Weights and Plates Podcast - #8 - How to Program During a Cut

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

Starting Strength Coaches Robert Santana and Trent Jones discuss how to modify your programming during a cut. A cut implies that an athlete is in a caloric deficit to produce weight loss, and specifically body fat loss. Whenever you put yourself in a caloric deficit, you are essentially under-recovered, meaning that you have less ability to recover and adapt to intense training sessions in the gym.   However, we still want to preserve muscle mass during the cut as much as possible. Consequently, most athletes will have to modify their programming to lower the intensity of their exercises while increasing the volume of the exercises. When and how much the program changes depends on the athlete and their level of training advancement. A novice lifter, for example, may not need to modify their programming at all, especially if they are already overweight. They essentially already have a surplus of resources they can draw from their fat stores, and as a novice, the relative intensity of their workouts is not that high yet.   For an intermediate lifter, it depends on energy levels. As energy levels begin to drop, the program needs to shift toward lesser intensity and greater volume. Santana often shifts the compound lifts from sets of 3's or 5's to sets of 10, which produce a little more hypertrophy due to the longer time under tension during the set.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

welcome to the weights and plates podcast i am robert santana i'm your host joined by trent jones my co-host good evening well it's evening here it's four here that's kind of evening i mean that's dark oh yeah it's dark in the winter, right? It's weird. Pacific coast time zone. Well, we're, we're Arizona time. We don't, we don't adhere to daylight savings. You know, you don't identify as Pacific coast. We don't identify as Pacific coast. We don't identify as mountain either. We're just Arizona time. Arizonans. Yeah. That's like, um, uh, our, our buddy Scott Hambrick, his wife is, um,

is part Cherokee. Mm-hmm. And, um, sometimes she runs on Cherokee time. Are they not daylight savings either? Well, Cherokee time is flexible.

Ah. It's whatever it needs to be. You know, if they say they're going to be there in a couple hours and that, it could be two hours. It could be seven. It could be tomorrow. Yeah. I run on that time too. I'm'm not i'm not cherokee but i run on that okay yeah so it was my girlfriend so yeah uh today let's oh you know i was on the starting strength boards

i think last night i was responding to a thing and the guy's like can you talk about cutting and lifting or let me pull up his post exactly be very interested in a deeper dive into modifying programming when you go on a weight cut both for my own use and potentially for clients i ever become if i ever become a coach um i think this is a good topic to talk about because i think that uh it's something that you get a lot of questions about, and you get, I mean, how do I word this? Things kind of get discombobulated because you have two things going on, right? Yeah. So I kind of read that as there's really two questions embedded in there.

Exactly. Yeah. One is how do I cut? Because we've talked about like big picture, how you recomp, you know, how you change your body fat percentage and your muscle mass distribution, all that kind of stuff. We haven't really talked about like actually cutting, like what, like in hard numbers,

like what kind of calorie target should you go for? How long should you be cutting? How long should you stay in maintenance? And then there's the second question, which he asked explicitly, which is how do I program while I'm in the process of cutting? Yeah, I think it's a very good question.

And it kind of goes back to some of the stuff we've been talking about. First, you know, this guy is obviously training, but, you know, some of the people that are listening to me may not be training, whether they know it or not. Just, you know, let's, I'm going to probably hit this in almost every podcast, every chance I get, because I'm on a crusade against it. Number one, are you exercising or are you training? This is the important question. Just because you step into the weight room doesn't mean you're training. I think this is an important thing to understand. Just because you pick up a dumbbell or a barbell or get on a machine doesn't mean you're training. There's a lot of silly things you can do with those things. We've all seen it at Planet Fitness, CrossFit, and various other places.

I think the most important thing to answer before diving into that is whether you are actually training or whether you are exercising. This also goes for someone like me. I'm always trying to add, but my workouts have been kind of shitty because of lifestyle stuff, right? Right. So, I'm trying to train, but I guess I am by definition, but I don't see a PR coming anytime soon, you know? Right. Yeah, I think the key with, like, if we're talking about training, so if you read Starting Strength, the book, then training is defined as adding weight to the, in the context of strength training, right? Adding weight to the bar on a regular basis and that being the goal, right? Now, you can do that when you're first starting out, you can do that every single workout, but by the time you get one, two, three, four or five years in, uh, you may actually not actually be able to add weight to the bar very often at all.

Um, if you get real advanced, maybe once a year, but the goal is still trying to add weight to the bar. I think we could like extend that more generally. Let's see if you agree with me. Your workouts have to get harder over time to be training. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If we're talking about conditioning, right? So, so if you want to become more conditioned, that means that you have to go harder than you have been in the past. So if you go and do Tabatas on the echo bike, that's great. Eventually you're going to adapt to that and you have to do either more tabatas or do them harder like put more output more wattage or whatever but it has to get progressively harder

no matter what modality you're doing that goes for anything you know if you're trying to improve it any type of skill whether you know it's weight lifting or you know drawing or you know acting or playing golf or playing basketball, if you're trying to get better at something than you currently are, you're going to have to push yourself beyond the point you're currently at. That is the essence of training, you know. Skill development requires some sort of overload. And, you know, I've seen it academically. I've seen it in the weight room. I've seen it as a competitive swimmer. And they all have that in common. It has to get harder. And if it doesn't get harder, you stagnate,

unless you're a rank novice where anything works, right? Right, right. Yeah. So let's assume that you are a trainee and you are trying to hit PRs this year. And now you're asking me about cutting. Okay. Well, if you're a novice, you can probably do both at the same time. So let's just kind of start with levels of advancement. If you are exercising, you can just cut your calories back and lose weight. And it's probably going to have little impact as long as you keep your protein levels up, because you're not really pushing yourself. You're just exercising and going in there to feel a certain way. And that's fine. That actually makes things a lot simpler.

If you're a trainee, and let's say you're kind of where I was, I wanted a 500 deadlift, and I wanted to not be a fat guy doing it. So I had to basically, I didn't do this on purpose, but this is essentially what happened and what would happen no matter what at that point in my life, is I had to put training in the back seat so that I can get down to the weight I wanted to get down to then increase my calories to such a level that I can effectively recover from my workouts and do more and then I was able to pull 500 at 175 but I couldn't cut from 205 to 175 and have my deadlift go from, what was it at the time? I think I was at 455 at the time. I couldn't have it go from 455 to 500. That said, I got it from 455 to 475 when I lost the first 20 pounds. And then when I lost 20 more, it went down to 440. And then when I gained back 10,

it went up to 500. So, you know, there's a fine line. You know, if you're fat enough, you can, you know, lose some pounds and, you know, add some weight to the bar. But, you know, there's a fine line. You know, if you're fat enough, you can, you know, lose some pounds and, you know, add some weight to the bar. But, you know, it all comes back to context, right? If you're a real big fat guy, you can probably do both at the same time up to a point. If you're a real big fat guy squatting 800, that doesn't apply to you, right? Yeah. So advancement matters here. The novice is going to be able to cut weight if he has weight to cut. So no, not the skinny, fat, 165-pound guy who's 5'8 and 35 years old. That doesn't apply to you because you don't need to lose fat. You need to gain muscle.

