Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2382: The 5 Biggest Challenges With Cutting & Bulking

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

5 Biggest Challenges with Cutting & Bulking Defining cutting and bulking. (1:28) Why would someone want to do either one? (4:49) The 5 Biggest Challenges with Cutting & Bulking. #1 - “Feeling” fat or “feeling” small. (7:07) #2 – The hunger or feeling full. (15:03) #3 - The scale lies. (18:02) #4 – How you work out. (25:05) #5 - Overcorrecting (lack of patience). (28:34) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code 25MINDPUMP at checkout for 25% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic** July Promotion: MAPS Split | Sexy Athlete Bundle 50% off! ** Code JULY50 at checkout ** Mind Pump #2287: Bodybuilding 101- How To Bulk And Cut Mind Pump #2372: Five Steps To A Faster Metabolism Mind Pump #2320: Throw Away The Scale! Mind Pump #2210: Best Workouts For Bulking & Cutting Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. Right today's episode, we talk about cutting and bulking the five biggest challenges that they actually have in common. It's a great episode. By the way, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Seed. This is the world's best probiotic hands down. If you want to improve digestion, better

nutrient assimilation, better skin. In some cases probiotics have even been shown to improve mood. Seed is the place you want to go. So go to seed.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code 25MINDPUMP for 25% off your first month's order of seeds daily. Symbiotic. Also we have a special this month on workout programs. MAPS split is half off and the sexy athlete bundle of programs is also half off. If you're interested go to MAPSFITNESSPRODUCTS.COM and then use the code July 50 for that discount. Alright here comes the show. Cutting and bulking, both of them come

with their own challenges. In today's episode, we're gonna talk about the biggest challenges that come along with trying to cut or trying to bulk. Justin's been on a perma-bulk as well. Yeah. It's just living it, man. He's like, cut, what's that?

What's a cut? What's a cut? Sounds like jealousy, you know. You know. All like, cut, what's that? What's a cut? What's a cut? Sounds like jealousy. You know? All right. First, I'll joke aside. I think it's important to define cutting and bulking. And now a lot of people would say cutting is the, is, is trying to lose weight.

Bulking is trying to gain weight, but I like to be more specific. Cutting is trying to lose fat. Bulking is trying to gain muscle. Now I know there's, there are rare cases where people are trying to gain body fat. In the case of, you know, where you have somebody who's too lean, where they're just

not healthy. And there may be times when people are trying to lose muscle, although I don't necessarily understand the reasoning. Maybe you're a pro bodybuilder and you want to get down to a more manageable body weight. Nonetheless, generally speaking, cutting is losing body fat and bulking is getting muscle. And the reason why I wanted to find that is because as we get into the

challenges, the weight part oftentimes becomes one of the big issues. A lot of people trying to lose weight, they don't really have that kind of discretion in terms of like, I just want to lose body fat, you know, specifically, they just want to lose overall weight. Yeah. Well, also, anybody who is trying to build muscle is virtually also bulking. I mean, you have to be in a calorie surplus

in order to build muscle. That's right. And the term bulk is exactly that. And I'm glad you clarified that, because I think what. And the term bulk is exactly that. And I'm glad you clarify that because I think what comes with the term bulk seems to be this, you know, people also think of it as like a, like a, like a bulky up and getting big and massive. And it's like, it's just a bunch of size. Yes. Like meatball. It just sounds that way. And I think it's been a turnoff, especially for a lot of my female clients,

to tell them we're going to go into a bulk because they go, I don't want to look bulky, that's not what I want to do. But it's like, well, yeah, but if we're going to try and build muscle, which we agree, we both, you want to build muscle, right? We have to be in a calorie surplus. And in order for us to do that, we're in a bulk. That's really what it is. And that includes the the female

client that I had that just, oh I want to just build my butt. I'm happy with everything else. I want to keep my waist aside. I want to build my, well guess what? That's a muscle. If we're gonna build that, we're gonna grow that. We need a calorie surplus, which means we need to be in a bulk and that's virtually what that is. Right, so in order to bulk or gain muscle, you know Adam said calorie surplus. That means you're eating more calories and you're burning. And what your body will do if you do all the things right, is it takes those excess calories and then turns it into new tissue, right?

