365 Days to Your Best Physique | ETP#171

In episode 171, we propose the idea of spending an entire year dedicated to building your best physique possible (thus far.) We talk about intelligently structuring your training and nutrition phases, from building muscle to calorie deficits, and share some personal and professional anecdotes along the way. We cover key topics like dieting, maintenance, and setting realistic timelines for hitting these big physique goals. Additionally, we talk about the mental side of things, avoiding common planning pitfalls, and touch on smelling the roses a bit to really enjoy the results of all your hard work.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction and Updates
13:44 Theoretical Approaches to Outlining Your Year
17:27 Orchestrating the Build
28:07 Transitioning to the Caloric Deficit
29:53 Realistic Dieting Timelines
44:36 Making Maintenance Practical
51:04 Pausing to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor
54:59 Bonus - Calorie Cycling Thought Experiment

Work 1:1 with Aaron ⬇️
https://strakernutritionco.com/nutrition-coaching-apply-now/

Done For You Client Check-In System for Coaches ⬇️
https://strakernutritionco.com/macronutrient-reporting-check-in-template/

Paragon Training Methods Programming ⬇️
https://paragontrainingmethods.com

Follow Bryan's Evolved Training Systems Programming ⬇️
https://evolvedtrainingsystems.com

Find Us on Social Media ⬇️
IG | @Eat.Train.Prosper
IG | @bryanboorstein
IG | @aaron_straker
YT | EAT TRAIN PROSPER PODCAST

