Should I Cut or Bulk? (for beginners)

[Arch0wl]

I'm asked this question a lot from friends who are just starting, and it's a complicated question.

In general, the more muscle you have the easier it will be to lose weight. If you have 40lb of muscle on top of your default untrained muscle, you will lose fat substantially faster than someone who has 5lb on top of their default. The person with 40lb of muscle has a higher resting metabolism *and* they will find it subjectively easier to eat below their maintenance, because their maintenance calories are lower.

So, building muscle is the priority. However, most people are not used to eating surplus calories to build muscle. They are scared that they will get fat, and they probably haven't lost fat before. The perception that you have no control over your fat levels persists in a lot of people, due in part to body image advocates who try to make other people feel better by saying that fat loss is primarily or even largely genetic. If this were true, bodybuilders and such could not time their calorie deficits to a precise number and generally achieve that number every time. Not only do you have more or less complete control over your fat levels, but fat loss is a science -- not an art. If you disagree with this, feel free to consult any exercise physiology textbook; you can find them used on amazon for less than the price of a meal at a sit-down restaurant.

This is ultra-true for women. Other women will ridicule women who bulk in the typical bodybulding style, because the perception is that 'skinny' is ideal, however unfounded this is. Muscle is generally superior because it makes the body more capable. Someone with more strength will run faster, hit harder, and generally move with more force than someone without. It also makes low body fat easier to maintain into middle age. Women, in other words, should aspire to gain muscle like men do, but because of social perceptions influencing women, few will deviate far from the norm.

Therefore, most people prioritize losing weight first, so that they definitely won't be fat when they bulk.

You should examine your current body fat levels before making this decision. If you're skinny and have anything approximating visible abs (even if the lower section is obscured by fat), you should be bulking. If people can call you skinny or say you 'look skinny', you should be bulking. And if you can fit into small-sized t-shirts with little to no muffin top effect, you should be bulking.

When you're bulking, you WILL look like shit. But striving to look great, constantly, with little to no muscularity is a losing battle. Low body fat levels are incredibly hard to maintain with low muscularity. Further, you will probably atrophy a lot of your muscle by trying to look great at a low body fat anyway.

Women I know do this often -- I can count something like five women I know who took adderall for weight loss and atrophied all of their leg and glute muscle, so when they shook their ass it'd look like liquids contained in skin as opposed to a firmer mass of substance. If you grabbed their calves or thighs, you'd feel nothing but fat and water because their body utilized muscle for calories instead of fat when they got to a low enough body fat.

You should cut first if and only if your fat levels are above 10-12%, and you should cut down to the point where you're 12-13%. This is because your body has diminishing returns on fat loss as you go to lower body fat levels. Cutting to 8% from 10% is substantially harder than cutting to 10% from 12%, and so on. If you find it difficult to cut to lower body fat levels, stop and start bulking. You will have much easier cuts in the future.

The lowest I've ever been was something like 9% down from 18%, and it took me six months to get there. Not only this, but I had to spend three (or more) extra months cutting from 13% to 9%. I could have just started bulking again and made excellent progress in those three months.

Unless you're very overweight or nearly obese, I recommend bulking for at least eight months out of the year. The other exception is if you're at 80% or more near your genetic maximum. Most people don't bulk enough. Most people focus on stupid shit like looking pretty so that they can get laid. If you need to look great to get laid, you're not going to get laid. I was seeing four women when my body was, by my standard, garbage and was borderline unemployed. You will get laid *more* if you look good, but it's not an obstacle.

If you've very overweight, you should cut down to the point where you're 13% and then start builking. The fat loss below 13% and especially below 10-11% is so slow and gradual that the rapid, balls-to-the-wall fat loss you're used to will try your patience. So if you're 200lb at 5'10", get to at lowest 145lb then start bulking. You could even start at 160lb.

So, for a quick heuristic:

Q: Am I at a fat level where I could be construed as "skinny" or "not fat"?
A: Start bulking

Q: Am I fat to the point where I worry about being fat?
A: Cut down to the point where you're "skinny" or "not fat", then start bulking

An easy criticism is that this is too simplistic. If you're very muscular already you probably know how this works and might have cut down to 6-7% or something.

But if you're already muscular, you don't need this guide since you've probably done this before. Also, if you're very muscular, you've probably moved on to advanced shit like recomping. If you're not at least 22 FFMI (really, you should set the threshold at 23), don't consider recomping. If you don't know what FFMI is, don't even think about it. It will sound attractive to you because it sounds like you're going to get the best of both worlds, but you can only have the best of both worlds with enough muscularity to justify something like recomping to begin with. You will make mediocre progress because you haven't mastered cutting/bulking in the first place.

For most people I talk to, they are scared of bulking and don't do it enough. A case study here is Chris (SCWolf). He I think lean bulked for two years straight. Mind you, he started off at a very lucky body fat % (i.e. he was not only very skinny but very low bf), but this enabled him to lean bulk for something like two years straight. After this he was putting up something like 225lb+ benches at 150lb or around that. Most people do not bench 225lb after two years of training and especially not at that bodyweight, so this is very impressive.