Q&A - Is Bulking and Cutting REQUIRED (vs. Body Recomp) for a Great Physique? | Bonus Episode

Can you transform your physique without the traditional bulk and cut cycles? Or is this possible with body recomposition at maintenance calories?

Today we have a question from from Wyatt about whether you can only make progress with your physique while bulking and cutting rather than attempt body recomposition. He also asks whether there is a difference between staying at maintenance calories and body recomp.

In this episode, we explore how new or detrained lifters might benefit from this approach and the limitations of its effectiveness. We also hit on food tracking, protein intake, and training intensity, while considering the emotional and social implications of constantly oscillating between bulking and cutting phases.

We then tackle the pros and cons of the bulking and cutting method for physique development, establishing healthy habits during a maintenance phase, obsessive behaviors and stress, especially for those susceptible to yo-yo dieting, and time-efficient muscle gains.

These questions are from the Friday LIVE Q&A in the free Wits & Weights Facebook community. Just post a specific question relevant to your unique, individual situation and have it answered in these live Q&As.

👉 Experience it yourself by joining the FREE Wits & Weights Facebook group.

Episode resources

• Ep 136: How to Maintain a Lean Physique Year-Round (Without Cuts or Bulks)

Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:00

Do you have to bulk and cut, bulk and cut if you want to improve your physique, or can you just remain at maintenance and achieve body recomposition Plus? What is the difference between maintenance, calories and body composition? If there is one, find out on today's Weekend Q&A. Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast. I'm your host, philip Pape, and this twice-a-week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry. So you can look and feel your absolute best, let's dive right in. So you can look and feel your absolute best, let's dive right in. Welcome to another weekend Q&A where we answer one or more questions posted in our free Facebook group, which you can join anytime using the link in the show notes. Enjoy today's Q&A. All right, wyatt's question. I'm curious to learn more about the magic of maintenance that you and Alan have talked about and how it might align with body composition. So Wyatt's referring to a term that I mentioned a few times in the past. One episode that was all about maintenance was called all right, episode 136, how to maintain a lean physique year round without cuts and bulks. So I suggest anybody revisit that episode as a prerequisite to this. So his question is maintenance, essentially body recomposition, given that you are eating near maintenance calories plus or minus 10%, eating around a gram of protein per pound of body weight and training hard on a solid four to six day per week program. So the things you're doing already are the things we want to do, right, you're tracking and knowing where you're eating, you're having sufficient protein, you're training hard. Other than that, I would throw sleep on the list and you're pretty good of the 90% there. If they are the same, meaning maintenance and body recomp, would you recommend that over bulking or cutting? If they're not the same, what are the differences? What can you expect from eating at maintenance longer term? It seems to me that if you train for a great physique, you're not making progress without bulking and cutting. What's the argument against that? So it really is one question, but he provided a lot of great context and then he provides more detailed context. So thank you. This is a great example of an ask Philip question Context.

Philip Pape: 2:29

I'm following through with the cut phase you outlined in our strategy call. Bulking is fun because there's a lot of flexibility to eat what I want in social situations without feeling too restricted While cutting. It can get somewhat discouraging to make trade-offs in social settings, like when I ate my calories for the day but friends invited us out to ice cream to celebrate something. Oh, you're hitting me right there on the ice cream. Or we go out to eat but I have to plan ahead for a couple of days and eat accordingly or otherwise, slow down progress on my fat loss goal. It's enhancing my discipline, but I don't think I want cutting to be frequent. One to two times per year I'm thinking you're saying no more than one to two times per year occurrence in my life, lol. All right, let's tackle each of these pieces.

Philip Pape: 3:09

So the first question is maintenance. The main question is is maintenance essentially body recomposition? And the way I'll say it is. You can achieve body recomposition at maintenance and that's the most common way. It's probably done, because most people trying to get body recomp are doing it partly because they don't want to gain or I'm not going to say they don't want to lose weight, but they don't want to. They don't want to gain weight building muscle. I think that's generally the reason they're like well, I don't want to gain fat and gain weight, building muscle. So I'm going to try to body recomp and so for new lifters or detrained lifters who are really responsive to that muscle building signal, I think maintenance and body recomp can be a very effective strategy at first for maybe two to three months at most.