Right. You don't have enough LBM, which is lean body mass. You don't have enough muscle. You are under-muscled. So you thinking that your soft belly is a problem and that you should be able to lose that fat while getting strong, that's not going to happen. You're just going to get skinny, weak. Your libido is going to go in the tank. Your dick's not going to work.

It's going to be a nightmare. Right. It's true. Because you're going to get too fucking skinny. On the other hand, the guy who's 5'8", 250 and has been sitting on the couch, you know, eating White Castle sliders, you know, because I'm a big White Castle fan. Rip says Cheetos. I like White Castle sliders. White Castle sliders.

And they're so fucking greasy. Oh, I know. That's why they're sliders. That's how they slide down. That's how I was taught. They slide on one end, not the other. But, you know, they just opened the first White Castle here in Arizona two years ago, I think. Oh, man.

And I went once because we shot, went out target shooting late out in the woods. And afterwards, I'm freaking hungry. And Arizona is not like Chicago where you have all this 24-hour stuff. Everything kind of shuts down, you know. And I remember that White Castle was there. I'm like, well, as far as I know, a lot of them are 24 hours. So I'm guessing that it's probably 20. We drive up there. Sure enough, it was 24 hour with a double drive through. It was real fancy one, man. And, uh, first slider I had in like probably 15 years, 10 years, something like that. Well, no, no, I took Christy when we

first started dating. I took her to White Castle in Chicago. So it would have been five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, four or five years ago. Don't they come in, like, bags of, was it 10, 8? 30. 30 is the crave case. You can get one at a time, and then there's a four-pack, there's a two-pack, you know? That's impressive. No, when I was in high school, we would go out to the teen dance clubs

in Chicago, and we'd get out at, like, 1, 2 in the morning, and we'd go to White Castle, and me and my buddy Eric would try to kill a Crave Case. This was obviously before I knew anything about nutrition. I was like 16. Right. But the Crave Case is 30 White Castles in this cardboard container that's in the shape of a briefcase. Well, did you do it? Did you knock him out? Oh, yeah, we did.

We were teenagers. Our metabolisms, we were swimmers, too, so like, you know. Yeah, this is good. We got the classic, you know, high school football coach, well, high school swimming coach for us, but, you know, he was actually pretty similar. He was a great guy, still, I follow him on Facebook. He has some pretty cool posts, but he was a hothead and was real hard on us, and it was good, you know. I had on us, and it was good.

I had a good experience from it, learned a lot. But he would tell us standard nutrition advice that most sport coaches would give because it's what they were told by somebody who's supposed to know this stuff. And I don't fault them. It wasn't bad advice. It was partially true. He would say, you've got to eat 5,000 calories. You're a swimmer. Well, probably would have been better advice for that sport was, hey, man, you got to eat like 600 carbs a day, you know?

Right. Yeah. Because, you know, you tell a 16-year-old to eat 5,000 calories, we're going to think immediately donuts, McDonald's, french fries, you know? Oh, yeah. We're probably going to eat 300 grams of fat and like 200 carbs. Right. And I didn't see a connection with diet and swimming performance because I was eating stuff like, you know, fatty, like chili. And I'd get like, what was it, like breakfast burritos and McDonald's and, you know, just high-calorie, high-fat food because, you know, nine calories per gram, right? It's dense.

It's dense. So if you're going to coach high school swimmers, you tell them to eat 700 carbs a day because that alone right there is, what, 2,800 calories? And they're going to get the other 3,000 from fat and protein easily. Right. Anyways, we got a little bit off track there. But, yeah, the fat guy who's sitting on the couch killing a crave case by himself is not the same as the fat guy who's squatting 800 at the ipf worlds you know so we're not talking to him right we're not talking to big ray williams we're talking to the guy who you know said i'm fat i'm decided i need to go to the gym you know yeah he really needs to change his diet but you know most people think they need to go to the gym so you know he's going to lose 100 pounds and get strong in the process probably, most likely.

But what happens when you take somebody who's now an intermediate? Let's say you took a skinny guy or skinny fat guy. You know, skinny fat guy, in my experience, 10 to 20 pounds of weight gain done over a steady period of time typically puts them in a good place at the end of their novice linear progression. Yeah. That's been my experience with it. Skinny guy needs to gain like sometimes 40 to 70 pounds, depending on how skinny we're talking, you know? But let's say you're not a novice anymore.

You've been doing this a while, probably like the guy who posted that. He's a frequent flyer on the boards. So I'm guessing he's probably an intermediate at this point. He probably has a training log there. Sorry, dude, didn't look at it yet. But, you know, you've been lifting for a while, you know, you've made some progress and you're like, okay, well, I need to cut. So how do I program for that? Well, it's simple. I may have said this here or in other podcasts. Training intensity, which means, you know, percentage of max. So the best way, when I use the word intensity, I'm like, how close are you to going as hard as you possibly can at the activity? Whether it's a sprint, a squat, a clean and jerk, or a deadlift, right?

Yep. If you're going as fast and as hard as you can, that's the highest intensity, right? So the closer you get to maxing out at something, the higher your intensity. Well, I've said this before. Intensity has a linear relationship with carbohydrate needs. So the more intense the activity, the more carbs you need, the more creatine you can benefit from as well, because high intensity bursts of activity primarily use creatine. You use a little bit of carbs, a little bit of fat too, but mostly it's a creatine ATP type deal for the first three to five seconds, maybe 10 seconds, you know, depending on the textbook you're citing. And then you start breaking down some carbs from there. So because of this, this is incompatible with dieting because dieting, you have to reduce calories. And, you know, you might be able to pull a bunch of fat out and drop 500 calories just from taking your fat from that 150 to, you know, 75 or whatever, right? You're dropping 75

grams of fat. That's, what's that? 75 times nine. That's almost 750 calories, right? Right. Which is a lot. You know, I probably wouldn't drop somebody quite that much. I'm just throwing some arbitrary numbers out there, right? You typically go around 500 calories. Well, eventually you're going to have to cut carbs. And when you cut carbs, now your goals are incompatible. You want to get strong, but you want to cut. And when you cut, you're putting yourself in a situation of under recovery because you're not getting enough food. Food is part of the recovery process. Carbs are part of the recovery process. Protein is part of the recovery process, and so is fat to a certain extent. And once you do that, now you have competing goals