Transcript

0:26

What is going on guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 171, Brian and myself titled 365 days to your best physique. So this was sparked by an idea that we have a lot of these conversations, but we have them in silos, right? We might be talking about fat loss in, in, know, in a silo or it might be talking about an episode of, you know, maximizing the, you know, build of a, set in time duration of a hypertrophy program or something like that. If we really, you if I was really sitting there thinking about what do people ultimately most want, right? People want their most of the time listening to the podcast, right? Think that that pinnacle physique, you know, for yourself. And I thought it would be cool to put together an episode like if you have an entire year, if you were to plan an entire year and give yourself adequate time, which many people unfortunately never do, how would you go about structuring it to produce, you know, 365 days from today, from tomorrow, whenever that date is? to produce your best yet, right? So that is what we're talking about today. As always, before we get into the nuts and bolts of the episode, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? course. Yeah. And then just add one more quick bit of context to this episode that we're doing. I think it's cool because Aaron actually went through this process a little over a year ago. Like it ended what? Maybe like eight months ago or something like that. But he went ahead and did his like best physique for the year thing. And he went through this process of build, cut and really ultimately ended up at his best physique ever. And so I think that'll be really cool that he has that individual like firsthand experience as well. Okay, so as far as updates, I have two main updates. I just got back from a week in London, which is why we did not have an episode last week. It was an awesome trip. I haven't done a trip international by myself, completely away from the family in probably the whole time. I mean, I've done some some trips with friends. went to Bermuda last year for five days, but this felt different. It was further and It was, it was great. I got to see my best friend from when I was a kid. We met when we were six and I'd never been to London before, which also felt kind of special. And he asked me, you know, what do I want to do? How do I want to see London? Like, do I want to do touristy things, whatever, whatever. And my response was that I just kind of want to see the city naturally through the eyes of him living his life. And one of the things that he does a lot is he walks. He's a, he's a step guy and he averages 12 or 13,000 steps a day. I'm kind of in a similar ballpark. And so we just decided to go out and walk. And literally every single day we just walked. we had one day that was 27,000 steps and our lowest day was 18,000 steps. And so every day was somewhere between 18,000 and 27,000. And that's just how we saw the city. It was amazing. We did some walks from his house where we'd go like six or seven miles out and turn around and come back or, you know, five miles, whatever it is. Some of the times we would take the tube, which is like their Metro or subway, and we would go to like a different part of town and then walk around for two hours. And it was perfect. It was exactly what I wanted to do. I got to meet his family, his daughters, which are just similar in age to my kids, meet his wife for the first time. And we had a night of partying where we went out and got a little tipsy and met some of his boys. So overall, super cool trip. As far as how it's pertinent to this podcast and fitness in general, I wasn't sure going into it if I was going to be able to work out. I knew I was gonna get a bunch of steps, which is great. But the first day I was there, he took me to his personal trainer. And I was kinda like, I was kinda pushing back and I was like, I think I'd rather go to the park and just do like some pushups and dips and pull ups and stuff. And then I got there and his trainer was like this. gregarious British guy and he's like, no mate, you have to come to the session with us and whatever. That was awful, awful English accent. But he was from like the north of England. So was trying to sound a little bit like that. So, so I did this session with him and it was basically just like partner CrossFit. We did like a Olympic lifting complex sort of it was like five deadlifts, five rows, five hang cleans, five push presses, five back squats over and over and over again. We did a bunch of like supersets of like pull ups to various types of pushups, some annoying like hollow rocks and like core work that just felt awful. and so yeah, it was fine. Like I got a workout in and it was cool to like experience what he does for, his training. And then, one other day I went to the park and did the pull ups and dips kind of back and forth, which I like to do when I'm on vacation. So I got two workouts in and a bunch of walking. And that was, that was just sufficient. So, that was cool. And then real quick, bike season is wrapping up here. So I took this entire week off of biking when I was in London and I didn't know how I was going to be coming back. I can 100 % say for anyone that does these international trips, East to West and West to East, it was so much easier adapting to the time zone going to London. So I guess going West was, is that right? No, going east, going east was way easier. And I adapted like literally in a day, I felt like I was right on schedule. And coming back to the US to Colorado has been awful. It took me like four days of waking up at 2am for two or three hours before I would finally just fall back into into my normal. So I didn't really feel great the first few days being back here. My heart rate was super elevated. Like literally every day I'd wake up and my heart rate was 47 instead of 39 or something like that. And I think that's just from shitty sleep and the travel and everything like that. So I had a couple really kind of crap. had a crappy bike ride first coming back. And then over the last few days, I've done two really big, famous bike climbs. So if you go on Strava and you look at these like famous bike climbs, one's called Flagstaff and one's called NCAR, NCAR National Center for Atmospheric Research. It's like this. really crazy climb to the top of this hill. And people come from all over to do these. And they're kind of two that I use as staples to assess my progress. And so Flagstaff I hadn't done since last year. And I beat my time by like a minute 45. And this was on a 23 minute climb. So that's almost like two minutes on 20 minutes. It's like almost a 10 % improvement. Super happy with that. And then just yesterday I did the end car climb, which is a 10 minute climb, or at least last time I did it, it was around 10 minutes. And this time I did it in 913. So 45 seconds out of 10 minutes is another just massive, huge improvement, similar to the Flagstaff climb. And I just am super amped because I wasn't sure that this year had produced such drastic increases in results as the prior year. And you wouldn't expect it to because returns diminish over time. And especially that my body weight is now 196 instead of 180 where it was last year. I really didn't expect to do so well at climbing. And I'm just ecstatic about it. Like yesterday was my last ride with shirt off sun out. It was 80 degrees. It was just incredible. And now we're about to go into the cold spell or colder spell, probably no more shirt off rides. And so yeah, just really happy with the way bike season turned out. I think just so happy with the way I implemented my training this year with the lower frequency and lower volume of lifting to allow me to kind of excel at the biking. And that's all I got. Just really, really proud of myself and happy with the way I. That's refreshing to hear. So in terms of updates for me, new training program, which I'm excited about. The other one, I mean, it produced me incredible results, but I was just starting to get really beat up from it. I couldn't train my back twice per week at that volume anymore. And I wanted to try some different approaches, something. So. New program, I'm enjoying it for now. I'm leaning into finding like the enjoyment factor a little bit more because I haven't been enjoying training to build my, you know, bodybuilding pursuit as much as I think it was just higher stress with projects going on. I've been finding myself getting like incredibly frustrated lately with certain things. Clients are great, which is a nice kind of, what's the word, like anchor relative to things. but