New muscle. And then a cut is the opposite. You have to take in less calories than you burn. There's no way around this, by the way. Now it's an oversimplification in terms of diet and exercise and how the things you eat and how they affect your behaviors and all that stuff in your health. So I know it's an oversimplification. This is where you get the argument.

You'll get some people who say calories in versus calories out, you know, is not real or doesn't work or is false. It's just not true. You have to lose any kind of tissue or to get your body to burn off any kind of tissue. You have to be burning more either at rest or through activity or both than you're consuming. And then again, to gain, your body can't just create tissue out of thin air. That would be magic. It needs extra energy to do so, so that would be consuming more calories

than you're burning. Now, why would somebody wanna do either one? Well, the number one reason would be for aesthetic purposes. That's just the number one. I'm not saying this is the best reason. I'm just saying it's the most common reason, right? The most common reason why somebody would want to

lose body fat is to try to look better. And the reason why someone will want to gain muscle also is to look better, but there's other reasons as well, right? Cutting could be simply for health purposes to improve maybe blood lipids or blood pressure, or to improve mobility, reduce inflammation. Bulking could be simply to improve athletic performance or strength or even health. In some cases, people who under eat a very

poor health. Increase energy. Yeah. Yeah. They need more energy. They need more nutrients. Um, uh, and sometimes either one of them can be used for the opposite goal.

So in other words, somebody may say, I want to lose a bunch of body fat, but then you look at their, what would be called their maintenance calorie number, which would mean the amount of calories that they consume to stay the same weight. And it's already so low. And you go, wow, okay. Your body's running on so low calories because you're inactive and because you've quote unquote slowed your metabolism down through your lifestyle. I think what we should do first is bulk to try to gain some muscle to speed up your metabolism so we have a higher place to cut from. And then cutting sometimes, this is less popular than what I just said, can be used to help somebody with a bulk.

When you get somebody who's been force feeding themselves for so long and their body Just kind of becomes, you know loses sensitivity to extra calories. They're burning everything off. They don't feel good They're stuffing themselves. Hey, let's go on a shortcut resensitize your body and work with your Your psyche a little bit help you give you a little break before we go back in a calorie surplus. So it's not as cut and dry as cut if you want to lose fat, bulk if you want to. Sometimes you use either one to help with the other goal. Now let's get into some of the biggest challenges.

Now these challenges really revolve around, a lot of them revolve around the psychology or the psyche that you have to contend with when you're doing either one. The first one, and this is true for both cutting and bulking, has more to do with the feeling. Okay. So either feeling fat because I'm in a calorie surplus or feeling small because I'm in a calorie deficit. Now, somebody, uh, and this, this really applies to people who. Have struggled with either being overweight or being underweight for a long time. So if you, let's say struggle with being underweight, you're

skinny, you're maybe, you know, what would be labeled as a hard gainer. And you're always trying to gain weight. You're always trying to build muscle. Always trying to gain weight. Always trying to build muscle. And then you do this for years and years and years and you've added weight to your frame. But now you're like, you know, maybe I should get a little leaner. I want to reveal more definition of my body. Or maybe you've just, this insecurity has pushed you

to the point where your body fat is actually a little too high. You're like, okay, I think maybe I'll try a cut. And then you go into a calorie deficit and all of a sudden you feel small and it taps into your insecurity. Oh my God, I don't feel as filled out in my shirt. My muscles don't feel, I'm losing muscle. I'm not getting, you know, I'm going to be small. And then you jump out. Same thing with the person who maybe is, was overweight most of her life and has always dieted, dieted, dieted. And you're like, okay, we need to build some muscle, which means we need a calorie surplus. You put that person in a surplus and now they feel fat.