here. You're doing one thing that's going to inhibit the other thing at some point. So there's a few ways to address that, and that's what we're kind of going to talk about today. Yeah, so I want to say this. I think we've talked about it before, but I want to reiterate this. When we're talking about training advancement and strength, let's just talk about strength training specifically. on your squat and deadlift in particular is because the stress of the workout was too great for you to recover from in order to do it again, the next workout. So in the novice, you know, program, if you, if you are squatting on Monday and you squat, I'm just going to make up a number 275 for three sets of five and you roll in Wednesday and you, you, all of a sudden what, what generally happens is like, it started at two 50, you know, you, you squat two 50 and then you're like, man, that was pretty tough. And the next day you're feeling like you're feeling it. And then Wednesday

rolls around and you get two 55, but it's like, man, I'm just not quite where I was at two 50. Like when I hit two 50, but, but you keep rolling and you get to 260, 265. And all of a sudden, every time you walk in the gym, you are not as fresh as you were a couple of weeks ago when you walk in the gym. And that sort of residual fatigue from workout to workout builds up. And what's happening there is simply that in our model, the stress recovery adaptation model, that in our model, the stress recovery adaptation model, you are dosing yourself with more stress in a given workout than you can recover from until you get to the next workout, right? So that's why the novice program essentially stops working. Now, there's another piece of that, which is that you could also, the other reason it

could stop working is that you didn't give yourself enough stress to cause an adaptation. And I think that's typically what happens with the upper body lifts in a novice progression is that the stress is not high enough in order to cause further adaptation. But with the squat and the deadlift in particular, for most lifters, it's going to be a recovery problem. And I want to point that out because when you get into an intermediate program, what you are doing is you are addressing that problem of recovery by spreading out the intensity throughout the week. So like in a Texas method program, you've got an intensity day on one day of the week and on the opposite end of the week, you've got your volume day. And the reason you do that is because those are your two highest stress days and you're spreading them out.

So you have more time to recover between these intense bouts. And so when you're thinking about what can you tolerate when you're in a caloric deficit, you got to think about like how frequent your stressful bouts are. Yeah, no, that makes sense. You're basically, you're spreading out the intensity to accommodate the recovery window. And when you introduce a caloric restriction, you are basically extending that recovery window. It's going to take you longer to recover from something. Right. And there's a couple other things going on too. And I've talked about this in the other podcasts that we've done. Your leverage is changing if you have to lose a lot of weight. If you're used to squatting with a big belly and you're going to go from a big belly to a flat stomach, it's going to feel different. You're going to have to relearn how to move. Yes, yeah.

That's just what happens. you know, I'm a, I'm not a big framed guy. I'm kind of a smaller guy. I'm five, eight, about 195 pounds now. But at one point I got up to two 15 and I competed at two 15 in a strength meet. And then a couple months later I dropped down to like 200, 205. And I remember that wasn't as big a deal going from two 15 to two 205, let's say, wasn't as big a deal going from 215 to 205, let's say, but when I went from 205 to 195, so about a 20 pound total differential, I started to have that problem. I had to, I felt like all of my squats were way off because I was used to that slight compressive effect of my waist being, you know, an inch and a half, an inch and a half bigger. So it wasn't even that big for me, but that, that was a, that was very noticeable. Yeah. Yeah. Same here. I never got super fat. I was 205 getting down to

185. No problem. I actually went up and wait on the bar. Like I said earlier, my squat went from, I don't know, it's 395. I got to, yeah, 395. I got to 400. I didn't put much on the squat, but I put another five pounds on it. The deadlift went from 455 to 475. And then when I went from 185 to 165, that's when everything went down. Yeah, right, right. Yeah. But 165 was like 11.9% body fat. So I had visible abs and, you know, completely different body structure at that point.

So, yeah, you have to consider all that. structure at that point so yeah you have to consider all that so the first thing first things first you do not want to program high intensity when you're cutting that's a bad idea you know if you're if you're trying to go heavy heavy heavy the entire time and i've i've done this several different ways so there's different options to do this and there's pros and cons to each but well one of the things you really don't want to do is cut into a meat. Like when I get a competitor, ideally, I like to take a person on when they don't have a meat coming up because it drives me nuts when they are borderline or a few pounds heavier. And they want to cut and then hit a PR at the meat. And it's like I pulled it off sometimes, you know, and I think there's an element of luck there, you know. Yes, yeah.

think there's an element of luck there you know and also depends on the person and also depends on how much you know water you can get off with you know sodium and fluid manipulation because i don't do low carb so like i don't do traditional water cuts typically what i do is most people eat plenty of salt in their daily life so and i'm like all right you know eat the rda 1500 i'm like eat a gram and a half of sodium for a week and they typically lose a bunch of water weight doing that you know yeah and it's not really an unhealthy approach and it tends to work quite well. So I don't do water cuts. I've never programmed one. And I think I had one person that wanted to do it. And I said, you know, you have to ask around because I don't do that, you know? Yeah. Right. Right. So my point point is, you know, like, when I get a competitor like that,

typically I want somebody who has a long off-season to lose weight because, you know, there's just, you have to get the idea of regular PRs out of your head. You might get them, and that's a bonus. Right. Baseline is you're probably not going to get stronger. Yeah, yeah. You know, because you're not recovering. You have created a situation of under-recovery. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because you've, you're, you're not recovering. You have created a situation of under recovery. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. So go, go back to your stress recovery adaptation model, right? If, if your recovery is less than by definition, you've got to spread out your stress more, right? So, because it's really, it's your day-to-day recovery is less when you're taking out calories. Um, and so you're relying, you know, you basically only got two factors that play into recovery,

two controllable factors, and those are food and sleep. There are some others, but those are the two big ones. And those are the ones that we actually have the most control over in most cases. So in this case, if your food is lower, you're going to have to artificially make yourself more advanced of a trainee than you would be otherwise. And that means, you know, as you know, being a very late stage intermediate or advanced lifter, that means that you plan for PRs on an infrequent basis, it doesn't mean you always get them either. That's the thing. When you're an early intermediate lifter and it's your first time through the Texas method, let's say, well, then you plan for PRs on a weekly basis and you're going to get them unless you just really screw something up or your technique gets way off. If your program is dialed in and your technique is pretty good, you're going to get those PRs.

You just got to do the work. Now, when you get to be a later stage intermediate, it doesn't mean you always get them. You plan for them, but they don't always happen. They're always trying. Yeah, exactly. So that's something that changes as you get more advanced. And that's essentially what you're doing with yourself in a caloric deficit is making yourself artificially more advanced. Exactly. So you're basically an art of, like, let's say you're a novice, for instance,

I always talk about this. You're a novice lifter, and you're running your LP linear progression, and you're cutting weight, and then all of a sudden, you start bonking on lifts, right? And this is a common thing I run into is, oh, I should be able to do this. Well, no, you shouldn't, because you just missed first of all. So let's get these should statements out of your head because they're just holding you back. Number two, you're going to try again, you're going to miss again, and then everything feels like shit and you can barely recover. Okay, the diet's kicking in now. You're not just making neuromuscular progress here. You're at the point where you need the food to continue on that linear progression.

