb is 4 calories) and this gives you 222g of carbs left for your macros!

So how do I go about tracking my macros?

It’s important not to get to obsessed with your calories and macro’s. It’s just a good way to know if your hitting your calories or macros and this then also helps you learn about diet and nutrition at the same time. I love tracking them because I am so much more conscious of what I’m putting in my body and knowing what’s in my food. I track my macros on ‘My fitness pal’ – which is free Jand the features are really helpful as you can just scan barcodes of food and track them. It’s even got a partnership with food company’s so when you go out to eat at ‘Nandos’ you can still track all your macros on the food search tab. With the free version it only allows you to input your Marcos in percentages, so you have to play around with them to try and match the numbers you worked out before. But as long as you know your macros in your head or have a good idea of them you’ll be fine!

Starting from scratch

In the beginning …

At the start of my fitness journey I never actually knew how to treat my body right. I was always at the gym and was the typical ‘Cardio bunny’ and I hated it! I was practically afraid of carbs or anything that wasn’t a ‘healthy fat’ or ‘lean meat.’ I used to think that if you just ate salads and did body-weight training I would wake up with abs. But the fact is most of these people we see and aspire to be on Instagram or Youtube have actually been training for years. Also what we don’t realize is that everyone’s bodies are different and we all respond in different ways to different types and styles of training. Some things that work for your friends such as diet/meal plans and their gym program might not work for you at all. And thats okay! You just have to accept it and face the fact that it will take time for your body to adjust to your new ‘healthy’ lifestyle and you will learn what food and types of training your body responds well to. Thats the thing and I know everyone hates to hear it but in fitness industry or the gym –

“Progression takes time”

Whether that’s loosing that weight for the typical ‘Summer-bod’ or trying to shred that little bit of belly fat or even trying to gain muscle. Believe me when I say that i used to think to myself that I would never touch weights because I would get big muscles and look bulky…

I was so wrong!

Building muscle takes time…

Because muscles need time to accurately recover properly and effectively. This means that you can’t train the same type of muscle everyday if you want to make the appropriate ‘gains’. Gaining muscle especially for females is hard! You have to be consistent in your training and most of all eat! EAT! EAT! EAT! In order to put on size/gain muscle we have to be eating in a caloric surplus (more calories than we need) which means consuming over the amount of calories than BMR (Basal metabolic rate). That sounds complicated but basically this is just the amount of calories our bodies need to work properly at rest, so imagine 24 hours doing nothing and your body just functioning that is your BMR. You can get this measured at the doctors but you can use online sites such as Muscle and strength, which are very useful for seeing how many calories your body needs daily and takes into account your activity level .Over the past few months i’ve been looking at different ways I can target muscles to overcome plateau’s or ‘shock the muscles’. This is because muscles have memory! sounds weird right?

Muscle memory

Ever wonder how you learn to swim or ride a bike when your younger then don’t do either for years and it comes back to you naturally? This Is all because of ‘muscle memory’. Well more like brain memory. Your brain starts to remember muscle movements when they are performed, and this is then stored in long-term memory when repeated a number of times. So, the movements eventually start to become natural to us and we can then add/up more weights we repeat the exercise as it becomes easier (plus the fact where getting stronger!)

So, If you haven’t been to the gym in a while or are too scared to get back into it or even commit because you think your starting from scratch and the gym has to be a full-time lifestyle to be effective or even make a difference to your body. Your muscles are here to help you and they got your back.

Ever wonder why your muscles never seem to grow when you first start lifting or start going to the gym? This is because you have probably never trained weights before and your muscles take time to show through as you’ve got to create nuclei first.

In your head you’re probably thinking “what”??

Let me explain…

Muscles are all built and strengthened from the Nuclei. This means that its essentially the   cement before the building bricks of the muscle. It creates a good foundation for the muscle to grow/gain size. Kind of like plants how plants use the energy from sunlight to produce glucose we use protein. Our muscles nuclei control protein-synthesis and the more you have, the more protein you are able to turn into muscle!