Oh no, I gotta get out of this. I don't like the way it feels. That's a tough one to get around. I think this is, one of the ones we did not list on here, I wanna make this clear, because I know someone's gonna say it afterwards, is consistency, right? Is obviously, we're assuming this person is consistent

with doing this, that trumps everything. If you're not being consistent with either diet cutting or bulking, you're not going to have success and it's going to make it a challenge. Figuring out that, okay, they're consistent. This is by far the number one deterrent or pitfall for the client that's following a plan is, it almost always taps into that insecurity, regardless of what side you're on. If you're the side that has been obese your whole life and you ask that person to bulk, they already feel super scared of that, just like the skinny person does feel if you put them in a cut and being skinny. And so it almost always will challenge that insecurity one way or another. And I think what ends up happening is a lot of times that's when people give up.

I know it from speaking from experience, my entire journey, I come from a place of the skinny kid who couldn't build muscle, who tried so hard to bulk, bulk, bulk forever. The first time I decided, oh, I reduced calories for a little bit. I bailed on it so quickly because I totally overestimated the muscle I was probably losing and I didn't like the way I looked within the first couple of weeks because I wasn't filling out my shirts. And so I would completely divert or leave or quit. And so I think this happens on both sides of the aisle more often than not.

And I would label this as the greatest challenge when you're putting somebody either through a cut or a bull. Yeah. So to give an example, I'll give some, some personal examples, right? So, um, and I have a lot of these, but I, you know, had a client who came to me who had lost a lot of weight on their own. Now they were at one point very overweight. I think they lost maybe 80 pounds on their own.

And then they came to me like, look, I got this extra, you know, 25 pounds to go. And I want to get rid of this 25 pounds. So I looked at their diet, what they were currently eating. I looked at their routine and I said, okay, here's the deal. You're already eating really low calories. I don't remember what the calories were, but let's just say it's 1500 calories. You're eating 1500 calories a day. You're exercising five days a week.

We need to speed up your metabolism. We need to build more calorie burning machinery. We need to build some muscle. And in order to do that, I have to increase your calories. Now, once we build that muscle, then we can cut your calories again, but now because you're burning more calories, we're not going to have to go down below 1500 calories to get you to lose

that extra 25 pounds. So in the meantime, for the time being, we're going to have to put you in a bulk. Now here's somebody who lost 80 pounds, it took them over a year and a half to do so. And they hear what I'm saying. It sounds logical. They're like, you know what?

You're right. I'm working out a lot. I'm plateaued. I don't want to eat a thousand calories. I'm at 1500, what am I going to do, go down a thousand calories and I'm not going to lose 25 pounds going down to a thousand. I'd have to go even lower, which doesn't sound

feasible at all. Okay. I'll do that with you. And so we did. And they were very challenged with the feeling of feeling fat, of building muscle or feeling their muscles fill up with maybe more fluid, a little bit more glycogen from extra, you know, the carbohydrates we're eating. They didn't, they, they, it was really a scary feeling for them because for them, they were like, Oh my God, like I fought this for

so long and I'm going to go back to where I was before. And it was a constant coaching process. Lack of experience, lack of awareness of how that all kind of plays out. And this is why, even when we're kind of coaching the coaches, it's really about forecasting that for that individual so they can have some kind of idea of like this vision of getting through those psychological barriers. Because you're going to face your insecurities in any of these journeys. You're going to have to face your insecurities. And that's a really hard thing for people to understand when it's like, well, I'm doing the right thing. I'm here. I'm doing the

work, but it just doesn't feel like I'm getting what I want out of it. But you know, that's just a hurdle that you have to work through. I can't stress that point enough that when I figured this out, how common this was, uh, that we all have some sort of an insecurity and that it rears its head in at one stage of this process, right? In your fit and in your overall health fitness journey, you'll probably have a chance to be in either one of these multiple times. And when you do, you're going to be challenged

with it. My ability as a coach and a trainer to communicate that to the client before it reared its head was the difference of that client being successful. Totally. If I didn't, in early years when I didn't know how to do that or that I needed to do that, almost always that client failed. Almost always.

They abandoned. Yeah, for whatever reasons or whatever example, they did not succeed in it. Whereas if I could just communicate that, the success rate was 10 times more likely than if I hadn't done that. So it's so important for coaches and trainers to understand that.