So if the fat loss is more important than making progress on that program, keyword on that program, then you need to switch to an intermediate program. So now you are an artificial intermediate. So instead of squatting three times a week or heavy, light, heavy, or whatever point in the program you've started to bonk on, you're going to go heavy, light, medium the next week because you're sure as fuck not going to do Texas method. That's a disaster.

Right, right. So you're going to spread that intensity out. You might even squat twice a week. I've done that too because I find that three times a week without enough food is pretty hard on the back. Sure as hell was for me. And then you're going to do that. And then if that stops working, you might have to recycle the weights, go back down, work back up.

I've done it that way. Another way that I've done it was, you know, when I was an intermediate. So that's how I would do it for a novice. So let's just kind of end there. You know, you're basically going to go through the same progression. LP, okay, that doesn't work. Heavy, light, medium. Okay, well, then we're going to rack pull one week, deadlift one week.

Okay, we might have to squat every other week. And all these things are artificial. So that means when that cut is over and there's more food in you, I'm not going to fault you for starting another LP again because now you're more fueled. You might go further. You might put another 20 pounds on that squat, 30 pounds on that squat, maybe more. Right. You might want to try Texas method. The problem is the food. You're trying to lose weight, which means you're eating less food. If you're eating less food, you know? Right. You might want to try Texas method. You know, the problem is the

food. You know, you're trying to lose weight, which means you're eating less food. If you're eating less food, you can't recover. So you're basically going to go through the stages of novice to intermediate to advanced, but it's all bullshit, right? This is driven by lack of food. So as soon as food is reintroduced, you better believe you're not an intermediate advanced lifter anymore. Now you take someone like myself years back, I was an intermediate advanced lifter anymore. Now, you take someone like myself years back. I was an intermediate at the time, and I was bent on not losing weight off the bar. I wanted to prove my case that I can lose weight and stay strong or get stronger possibly. And I lost probably 5% of my strength, which I think is pretty good and what i did was i'm like well i read

somewhere that you know volume is the key to preserving muscle mass on a cut and i would stand by that you know through my experiences that has turned out to be true but that was the first time i heard it so i'm like okay well i don't want to do a bunch of fucking bodybuilding shit so how about uh i just do more sets with lower reps and heavier weight? See how that works. Well, I did it, and by the end of it, my back was destroyed. It's a miracle. Knock on wood.

I didn't get a fucking injury from that. Right. But basically, my day one workout, I was basically on some form of a four-day split heavy-light-medium deal. My day one workout was five sets of five squats, five sets of three pause safety squat bar, which I probably could have done without. So basically we're at what, 25 squats and another 15, about 40 squats right there with a reasonable amount of weight. Yeah. And seven sets of five bench. And then I think like three sets of five deadlift,

you know, or RDLs or some assistance exercise right it wasn't it wasn't heavy deadlift day but basically i think yeah i did it i did it from the floor because i remember clearly you know how i remember that i did it from the floor the last week i was on that program my back got so fried from those squats i couldn't get 275 off the floor on that deadlift even though i was you know pulling in the mid-fours oh my goodness yeah i remember i'm like terrible i'm like it won't move what the fuck and i wasn't injured it was the most bizarre shit i was just done you know yeah yeah but uh that was my day one workout and then i would olympic lift twice a week so i'd clean one day i'd snatch one day and then one day i'd you know i'd have a heavy deadlift day followed by some benches and

push presses and so basically i was doing three to four lifts per workout plus two dedicated olympic lifting days so six days a week you know and uh you know other than that first workout the other ones were doable in terms of logistics it was just six days a fucking week you know right right um but they were like about one the olympic workouts are about 40 minutes to an hour um and then the other weight workouts were about 90 minutes 60 to to 90 minutes. But that first day was four hours long. It was pretty brutal. That sounds horrendous. Yeah. And, you know, I lost 5% of my strength and I was satisfied with that. And then I, you know, surpassed where I was when I was fat with 10 pound weight gain that followed it. So you could approach it that way if you want to try it. You know, I wouldn't do it again. And, you know, I've tried it with other people and I start to see similar things. You know I've got a guy that I'm working with now.

He thanked me for mentioning him in the last episode, but I like mentioning him because I'm watching some of these things materialize here. And he's got a lot of weight to lose, so it's been a learning experience. He lost 320 to 260. He's close to that 60-pound mark now. And he does these little six-week cuts, and then he takes a break, then six weeks again. And, you know, he started, the most recent development was, you know, I got joint pain. Getting joint pain from all this lifting. And, you know, I had him doing heavy fives, you know.

Okay. And he's getting joint pain, is that, like, in his knees, his back? Elbows. Elbows. Yeah. It's kind of random. Elbows. I think back, elbows.

I can't remember all the exact joints but definitely i think upper and you know upper extremities and back probably okay yeah yeah and uh you know i his form's not that bad you know but at the same time you know he's been working with me for a while that he'd probably be close to finishing an honest lp enough food. And I looked at it, I'm like, well, let's do some high reps then and work up tens. And then we did that. And then he said, oh God, it feels so good to lift again and not hurt, you know? Right. And then it's, you know, all this, like I'd known these things for a while. And like, it's kind of cool when you see someone go the distance, cause it's not that often that you get people that go the distance or handful of clients.

You know, a lot of people have lives. They get busy. You know, they're restarting, you know. Exactly. Yep. And this guy's been pretty steady the whole time. So when I get those people, this is why I remember them, you know, because they're the minority, you know, they're not the majority. And basically, yeah, now we're moving along.

You know, he's losing weight and, you know, he's working up his tens and that's that. So when I was first learning about this stuff, it became very clear to me why some of the old school bodybuilders that didn't have a bunch of peer-reviewed bullshit fucking articles about complicated training methods, why they defaulted to bodybuilding, even though like, you know, in that time, the bodybuilders were the guys that weren't good enough for the weightlifting meets. That was the culture back then, because you had to, basically, everybody wanted to be a weightlifter in the 60s. That's my understanding from the old timers I've talked to. And you had to enter the weightlifting meet to do the bodybuilding meet. And a lot of bodybuilders of that era had done weightlifting, had done powerlifting. And I remember when I read Arnold's book, and this comes up a lot because this was a big, that book, some of the content in there is what led me to where I am now and led me to RIP.