Philip Pape: 3:56

And it's true, you know, we have to be doing all the other things right. We have to be tracking our food so that we know we're at maintenance, because that maintenance is going to shift. That's the thing about maintenance, right, it is going to shift. You have to be consuming the protein you said a gram per pound, but even 0.8 or 0.7 grams per pound is kind of the minimum and then engaging in consistent, challenging training, not necessarily four to six times a week, but whatever is necessary to get you that stimulus, as long as you're training with intensity and proper execution right, really getting the most out of your training hard. So under those conditions you can definitely build muscle slowly while slowly losing fat.

Philip Pape: 4:36

And the main reason is that the muscle building signal is so high that by maintaining your weight you're actually gaining weight and losing weight at the same time. I know it sounds like the same thing, but it's like. Your body is using the resources to build muscle quickly because you have this new signal coming in. It's never experienced before, it's highly amplified and it has no problem taking the protein and diverting it over to muscle protein synthesis. But because you're at maintenance now, you don't have enough energy for everything else in your body, so it will then lose fat. So, ironically, or interestingly, being at maintenance in that scenario is kind of like being in a slight deficit, in a way from a fat loss perspective, in that your body is giving up this energy storage to help build the muscle.

Philip Pape: 5:26

But once you've exhausted that after about, I'll say, three months as a new lifter, maybe six months it slows down tremendously, and so could you continue re-comping at maintenance indefinitely. I'm going to say generally not, unless you think of it in terms of many, many years. So, and that's what makes it inefficient. Okay, however, here's what. Here are the scenarios where it could be preferred. Number one you have already achieved some level of physique that you're pretty happy with. You're satisfied with the current muscle mass and body fat, but you just want to keep, you know just tiny refinements over time and you want to just maintain that physique. Okay, makes sense. Uh, the second thing is you want to.

Philip Pape: 6:12

The second reason is you, for psychological reasons, want to take a break from the stresses, you know, not just psychological but physiological, of bulking and cutting, and both have their stresses, right, we all know the stresses from cutting being a lack of energy. It's harder to sleep, you know hormones go wreak havoc. You just feel hungry, right, all those things. You lose strength, you lose uh, your, your lifts may regress. All of those negatives I shouldn't say negatives, I should say trade-offs, because the benefit you get is a massive reduction in your fat. And then there's a stressor of building, which is, for some people it's uncomfortable to keep pushing the food and the calories right, and the concern and the fears over gaining fat, and maybe you're going too fast, maybe you're going too slow, like there's other stressors there as well.

Philip Pape: 7:01

The other reason you might like maintenance is that lifestyle factors which you kind of already alluded to, like these social engagements. It's challenging to sustain a deficit in those scenarios. I'll say challenging. Only you kind of make it harder on yourself when you have a very active social life and choose to do all those things while in fat loss. But it can be done and that's why when we talk about fat loss. It helps when you can do it in a period that is kind of boring, right, it doesn't have a lot of that going on or when you can make the sufficient trade-offs, or when you go at a fairly slow or conservative rate and it's not that big a deal to just do these refeeds and these breaks along the way. Even if you are going aggressively, you can still plan in deviations and refeeds and breaks and just know that it's going to take longer, no big deal.

Philip Pape: 7:49

However, some people don't want to do that. Some people and even in a surplus I could see I guess it's not that big of an issue in a surplus, right, because you kind of always have those extra calories to play with. The one situation would be in a situation where it's hard to get food within a given day, for whatever reason, kind of have the opposite approach, but I don't think that's big of a deal in surplus. It's more of a problem in a deficit. So if you don't want to deal with that um and you'd rather just take your long time doing it, you can do maintenance and then I guess tied to that is, if you want this, like you kind of want to do intuitive eating and you don't want to. Not only do you want to restrict your food, which we never want to do, you also may not want to track and you kind of are okay hovering uh, between like plus or minus three pounds of a certain body weight. You could do that, quote unquote, intuitively. This assumes you've already gone through some process of building muscle, losing fat in the past and you've tracked before, and you kind of know what it takes to stay there and have enough protein and all of that. But that would be another reason for a little bit more relaxed approach. So that's what might be preferred.