And it sounds like this, it sounds like, okay, you know, I'm glad you're agreeing to what we need to do. Here's what it's gonna feel like. As you do this metabolism boosting bulk to build lean muscle, to set us up better, here's what it's gonna feel like. You're gonna feel bigger.

You're gonna feel like you're getting fatter. You might see your weight go up even a little bit, but that's part of the process. Expect it and it's going to challenge you, but you got to stay with the process because at the end of it, we're going to get you the place you want to get to. Now on the flip side, the person who feels small, that I can attest to myself.

I was like you, Adam, I was a skinny kid and I was always trying to bulk, always trying to bulk. Well, at one point, and I did it really effectively and I got my body fat percentage up a lot higher than I probably should have. And I was also getting some inflammatory issues and stuff like that. So I had to kind of reverse down.

And I remember, you know, week two or three, oh my God, I'm getting smaller. Oh, I'm losing muscle and wanting to freak out and reverse out of it. And I had to be, I had to ignore those feelings to keep pushing through. It actually took me several attempts in order to do so because for me, my insecurity was being skinny. Feeling small was the thing I had to contend with. Whereas with other people, it's feeling, the feeling of fat.

Next is the hunger or the feeling of feeling full. Now this is an interesting one, right? Somebody who's chronically dieting, who's always in that diet stage, who used to be obese, you know, eats low calories. Like they start to get, this is somebody who starts to get used to just kind of being hungry and eating very little.

You put them in a reverse diet or you put them in a bulk and bump their calories, try and build lean tissue. And now their portion size has increased and they're like, I don't like the way this feels. I feel like I'm eating so much food. In fact, I would get this all the time from clients. I feel like I'm eating so much food and they'd say, hold on and wait. You're going to burst.

Hold on and wait, hold on and wait. Now on the other side, the kid or the person who was always skinny and always bulking, now they're trying to cut, they eat, you know, something that's satisfying, but to them that's not normal because normally I eat until I can't breathe anymore and that's a challenge. I think I was supposed to eat more food.

In fact, you went through that recently, Adam, with your current experiment with the GLP-1. No, I mean, I'm still going through it. I recognized it just recently in the GLP-1 and I'm still noticing that I have these underlying behaviors embedded in my old insecurities around my portion size. And for so many years have trained myself to eat two times the meal size. Well, what I know that we teach all the time is that as your lifestyle changes, your calorie maintenance caloric intake changes too.

Like I have significantly less muscle on me than just five years ago. I'm less active than when I was 10, 15 years ago. And because of that, I should change my calories, but my behaviors and habits have still been trained around this double portion size. And so, I've become comfortable with the feeling of full, so comfortable with it that it's weird to eat half the food and feel like, oh, I actually feel satisfied. I feel fine.

I don't feel hungry at all, but oh my God, I have trained myself to push beyond that for so long that I have to now retrain how I feel fine. I don't feel hungry at all, but oh my God, I have trained myself to push beyond that for so long that I have to now retrain how I feel just eating half of that. Yeah. So if you've been like constantly battling with your weight and you've been eating low calorie for a long time and over training and you've heard some of our other podcasts and you are convinced like, okay, now I see I need to speed up my metabolism. I need to bump my calories, eat more protein, lift weights, maybe stop exercising as much as I currently do, get my metabolism to speed up.

And then you, you go and you try, all right, I'm going to increase my calories by 500 and I'm going to eat more protein. And then you go do it. Oh my gosh, this feels like way too much food. I don't like this feeling because you're used to feeling so empty all the time. And again, vice versa. So, uh, that's a very tough psychological feeling, by the way, all of these are challenging until you start to get comfortable with them.

And then what you find is that, okay, I see what's happening, but really gets challenging, especially that first, uh, month or so next up is has to do with the scale, the scale. The scale is a tool. It's got some value, but by itself, it doesn't tell you much at all. It tells you total mass and that's it. Okay. Do you use this, the same example that

I've used for decades with people. It's a silly one, but I'll tell people who want to lose weight so badly, they don't care and I'll say, well, cut your leg off. And then they always laugh because of the absurdity at what I said, but I'll tell people who want to lose weight so badly, they don't care. And I'll say, well, cut your leg off. And then they always laugh because of the absurdity at what I said, but it points to the inaccuracy of the scale. It's just measuring weight.