One of the things that he talked about was that he couldn't do all his body parts in a day and had to break it all up and was doing more volume, etc. But I just look at this and I'm like, well, these guys aren't very bright, but something told them that they had to do 10s. And a lot of them had high-intensity lifting backgrounds. They had a heavy lifting background before they got to the Olympia. A lot of them did powerlifting. A lot of them did Olympic lifting. So why did they default to this volume? Well, for one one they can recover more

from it because they're on drugs obviously you know that's part of the equation but the other part of it too is you know when you're starving it you just can't lift heavy you know you figure that out either yeah you know the easy way or the hard way you know so i think you know a lot of these guys were probably just getting beat the fuck up doing you know heavy triples and fives with five to seven hundred pounds depending on the lifter you know yes and they're like well no screw this i'm not gonna you know deadlift three times a week i'm trashed you know i'm gonna do all this assistant shit and you know probably you know deadlift a set of 10 every other week or whatever you know i don't know what the hell they did but it made sense to me i'm like when you are like arnold pulled 700 when you're a guy that's

that strong you know squatting six pulling seven you can't put in that kind of work, you know? So that's where all the silly machine dumbbell and, you know, traditional bodybuilding stuff comes in because it keeps them in the weight room more often, you know? So they're able to hit their muscles in isolation and maybe eke out a little bit more, a little bit more hypertrophy, I guess, while they're still trying to, you know, advance their career as a bodybuilder, right? these guys these guys are squatting and dead lifting six to seven hundred pounds like i read this stupid article in t-nation years back that pisses me off and i know the i met the author in person he used to train here and you know i'll tell him to his face it's a bullshit fucking article that takes it out of context it says well you know i'll tell him to his face it's a bullshit fucking article that takes it out of context it says well you know bodybuilders versus power lifters and starts talking about you know tom

platts uh competed against uh what the fuck was his name fred hatfield in the squat competition it was one rm and then amrap i forgot how they worded it in the article but basically how many reps can you do with 500 and then what's your one rm you know right right or was 525 525 for as many reps as possible or a one rm and i've seen that set yeah okay go ahead yeah go ahead stupid fucking article man so the article starts talking about how oh you know hatfield out squatted platts for a max right but then platts took 525 for 23 reps and hatfield only got 11 and then i'm like is anybody looking at the practicality of this this guy squatted 525 for 11 he is squatting more than any of these readers will ever squat right you know i mean get the

fuck out of here you know like and then they also leave out the fact that tom platts has proclaimed himself a power lififter at heart. Yes. You know, you have the biggest wheels in bodybuilding, and yet you love powerlifting. Right, right. Isn't that funny? Yeah. I mean, at the time.

I mean, there's guys with bigger legs now, but at the time, you know, he was known for his lower body muscular development. Yeah, the guy with freaking tree trunks on his legs. That's an awesome set, by the way. If you haven't seen them on YouTube, go and look up Tom Platz 525 or whatever it was. I think it was, yeah. Freaking tree trunks on his legs. That's an awesome set, by the way. If you haven't seen that on YouTube, go and look up Tom Platt's 525 or whatever it was. I think it was. Yeah, 23 reps. It's ridiculous. And it's like no shit squats too. There's something to be said about specificity there.

Obviously, if you train reps, you get better reps. You train weight, you get better weight. But people that are reading that are probably squatting 135 or even 225, you know, like it doesn't apply to your readers. Yes, I agree. Yeah. And that's something that's hard to understand until you've been through, until you've really been through some long intermediate training cycles, you don't quite understand how stressful a, it doesn't even have to be a max effort lift, but a high intensity lift, you know, at 90 plus percent of your, of your one RM, you know, maybe 93, 95% of your one RM somewhere in that range, it takes a lot out of you. If you're doing the

barbell lifts, it is, they are what we call very systemically stressful. And they stress the joints, they stress your central nervous system, and that effect gets amplified the stronger you get. And if you're just coming off of having done a novice progression, or even like a Texas method, like an early intermediate progression, yes, your heavy days are stressful, sure, but it ain't the same way. You know, if I go and pull 475 plus, then it takes me more than a few days to recover from that. Now, my work capacity is high, so I could go and do a submaximal deadlift later in the week, no problem. But I can't do another 475 plus deadlift set later in the week because I'm still recovering like seven days later from that deadlift. And I don't think, I don't think a lot of trainees that haven't had, you know, several years of training under their

belt really understand the magnitude of this. So that's, that's something that's important. But I think, you know know this is something that bears out if we think about how the body recovers and how it adapts to stress what you just said makes sense so let's let's kind of summarize here when you're cutting you are under recovering because you don't have as much food on hand you don't have as much nutrients to repair tissues that are being stressed in the gym. So you have to back off on your intensity. And in general, you're going to get better results if you train with more of a hypertrophy mindset, doing longer sets with less weight. So lower intensity, higher rep sets. You recommend sets of 10. I think it's a great idea. And the other thing is you're looking for movements that are not as systemically stressful in a lot of cases, right? You could, so, and there's a couple of ways to do that, right?

You could simply, the easy way is like, instead of doing heavy triples on your squat, you go and do three sets of 10 on the same squat at a lower weight that's fine you can do that that's lower stress you could also say like hey you know what i'll do some leg presses that would be a lot less systemically stressful um it's not going to have as much training effect as a full squat but maybe that's what you need if you're deep into a cut so that that's one thing but the other thing is like so that the like the way that your body is actually reacting to all the stress if you think about it when you go and you do longer rep sets essentially you are asking your body to operate in more of a glycogen kind of you know

anaerobic part of the the cycle the spectrum right and so essentially your your body has to react to that by forcing more water and glycogen into the muscle cells and that's that's essentially what hypertrophy is you're able to gain more kind of cross-sectional size as a result of that adaptation so essentially if you're you're training, if the goal is to preserve as much lean mass as you can while you're cutting and lose more body fat while preserving that, that lean mass, it makes sense to train with more of a muscle building style. And that also, of course, is going to be lower stress as well. And I think that's something that, you know, I just wanted to point out there, you know, remember that it's not just our muscle bellies that are being stressed and have to recover in our body.

It's also our joints. You mentioned, you mentioned your trainee that started having joint problems. Remember the joints have tissue that has to recover as well. You've got tendons and ligaments and even your cartilage. That's all dynamic tissue that gets inflamed. It has a, it has a, you know, stress response and it has to, you have to recover and then it needs nutrients too, to, to repair itself. So these are, these are the big things you want to be thinking about as you are trying to design a program for your cut. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to clarify one

thing too, cause we talked about you know doing less stressful and systemic movements you know you still want to do the main lifts um you still want to squat you still want to deadlift you just don't need to do as many sets because obviously the reps are higher so when i program a set of 10 on squat you know the hypertrophy people say oh my god this is not enough you're going to detrain. But I do two sets. I do two sets of each lift. And sometimes I'll go down to one set if that deadlift gets heavy. I typically keep the squat at two. The press and the bench, I program the same.