Philip Pape: 8:56

Let's continue with your question here this could end up being a podcast episode actually the differences between maintenance and traditional bulking and cutting and then the long-term expectations of that. So we know that maintenance involves eating at a calorie level that keeps you at a certain weight right, involves eating at a calorie level that keeps you at a certain weight right, and instead of focusing on changing weight, you're focusing on changing body composition and and so now you kind of have to ignore the scale, insofar as you know you're maintaining weight. Besides that, you kind of ignore the scale and you pay more attention to your circumference measurements, your protein, your lifts, and that could get frustrating for some people because it's going to be a much slower change over time. So the whole like getting quick wins approach is harder at maintenance. So that's one difference in that bulking and cutting give you much faster change, a lot of quick wins. It's easier to see progress. The tolerance on measurements is bigger because now things will change faster, right, and so being in a calorie surplus, being in calorie deficit kind of gives you this nice focused direction to go and therefore all the variables are changing that you're measuring right. Now, on the flip side again, when you're maintaining, um, there's a, there's a comfort to being able to stabilize things a bit. So you can kind of get in this mode of well, things aren't changing. So I don't have to be all on top of all these variables. I could just relax, I could adhere to a routine with my diet, with my training. My body weight might fluctuate up and down, but I'm cool with that because again, it just stays within that norm and this could again help your physical and psychological well-being between them and psychologically.

Philip Pape: 10:50

But then you know, is there an argument against bulking and cutting to make progress? I would say that it's mainly limited to newer lifters and detrained folks. Um, I think. Well, okay, the only thing that comes to mind why? Is, if you are susceptible to like yo-yo dieting and the bulking and cutting like exacerbates some obsessive behavior you might have that hasn't been resolved and that creates then unnecessary stress and that potentially exacerbate metabolic adaptation and yada, yada. That could be a problem. But then that's assuming that you haven't gone through a period of maintenance first to help resolve those things and build healthy habits first, which is what I would do as a coach right with you, and you kind of have gone through that process.

Philip Pape: 11:34

Your question is premised on the idea that you've set your behaviors up for success already. So if you're prone to like this extreme up and down, crash diet, yo-yo diet, and you haven't resolved that at maintenance first, that would be an argument for not bulking and cutting. But the argument for it is simply time, efficiency and the knowledge that you are actually getting toward your goal fairly quickly. And I'll be honest, like if you mapped out two people's journey over, let's say, a three-year period, I'm pretty confident that the person who bulks and cuts is going to be able to build a lot more muscle in that period? Maybe not over 10 years, but do you want to wait that long? That's the key, as you're getting older and all the negatives that are pushing against you because you're getting older.

Philip Pape: 12:22

I think I covered everything. Let me think here. What else do I have in my notes? So the flexibility of being at maintenance, the magic of maintenance, means you can kind of enjoy your life, not worry too much about the change that you would have to track with bulks and cuts, and that could be liberating for some people. Um, and that could be a great place to to maintain or enhance right your sustainable habits, where the fitness and nutrition stuff that you're doing is just part of your life. It's not dominating it, like some of us might think. That bulks and cuts now you're really just always in that mode.

Philip Pape: 12:59

I personally love the bulks and cuts because of the variety of it. I would get tired, I would almost get impatient being at maintenance for too long because I would think things are not changing. So I think if you want to be at maintenance and for like a year and see and report back and let us know how it went, that would be the ultimate answer to your question. But if you want the most time, efficient results, it would be bulking and cutting with the proper tracking, measuring all the right things and doing all the right things so they all come together. And so that would naturally lead into join Wits and Weights Physique University, because we teach you all those things there and we help you implement it along the way, and I don't know why, if you're interested in joining at this point, but we'd love to have you there and there's a lot of really cool courses that will level up your education. And in fact, there's one course that I didn't even show today. That will be the foundational course of the whole program, called Physique Foundations, and in that course we are covering all of these topics body composition, cuts and bulks, the nutrition, the training, even a little bit on the like, not physique competition per se, but like if you want to get ready for a specific moment, like you know, a photo shoot or something like that, how would you prepare? So it's got everything for physique development on the nutrition and training and lifestyle side.

Philip Pape: 14:23

Whitson, weights Physique University. Go to whitsonweightscom. Slash physique Other than that. That is our Ask, philip to for today. That's it for today's weekend. Q and a bonus episode. Remember this is just a small part of the weekly ask Philip live Q and a in the wits and weights Facebook group, which you can join totally free using the link in the show notes. I invite you to join us as we improve our health and physique together. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits and Weights. If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them and make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.