You know, there was one comedian one time who did a bit about it. And he says that what he does for his diet is he gets, he holds his cat when he gets on the scale and he starves his cat. So the weight of the scale goes down. So the scale lies because if you're really, if you're going, you're trying to cut your calories and you were always that, and you're insecure about getting smaller, seeing the scale go down,

oh, that could really freak you out. And then reverse, you do that, you do that, that bulk to try to speed up your metabolism. You step on the scale, you see it go up three pounds. It could be water weight, it could be hydration. This often happens when you go from really low calories to actually eating enough to build muscle. All of a sudden you'll gain three pounds of, or four pounds of just intramuscular fluid, which is good. It actually makes your muscles fuller, makes them more toned and sculpted and the whole thing. But the scale went up. Oh my

God, I'm freaking out, I'm getting fatter. The scale is the enemy when it comes to this stuff. Unless you combine it with other metrics that allow you to parse out what the weight is. Is it lean mass? Is it fat mass? Yeah, the reason why this is so important is there's a scenario with the same person

who let's say is trying to reduce body fat where they have tremendous success and the scale went down five pounds and they had tremendous success and the scale went up five pounds. That same person with the same goal of trying to reduce body fat, the scale could go down five pounds and it'd be successful. It could go down five pounds and it'd be unsuccessful. It could go up five pounds and be successful and go up five pounds and be unsuccessful. So there is a scenario of the scale going up or down. Let me, let me explain that.

Cause you, some people might be like, what are you talking about? So here's the successful, you're trying to lose body fat. You lose five pounds on the scale. It's five pounds of body fat success, or you get on the scale. You lose five pounds, but it's five pounds of muscle mass fail. In fact, your body fat percentage went up now because the current body fat you have is now a greater percentage of your body weight. And then again, you're trying to gain weight and the scale goes up five pounds. Is it five pounds of fat or

muscle? Or the person who's trying to get leaner, you can gain, if you're trying to lower your body fat percentage and you lose zero pounds of body fat, but you gain five pounds of muscle, you're leaner. Your body fat percentage just went down. So that's how much the scale can lie to you. And you need to understand that because a lot of people will set their mood, will set their whole day and the success of what they're doing based on what the scale set and will ignore how they feel their performance and what is actually such an emotional response to and oh yeah with clients when they're feeling so good and they're

energized and they're stronger and you know even their their clothes on certain levels like fit them are really good but they step on the scale and it's that increased and it just immediately just shuts all those other signals off. And it's, that's why it's just been such an opponent to, um, the whole process itself in terms of just like getting on board and being positive all the way through. It's, it's one of those that's like you say, can fluctuate. You could have a good positive measure of it, or you could have a negative measure of it depending on what's going on with your body. And I think what's important to note, because I'm sure when Sal broke down what I was explaining

even deeper and explained the scenario where somebody could lose five pounds on the scale and it be all muscle, I'm sure there's people listening going like, oh yeah, but I mean, that's probably rare. Actually, it's very common. It's actually super common that the scale moves in what the client thinks is the right direction, but it negatively impacts them, or that the scale moves in what they think is a positive direction, but it actually negatively impacted us. I mean, there's a lot of times where, and that's because clients have a tendency to over overdo either way right so if they are

their goal is to build muscle and they know they need to be in a calorie surplus all of a sudden their calorie surplus is a thousand calories every single day and they probably only needed about 200 calories at most every single day in order to do that and then because they added so much more yeah the scale went up five pounds the direction they thought they wanted to go, but they put on four fat and one of muscle. And so- They could have just put on one of muscle. That's right.

And so, and the same thing is true in the opposite direction where somebody, they just want to lose 80 pounds so bad. And so they cut their calories dramatically and the scale goes down five pounds and they're like, yes, I'm moving the right direction. But they find out four pounds of it was muscle and only one pound of it was fat.