You can take a little bit more of a beating on those. But then I'll throw in other stuff just to keep you doing stuff, keep you moving. Makes it entertaining. stuff, you know, just to keep you doing stuff, keep you moving, you know, makes it entertaining. But my point is that when the intensity is lower and you're able to crank out 10 reps or eight reps, you know, I typically don't go under five when I'm cutting people these days, unless they really want to try and torture themselves. But most people just kind of roll with it because the reality is when you go back to fives and triples, you're going to transmute that strength, which means you're going to take all that work that you put on your body and convert that into strength.

That's, you know, layman's way to explain it. So that's the other way that I, you know, approach programming on a cut. It's less stressful for the trainee too because you're less likely to miss a lift, you know. Typically, like, you know, I'm another guy that I'm training right now. You know, he moved into high reps and he started missing reps because of endurance, you know. And he's like, oh, shit. He's like, I just can't breathe, you know, I'm another guy that I'm training right now. You know, he moved into high reps, and he started missing reps because of endurance, you know. And he's like, oh, shit. He's like, I just can't breathe, you know. It's burning.

Right. So I'm like, all right, we have to go. Well, I remember one time, the guy that was coaching me had me go up to, he wanted me to do 12s on press. And, like, I had to keep going down, and I'm like, 85 pounds, what the hell? And then, like, I texted Cody Miller. He's another one of our coaches. And I'm like, have you ever done 12s on a press? He's like, yeah, dude, I had to do, like, 75 or 85.

And I'm like, so it's not just me, you know? Right. So that's the interesting thing about press. Like, the shoulders, I'm convinced the shoulders are mostly type 2 motor units because the endurance, when you're training fives and triples on those, it drops so much. And maybe that's because the absolute weight is lighter too, but I feel like it drops so much compared to the other lifts.

Right, right. Like it's nowhere near the predicted percentage you would think, you know, like it's crazy. Right. No, I've experienced that too. All right. So I wanted to ask you that. All right. When we're moving from, let's talk about triples, fives, eights, and tens, kind of those rep ranges. When you're moving somebody that's doing, let's say they're an intermediate lifter and they know kind of what they can do for a lift for a couple triples. They also know what they could do for three or four sets of five. How would they adjust those weights at those rep ranges to go down to eights and tens? What kind of percentages roughly would you use

this is kind of one of those situations where i kind of use judgment so like i generally know that like 65 to 70 percent is probably going to be a set of like probably 60 to 65 percent of max is going to be 70 percent if you know your max um If you've only been working on fives and threes, then, you know, that's probably like a five is probably 85% to 90% of your max. A three is probably 90% to 95% of your max, somewhere in there. I think mine's 92%. I'm not very efficient, you know. Yeah, yeah. Sounds about right.

You know, you can use kind of those. And they're guidelines, too. You know, these aren't absolutes because everybody's different, you know, you can use kind of those, and they're guidelines too, you know. These aren't absolutes because everybody's different, you know. But in general, you know, if you're doing a heavy set of five, it's going to be somewhere in the 85 to 90 range. If you're doing a set of three, it's going to be like 90 to 90. Probably 93 is more realistic, you know. And then you'll just kind of work down from there, you know. Try to backwards calculate an estimated max using numbers you've actually performed, you know.

Okay, yeah. And then start around the 60 to 65 range and if it's too easy add if it's too hard subtract you know that's i think that's a safe gamble with people that i you know have been training for a long time and know better i might start a little heavier and usually i go five percent more on the bench in the press than the squat and the deadlift that's the other other thing I do. So like if I start somebody at 65% on the squat, I'll start them at 70% on the bench. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like that.

I tend to use for a lot of my lifters, I tend to use their top like triple or double as their sort of their max, which it is. It's a three RM and a two RM for them. It's just not a single. Now I tend to coach a lot of older guys that are 40 plus, and we generally, unless they really want to do a meet, we generally

just don't hit singles very often. It tends to be a little bit safer that we don't have to compromise or have any shaky reps, have any shaky 1RMs. But if they know what their 3RM is, for instance, then you can do the same thing there. And I go by what they've actually performed. And yeah, I found that a set of eight is usually going to be about 75, usually about 70% of a 3RM or 2RM. That seems to be about right. So yeah, if you're going to do a set of 10, then you're going to have to go a little bit lighter than that. And so that would put you right in that 60 to 65% range that you mentioned. Yeah, no, yeah. That's a good rule of thumb. And again, you know, what's nice is if you're going to make these adjustments to your training, you can always aim at the low end of the range first, if you've never done these before. And then, of course, since we're training, bump it up, you know, so if you're unsure and

you've never done sets of 10 before, maybe start closer to that 60% mark on your squats and then try to progress up to 65% of your one RM. And so it gives you, gives you some room to build in some progression to your program. Now, would you say that when you start doing these higher rep eights, tens, maybe even twelves, would you say that there's kind of a low ceiling on how far you can progress those or how long you can progress those? Not necessarily. It depends how you're loading them. If you're taking huge jumps, and of course, you know, I might go up a couple pounds on a bench or a press i might go up you know five pounds on a squat a deadlift maybe 10 the first week you know i sometimes even go up two and a half on the squad if i'm training someone who's smaller

sure yeah yeah you know let's talk about how we progress through that right um well first of all we don't do fours or sevens or nines or any silly shit like that. Not intentionally. Not intentionally. There are. Yeah, well, I mean, four is a misfit of five, first of all. Sure. You know, sevens aren't even real.

I mean, thirteens, I mean, they don't even have 13 floors in a freaking hotel, man. Come on. You can squat thirteens. We don't do elevens, you know. So there's tens, eights, fs, triples, doubles, singles. That's it. Yeah.

That's all you really need. Yeah, that's all you really need. Anything else is missed, missed rep. So that's kind of how I progressed through the classic, you know, the classic periodization model. What's it, classical periodization? Right. Where you're, you know, going from higher volume, lower intensity, or moderate intensity. I should say we don't really train low intensity in the weight room unless you just want to fuck around in the weight room.

But it tends to be higher volume, moderate intensity to lower volume, high intensity. So I'll do tens for a few weeks. Then I'll do eights for a few weeks. Then I'll do fives for a few weeks. Then I'll do threes for a few weeks. Then I'll do ones for a few weeks i'll do eights for a few weeks i'll do fives for a few weeks i'll do threes for a few weeks and i'll do ones for a few weeks or double some guys like some guys don't like to do singles before meets you know if they're gonna go compete they like to end with doubles you know that's one of those things where it's a preference thing i know rip doesn't like singles in the gym yeah uh

you know he likes doubles i think ed cohen did doubles you know but you know as we know with the famous thousand for two squat, Kirk used to do singles, but then add a second one to it when, you know, Chris missing the gym, as he puts it. Right, right. But, you know, there's, there's mixed, you know, and at that point when you're training singles with the intention of a max, you're a competitor, whether you're doing it in the gym or on the platform, you know, you're competing for a bigger max, right? Yeah, yeah. And at that point, you know, you have to make a judgment call for what makes more sense to you. I like doing singles.

