Cutting for the Summer. Some Practical Tips
Cutting is a regular ritual this time of year, to unleash abs that have been safely hibernating all winter. That is for the gentlemen. For ladies, it might be cutting some excess from the waistline, to achieve your desired waist:dump-truck ratio. Summer is mating season for us mammals too, so here are some practical tips to showing off the physique that you’ve worked so hard to build during the Winter.
Calorie Deficit
No matter how you slice it, you must by definition be in an energy deficit, to lose body fat. Calories are readily available forms of energy, whereas body fat is stored energy. If you want to shift to burning stored energy, you must be consuming less readily-available energy than you need on a daily basis. If you have any reservations about that reality, then head over to my post on fad diets. Yes, you can lose weight through keto, vegan, gluten-free, etc, and if you do it is because you are in a calorie deficit.
Now, how that calorie deficit is achieved is another matter entirely. For example, you could do intermittent fasting, whereby you close your hours of eating to say eight hours of the day. You’ll more than likely consume coffee early in the day, which is an appetite suppressant, and by the time you get to eating, you’re going to struggle to eat enough food in a few sittings, which are only a few hours apart.
Conversely, if you enjoy breakfast and eating throughout the day, you could opt to eat at maintenance calories, and achieve your deficit through more cardio sessions. A great excuse to get outdoors as the weather improves. One caveat here is that you do need more disposable time, so it may not be the best option for busy professionals or parents.
These two approaches are one of the many ways to skin this particular cat, so rather than going on for days about which approach you could take, I will describe what my pre-summer gameplan is, and how it might adjust for someone who is starting from the opposite set of circumstances.
My Approach
With it being early March, that gives us approximately three months before we see the nice weather arrive. Since September, I have been eating in a calorie surplus to gain muscle, with the gains coming for sure, but at a slow rate. That is simply down to genetics. But we don’t complain, on this website, we adapt. My main priority this year is to preserve the hard-earned muscle because I lose bodyfat quite quickly, and muscle too if I’m not careful.
That said, I am going to simply drop to what maintenance calories (3,600) would be if I just did my usual weight-training routine, at my current level of intensity and volume. However, this guy is itching to move. And by move, I mean getting back on the bicycle and hitting the pavements for long walks in warmer weather. I will also stick to the same level of training intensity (i.e. kilos lifted), but looking to add repetitions in a very slow gradual manner, or at least maintain what I am managing now.
My thinking is that I will achieve a very gradual weight-loss with my approach to achieving a deficit. With my training, I will have very clear objective measures of whether I am progressing, or if the cut goes too far and my performance begins to decline.
I will be eating in the mornings (which I found difficult on my bulk) because I am now more concerned with equal protein distribution throughout the day. That doesn’t mean I am going to be worried about hitting the fabled ‘anabolic window’ with a post-workout shake, but I am accounting for the fact that Protein is an amino acid, which is not stored in the body for use when Protein is scarce. If you overconsume Protein, it turns to glucose. Carbs and fats, however, can be stored for later, so I am not at all concerned about when I consume them.
If I wanted to be anal about it, I could include some Intra-workout carbs like a bottle of Lucozade sport, or Gatorade to insure against declining performance, but since I am still eating higher calories than in a traditional cut, I won’t be getting stressed over molehills. A stress-free cut is an effective cut. Don’t underestimate the impact of willpower, which is finite across all dimensions of your life.
An Alternative Approach
My approach will not work for everyone. I have friends who have no problem maintaining thick arms all year round but struggle to shift fat around the abdomen. See my post on somatotypes. What may work more effectively for these individuals is to get right into a deeper calorie deficit from the very beginning. Subtracting 300 calories from maintenance calories would be a great place to start, and then adjust once weight-loss hits a plateau.
If you struggle with food cravings and sticking to the gameplan, it might be worth bumping your calories back up to maintenance for two days, every two weeks. For example two weekends per month. This could be the difference between adhering to your cut for 3 months vs. falling off the wagon. At a mere 1,200 extra calories over the course of a whole month, this is a drop in the ocean that won’t affect your total weightloss in any noticeable capacity.
Seeing as these individuals maintain muscle mass rather easily, I would focus on condensing workouts into no more than six exercises per session, with two compound exercises and four isolation exercises. Three sets per exercise at somewhere between 5-8 reps for compounds, and 8-12 reps for isolation exercises. Recovery from this style of training will be relatively easy, whilst maintaining high levels of strength, even in a calorie deficit. Any leftover time from these relatively short workouts can be used to hit the treadmill after completing the weight training session.
In Short…
Energy balance dictates fat loss. A gradual approach dictates muscle retention, and within those two principles you could come up with an infinite number of approaches to achieve results. Hopefully, this article has been helpful in examining how you think about cuts, so that you can tailor your approach to match your life circumstances, body-type, and goals. See you at the beach!