Well, why was it? Well, that's because they cut so dramatically. They reduced their calories so low and probably hitting macro targets like protein and over-trained the body. And yeah, it lost weight. It was catabolic, but it lost as much or more muscle, which is not the direction we want to go.

This happens all the time. Not only does it happen, I mean, the studies will show this, right? Just people who diet will lose a good 30, 40% of muscle on the diet, unless you combine it with strength training and, you know, a high protein intake. So, I mean, you again, using myself as an example, when I was a kid trying to gain weight at all costs, I would actually gear myself or direct myself towards foods that caused water retention. This is how much I tied everything to the

scale. It's like, oh, I gained more weight at the end of the day if I eat pizza, you know, as if pizza is like this magical muscle building thing. No, it just made me hold water because it was so high in sodium and carbohydrates, which will make you hold water. And I would do that. I would literally gear myself towards these foods that would make me the heaviest at night. And really when I look back as an adult, like, well, these are all foods that bloated me. And that's why I went towards them and it didn't put more muscle on me. It actually made things much more challenging. Now if you combine the scale with consistent body fat testing and you look at performance and you look at

metrics like how you feel then you get a much more complete picture but if it just becomes about the scale or if you put the scale above body fat percentage and you put it above performance and you put it above you know metrics in terms of how you feel now you're a real problem because when I look when I list all those things out the scale is actually less important than all of those. Body fat percentage being more important, being much more accurate telling you what's going on. Performance is way more important. How you feel is way more important. The scale is actually at the bottom of all of those metrics. In combination with those though, and put in the

right order, it can be valuable. Unfortunately, people typically just use a scale and value it above everything else. All right. Next up is how people work out. People make a huge mistake in particular when cutting. Anytime, almost anytime somebody goes on a diet to lose body fat, they also simultaneously increase the amount of exercise that they do or bump up the volume. This is a big mistake because if you're currently working out now,

let's say you're working out now about four days a week, your strength training four days a week and you're doing a good job, you're like, okay, I think this is a sweet spot, I'm getting good results, I feel good. Now I'm going to go on a diet to get leaner and you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to add like two more days of running to my routine to help me lose weight. Lowered reduced calories means you have less nutrients and less resources for recovery. The last thing you should do to increase the amount of training, uh, volume or

training damage that you put on your body. In fact, one of the smart things to do when you go on a cut is reduce your training volume. In fact, you could take, I could take any athlete with their current training volume, that's perfect. And I could drop their calories low enough to make whatever they're doing, over train them. That's a fact.

I could do that with anybody, right? You can make anybody over train, even if they're doing the perfect workout by bringing their calories low enough to make whatever they're doing, over train them. That's a fact. I could do that with anybody, right? You can make anybody over train, even if they're doing the perfect workout by bringing their calories low. Well, and also considering all the methods possible to preserve muscle. So focusing a little bit more on strength training, which is something that I think it sounds kind of obvious, but I still see just the common denominator of people just going straight for cardio when they're cutting down because for them it's overall energy expenditure. So that's the common thought is like, how can I just burn calories and how can I burn it out?

Like I need to burn the fat off when in fact you need to preserve the muscle because that's what we're trying to keep and then also replace your body with your composition, mainly being muscle to fat. This is so common, it's still prevalent in the professional level of competing, which is in the sport of building physiques, which is crazy to me. Yeah.

You still, I mean, I remember seeing my competition like this, like, I mean, when you, a lot of the pros would go in the same gym and workout. So you see everybody's kind of routine and what they're doing. You know how many weeks they are out from a show. And so it's pretty good idea to get it, or it's pretty easy to know that because you have a show that's coming up, say in town and you know that that's what everyone's prepping for. So I know what phase they're all in and you would see this like, okay, everyone's transitioning. We're four weeks out from show,

and I see them ramping up intensity, I see them ramping up cardio like crazy, and I'm like, I know you're in a super low calorie diet right now, like what are you doing? Like you're only gonna sacrifice, you've already put this body in this like permanent catabolic state, so it's gonna be eating away.