I don't really care for doubles unless, you know, I work up to a single and do some doubles as down sets, you know, or back offsets. Yeah, yeah. But in terms of cutting, you know, typically I'll go, okay, tens for, you know, three to five weeks, you know, eights for three to five weeks. And usually by then, by the time I get to fives are wrapping up the cut because I don't like to cut people more than three months typically. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you went there. Cause that's, that is a, that is a key to this is that you don't have to stay in this mode forever. It's, it's actually going to be a fairly short period of your, your training because you're not going to be cutting forever yeah exactly and that's that's the problem most you know this is one of the most valuable things i learned in

my uh my in my experiences as a lifter and somebody back when i was more competitive with it was that uh you need to take breaks you know and that was just something i was not doing before and i read something about you know i read through RP, I read about maintenance phases. And then I realized, I'm like, man, I just try to cut until I get as low as I can. And then I'm not satisfied with as low as I can. And then I just stop, gain weight, get fat, and start the whole process all over again. Right. So this last time, it helped that I had more muscle because I've been barbell training for so long at that point.

this last time it helped that I had more muscle because I've been barbell training for so long at that point. But the big thing there was that, you know, I cut from what October, July of, was it July of 15? I think, yeah, 15. Cut through October, did a meet, you know, so I had a little break there, picked it back up, went through January, you know, did a meet, took a month off, hit it again in February, did a meet in April, took another month off, finished up in July. So, like, you know, I had all these little breaks in between. So, I got, like, these, you know, three, two to three month cuts and then I had these breaks because I did competitions. And it was useful because I was able to lose, I don't know, how far did I go now? I went down like 40, 42 pounds, something like that total when it was all said and done.

You know, it took my body fat down about 15%, so I'm from 26% down to 11.9, you know. And I only lost 5% off the bar, so I'd call that successful, especially with as lean as I was, you know. But the reason you don't want to cut longer than three months, I mean, you can go to 16 weeks, you know, there's, I get it, that first month, there's like a lead-in period and you're tweaking the macros and trying to figure out how much you need to eat to, you know, lose that part of get. But typically, it's three months because what happens when you're cutting, the longer you cut, the more fixated you get on food,

the more stressful it becomes, the hungrier you become, the lower your energy levels get, your libido starts getting interrupted, you know, and it's just, it doesn't feel good. You start thinking about food all the time and your life revolves around food. And, you know, to some extent that's going to happen anytime you restrict calories in today's environment, you know, that's going to happen anytime you restrict calories in today's environment. There's shit everywhere. We have a first world problem of too much food. Right, right. And I don't know if this has ever been encountered in history, but the poorest of people can access a shitload of calories in 2021, at least in America.

Yeah, yeah. So this is a different problem than what we face historically, which was famine. You know, you hoard food, you get fat, you lose it in the famine, you gain it back, you know? Right, yep. Or something like that, or you die, you know? But my point is that because there's food everywhere and, you know, there's social situations around food, you know, restricting for about three months is a reasonable amount of time for your brain to, you know, restricting for about three months is a reasonable amount of time for your brain to, you know, exercise that level of willpower and not go insane in the process. Right.

You start going four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten months, or you tell me you've been cutting for a year. When people tell me they've been cutting for a year, what that means to me is you've been trying to cut for a year, you probably did well the first couple months, and now you're basically restricting and binging, restricting and binging, and have given yourself a possible eating disorder. So you've got to think about the mind there, the body too. So if you're a big fat guy and you lose 30 or 40 pounds on your first cut, that's probably not going to be that stressful on your body. And any risk is outweighed by the benefit of not carrying 40 of that extra 100 pounds that you have, you know? Yeah, yeah. But if you're a skinny fat guy and you take

yourself down to 5% body fat and try to stay there, now you're going to have hormonal disruptions. I mean, you need cholesterol to make testosterone. You need acetyl-CoA to make cholesterol. You need calories, whether it's, you know, fat provides the most, obviously. That's why fat has this link with testosterone, but it's not exactly what they say it is in the bro magazines. But basically, you know, you can make cholesterol from any of, from this molecule called acetyl-CoA, which comes from fat or carbs or rarely protein, right? But fat gives you more because it's nine calories per gram, right? So if you're under eating, you're going to produce less cholesterol in the body.

And if you have less fat stores, you can't pull it from your fat stores either. You can't pull this acetyl-CoA from your fat stores, right? So you basically start getting hormonal disruptions. Women tend to lose their period, get amenorrheic. Amenorrhea is when a woman loses her period. It tends to happen in female endurance athletes. Why? Because they're very skinny. They're low body weight, low body fat, and they tend to not be eating enough, and then they tend to lose their period. So the leaner you get, the less healthy that becomes

unless you are naturally lean, and that's not who's listening to this. I mean, the guy who's naturally lean listening to this is like, can you skip to the part where I get bigger? You know? Right. So I can look like a monster, hopefully. But some of them are just lazy because they're like, I already look good enough. But my point is that all this stuff about low T with low fat diets and all that shit, that becomes a problem when you are getting very lean. Because remember, your fat stores provide you with certain nutrients and molecules. And when you don't have any fat stores left and your calories are low, you're not getting

those things, right? But if you have plenty of fat stores left, it's unlikely you're going to get low T from cutting fat from your diet. It's unlikely because you still have fat in your belly and you're going to burn that up and you're going to get vitamin D from there because you sequester some of that there. You're going to get the acetyl-CoA to make cholesterol. You know, you're going to be fine hormonally. Mentally, you're going to go insane. You might lose energy levels. You might get stiff joints, and you might develop some disordered eating if you keep cutting

and cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I don't, I don't think we need to look very far to find plenty of examples in our own lives and our personal lives of people we know that have yo-yoed, so to speak. They lose a bunch and they gain a bunch and they lose a bunch and they gain a bunch. And, you know, that's just, that's demoralizing, but it's also, it's indicative of someone who has not built sustainable dietary habits. Like they clearly have not built something that's sustainable because they keep bouncing back and forth. So that's a big part of, you know, there's a stress, there's a physical stress from the work that you're doing in the gym that you've got to account for. We can account for that by changing programming. There's a psychological stress from long-term cutting that we need to watch out for. And that we can mitigate by taking

breaks and maintaining for periods of time. And I think the other thing too, that's kind of built into that is that when you do these periods of, you know, you cut for a few months and then you maintain for a while, you're also sort of cementing the habits that you built to get there, right? So you had to actively reduce calories to get down to a lower body weight. Now you're at a new sort of baseline for your calorie consumption. Well, you still have to like build the habit of eating that new baseline. And I, that's, that's an, I think an underappreciated part of the process. Yeah. You know, so I think we've kind of hit it on, uh, on the programming side, on the calorie side, on the kind of the stress management side. I'm wondering,

is there something that people should be doing during the cut? Let's say we're in the middle of that three-month cut and you're starting to feel your energy levels drop. Are there some things you can do with your carbohydrate timing that can help you with your training sessions while you're in the middle of the cut? Yeah, absolutely. middle of the cut? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, when you are not eating as many carbohydrates and you're training vigorously, you're at risk for lower blood sugar levels. This is why intra-workout carbs are recommended for people that are cutting. What that means is you take carbs during your workout. So it's kind of like an athlete, you know, and you're running for, you know, several hours if you're a long distance runner, or even if you're any,

like I remember in high school sports, this was a big thing. You know, they'd tell us, oh, I have Gatorade and now they got those, now they got shoes and all this other stuff. But there's a reason for that. And there's a lot of, you know, science behind that, that I happen to agree with because I've also seen it out in the world. It's one of those things that, okay, they're writing this and I've actually seen this work. So it's probably right, you know, but basically there's three things you need. You need carbohydrates, sodium, potassium, and water, you know, fluid, electrolytes, and carbohydrates so that you keep your hydration up. Remember your muscles are 70% water and also to keep your blood pressure to reasonable place so that you don't get hypotension while you're lifting,

because that could happen. Your blood pressure can drop, and then your blood sugars can drop because you're eating less total carbs. So the reason that I recommend intra-workout carbs is not because I think you're actually going to use that sugar that is in that beverage for the workout that you're doing at that moment. That's not how it works. It takes time. But what it will do is it will hit your bloodstream and keep your blood sugar levels high so you don't get dizzy and start bonking and possibly have a hypoglycemic episode. I also recommend creatine. I think I recommend that in general because we're doing high-force output activities. You're doing a high-force output activity.

You're primarily using ATP and creatine. Yeah. So by taking supplemental creatine, you're getting a little more. So it helps with strength training workouts in general, but it can be helpful when you're in a period of under recovery, when you're lifting and dieting and trying to lose fat and everything sucks, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I recommend creatine. I also recommend multivitamins. When I was in college, most of the dieticians would say, oh, you don't need vitamins. You're just going to urinate it out and all this stuff. And, you know, there's probably truth that if you eat a well-balanced diet, which what the hell is that?

You know, I mean, it's hard to define. It's kind of a broad term, but let's say you're eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, meat, and all these other things. You're getting an assortment of micronutrients, right? But if you, you know, let's assume that you can get it from food. That's ideal, right? It's ideal that you're getting them from food, but let's introduce a diet. Now you're restricting calories, which means you're restricting food, which means you're restricting micronutrients. Right. Yeah. So you, so it's good to take a multivitamin, possibly with mineral, you know, I'd say that case by case basis there, depending on what the person's's eating because i eat a shitload of iron when i'm cutting because i eat a lot of red meat so i have to give blood so i don't get you know prostate cancer later colon cancer colon

cancer mixed them up um yeah just an aside if you're a male since you don't menstruate a lot of your iron stores and it builds up and it's associated with cancer later in life so it's probably good to give blood, you know, every so often to get rid of some of those iron stores. Pre-menopausal women menstruate, so they lose iron that way. So they need to supplement iron. That's why you always hear that women need iron. I think Rip wrote it in the book too. Yeah, right. Yeah, women need iron, men need to give blood. So that's just an aside. But I recommend multivitamins when you're cutting because there's a good chance that you're probably not getting enough micronutrients.

You're probably getting plenty of some like, you know, most grains in the US are enriched. So they, you know, have certain B vitamins in there. And there's a lot of things that are fortified, you know, it just depends on what you're eating. If you're eating a lot of meat, like I am red meat, you're getting a lot of B12. So I probably don't need a B12 supplement when I'm cutting. So it just really depends. But when you're cutting calories, you're cutting micronutrients. So a multivitamin probably won't hurt when you're losing weight, when you're in a calorie restriction. Creatine is a good one.

And that's really all I really recommend. And then protein powder if you're having trouble shoveling all the protein down. You know, I like egg white protein or casein protein before bed because it digests lower. It takes longer to get through the system. But you can also eat Greek yogurt because Greek yogurt is mostly casein, you know? Yeah. There's different ways to approach it. I love that stuff in the summer.

Greek yogurt and berries, fresh berries. Oh,. It's great. Oh yeah. Um, so with it, so one more question on those intra workout carbs, do you have any preferred sources? So I know you can get like dextrose as a supplement that you can mix up. Um, but I know, um, a friend of ours, Dr. Darren Deaton, he's, he's a big fan of applesauce before training. Yeah. We keep some at the gym sometimes. You know, if you want to follow the biochemistry and, you know, do the best possible thing you can possibly do from a biochemical standpoint, then dextrose is probably the best thing you can take because it doesn't have to undergo any conversion. It's a simple carbohydrate.

It's one. It's a monosaccharide. It's glucose, you know? Yeah. So you're just taking it in and you're using it. It goes right to your blood sugar versus a complex carb that has to get broken up. But something like applesauce, you're getting probably some fructose, some glucose, because it's typically table sugar that's in there.

It's probably going to be fine. Let's just put it that way. That stuff can get your blood sugar up plenty fine. Yeah, right. But, uh, you know, I'm, I'm kind of old school if I do it, which I haven't really cut aggressively in a while, but last time I did, I just mixed whey protein, chocolate whey protein with dextrose and just sipped on that while I was lifting. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. All right. So that, I think we think we uh i think we covered some good stuff there so hopefully this answers your this poster on the forum let's hopefully this answers his

questions and i hope it does answers your questions dear listener i think yeah i i'd be curious in exploring on on future episodes what a long-term cutting and maintenance cycle looks like with uh some of the clients that you've worked with? Because, you know, like how, how has somebody's body fat change over like a year to two years and going through and how do they, they sort of navigate these, these cutting cycles? Cause it's easy, you know, it's easy to kind of see one, you know, one cutting cycle. Okay. We got the next, we got three months there and then maintain for a couple months. But I'd be curious to see kind of what this looks like over a long period of time, like one to two years and how you, how someone's training tracks alongside that.

But I think that's content for another episode. Absolutely. So should we close out? Yeah, let's do it. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the weights and plates podcast you can find me at www.weightsandplates.com or on instagram at the underscore robert underscore santana or at weights double underscore and double underscore plates excellent and you can find me at marmalade underscore cream on instagram send me your questions you can also send me an email at trent at marmalade underscore cream on Instagram. Send me your questions. You can also send me an email at trent at marmalade cream.com. Bye.