Like you pushing it harder than what it was used to being pushed when it was fed even more is most certainly gonna result in you losing muscle too. Slowing your metabolism down and you bringing a lesser physique than what you already currently have. So it's super common. If it's common there, where they're supposed to be the elite in the arena of bulking and cutting,

and you're still seeing it happen. So you most certainly see it in the average person. Always. Now, if you're going to increase volume, the time to increase it appropriately is when you go into calorie surplus. Now you have extra resources and energy to heal, recover, and adapt from the extra training. Now, this doesn't mean you should always increase your volume when you're bulking or the amount of training you're doing when you're bulking. It just means if you do, you should probably do it when your calories are higher. Definitely not when you drop your calories.

All right, lastly, it's a big mistake, and I know, Adam, you wanted to add this one, I'm glad we did, is over-correcting. This one is huge. I think this one comes in combination with the scale or with the first one, which is the same. It pairs well with your first point, the feeling because normally what ends up happening before someone just fully abandon ship and quits the program or quits what they're doing is

they over correct first. They first freak out because the insecurity point you made, whether that either side, whether it's, oh my God, I'm too skinny. So then you start to eat a bunch to fill back out, to feel better temporarily and you mess up the diet. Or the other is true. You all of a sudden feel like, oh my God, I'm getting fat when you're just filled out.

And then you cut your calories and ramp up cardio the next day. So I would say one is number one point, number one most common. And then I would say this is the second most common and it's because of the first one, it causes this over-creation. Yeah. So I like to use this visual, right? You're driving on a road and it's wet, it's raining and the car starts to

slide a little bit to the left. And so you jerk the steering wheel to the right. Yeah. Now you spin the car completely out or flip the car, right? That's not how it works. If you are moving in the wrong direction, a slight adjustment is appropriate, but people tend to overcorrect when they see one measurement or one way in, or one thing that doesn't look like it's moving in the right

direction. So what do they do? Oh, I've been doing this bulk, trying to build muscle. Oh my God, the scale went up four pounds. I'm going to fast for 24 hours or I'm gonna cut my calories way down just over correct or vice versa Um, what you should do is wait until you get at least two or three Consecutive measurements that show yeah, you're moving in a direction or not before you change direction over correcting is almost never A good idea. Yeah

I had a rule for myself and my clients when competing was that we needed to have at least two to three check-ins that were moving in the negative direction before we would adjust course. Just because in so many situations, I have seen a check-in that we were doing, say weekly or bi-weekly come in and, oh, wow, it looks like we, you know, didn't gain any muscle. We didn't lose any bifat. We kind of plateaued a little bit right here. And then the next week, all of a sudden we see this great positive response. Like, oh wow, shoot, we put on a pound or

two pounds. Like that's awesome. Or vice versa if we're going the other direction. I'm trying to cut and that person sees no body fat percentage has gone down at one check-in and then the next check-in, it's still maybe there. And then the third one also, we're now we're moving. Right. So, um, I always wanted to see at least two or three of our check-ins, which would be your measurement circumference, body fat and scale, using all those metrics and going, okay, is it not moving in the right direction? Okay, let's check. Let's see if it's that way on the next check-in. Water, water weight can make it go up or down.

It could be a fluke. It could be the measurement itself. Oftentimes these measurements, especially body fat tests. Stress. You could have a stressful week. You could have a stressful, holding extra water. You had a day where you're just a little higher in sodium the day before, and then all of a sudden you

drank two extra glasses of water the next day. I mean, there's a lot of different things, especially when you're paying attention and you're tracking this stuff and you are checking in, doing body fat, every week to two weeks. Like that's a very small, our change when we were talking about body composition is very small and incremental. And so having a day- Being able to measure it accurately in a week is very difficult.

Very, very tough. So always give yourself a couple check-ins before you course correct. Now look, we have a guide on how to lose body fat. It's free. You can find it at mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump.

Justin, I'm at Mind Pump to Stefan. Oh, and Adam is at Mind Pump. Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle

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