pulled back training, like some of my sessions I'm wrapping up in like an hour in like five minutes. like, this is great. and then finally. some of the changes that you made? So it sounds like you're not training back twice a week, your sessions are shorter. Does that mean you're doing lower volumes? Does it mean you're taking shorter rests? What are kind some of the, I know people are gonna wanna know this. Yeah, yeah, great, great questions. I'm going two days on one day off. So I have a push pull legs that I'm rotating two sessions of each. like, well, it's actually legs I do first. So like legs a push a off push, sorry, pull a legs be off, pull push B, pull B off. And then how I'm alternating is like one off day, I'll do a zone two session, my next off day, I'll do a hit session. And then I just like flip those. no double days, and lower volumes in general. Yeah, there's, I'll probably like certain things I'll probably have to start putting in some, some doubling up like a zone two on a day or something like that. But, not quite yet. and then lower volumes. Yeah. I'm typically doing two to three exercises for like a push. That's going to be a chest or back, for example. one dealt and then one bicep or tricep. I I'm just, I really don't need the arm. volume, like the arms are just blowing up still the elbows are still not super happy. And I'm like, I just don't really need the volume. Like arms are big enough effectively. And I'm just playing the physique game as opposed to how you know, you should train by the book per se. And then reducing loads on some of the leg stuff and then just incorporating some like pauses. So I'm doing like pause leg press is in right now. at higher reps and really just focusing on like chasing a stimulus as opposed to just really pushing loads as I could just feel it like systemically my body was just the weight would move, which is nice, but like, I just felt it afterwards. It just felt run down frequently. And it wasn't that enjoyment to train was just not there. It literally felt like a job. So I like, I want to pull back. I still have two to three months plus of building. I can't I can't begin to hate it quite yet. Yeah, yeah. Is the plan for you to do the stage in what, spring or early summer of 25? Yeah. And with that, it's being. intelligent around planning of things like there's not really shows in like March, you know, February sort of thing. I'll still be pretty busy with gym stuff. I would imagine at that time. But that gives me, you know, all of November, all of December and probably all of January to continue building. And I'm really. 11 pounds away from as big as I think I'll need to get, so. I have plenty of runway and I don't. think I need to I don't I just don't think I want to push more than that. I don't think I need to reach 245 pounds in my offseason for fucking men's physique, you know, so goal for your leanest when you hit stage? Do you have an objective, like a range of where you expect your body weight to be? They are starting, I believe, I don't remember if it's next year or the year. I know they've started putting in the weight caps in the pro divisions. I don't know if those are going to come down into amateur or not. But my weight cap, I think is 97 kilos, 90, maybe 97, 97 X or something like that. If I remember correctly, something. or something like that. Yeah, it's around like 215 ish. Yeah. So that plays a role in it as well. Yeah. And then, the last the last episode, I talked about a mobility program I had started because my mobility had just it just disappeared pretty much on me and it was starting to concern me. While I don't love doing it, it feels like a job per se three weeks in in. I mean, it's like I have my mobility back. I wouldn't say I have new mobility, but I'm like as mobile as I is my normal baseline. It's like sitting in squats feels normal again. I can like move my hips, my shoulders feel good. So that's been been quite a positive in the last couple of weeks of just feeling a lot better like day to day and my back doesn't hurt anymore or anything like that, which is great. Yeah. Mobility is super important when you need it. Yeah. Okay, so I think we can start getting into the thick of the episode. the first thing when we want to talk about it is understanding where is the most appropriate starting point for you. And I kind of have three. What's the way I want to look at what's the way we want to phrase it, like layouts of the different phases, right? The first layout is we do one build, and then one cut how our one calorie deficit, I want to use that terminology a little bit more objectively. When Brian laid out the little bit of what I did in 2023. That's what I did six months of building, and then I needed effectively six months of dieting, right? That's exactly what I did. The You need to be lean ish enough to start your build because as you build, you're only going to put on more body fat, right? we'll get into this a little bit more, but that's an important consideration. There is the second approach is then a cut. If you are a little bit, have a little bit more body fat than, you know, warrants starting with a build. So you do a calorie deficit first, then a build and then a calorie deficit. This is typically too ambitious of an approach for only a single year. If you were to do something like maybe only an eight week, like rapid calorie deficit in the beginning, you burn two months, you're probably not going to peel off like that much body fat. You can, but it's a rush. And now we only have 10 months left for... you know, what's supposed to be a very lucrative build and then a calorie deficit. It's just a little rushed and I see it botched way more than it is handled well. Yeah, I feel like that's a decent approach if you're not necessarily trying to get to your best physique ever, but you're like, hey, I'm a little fluffy right now. I'd like to lose a little weight, then build some muscle, then lose a little weight again. And it's like, yeah, that's a totally reasonable approach. But with the context of your best physique ever, like you said, a year just probably isn't enough to fit two cuts in there, one on either side. Exactly. And I'm glad that you reinforced the context is your best physique ever. Like you're going into this with that being like a high priority goal for an entire year. I didn't say the highest priority, but a high priority. And then lastly, the third kind of approach is one cut to really find your physique and then a build to really find yourself. Now adding a little bit of, I wouldn't say this is antidote, but from things I observe, find this is what happens most often with women. They, through whatever reason, higher coach, something like that, they hit this deficit and they really feel like my body has never looked like this before. I never thought that I could achieve this. I just thought it wasn't in the cards for my genetics or something like that. And then they're very happy. And then they fall in love with like the training process. And then through that build is really where they find their confidence in their positioning. in the gym, right, which I love. I love watching this unfold for people. So those are the kind of three phases, you know, that the three approaches to the phases that I think are most commonly laid out. Like Brian and I said, the middle one is probably not advised to use. So we're either going to build first, then cut. And that obviously requires a leaner body composition starting with, or we are going to go start with A cut, typically involves a combination of the making large changes to your lifestyle and the way that you live. And then you finish off with the build of really prioritizing growing muscle and getting strong. Okay. So any follow-ups on that, Brian, before I continue diving in. I think that makes sense. Go for it. Yep. So I think what we'll do is kind of like build out the phases a little bit and then say certain things that make the most sense to incorporate into those phases. And the first I have here is the build. So we'll go with that kind of first avatar, the six month build, and then in the six month deficit. When it comes to we'll see if there's enough time to kind of troubleshoot some things that may occur along the way at the end if we have time. perfect, perfect. With the build, I personally think you should really line up three plus months of building. Now, before it sounds a little bit far-fetched, hear me out. I explain this concept to clients often, and then sometimes they'll present me things with, I think I wanna do like six months of building, and then, you know, diet for eight weeks, and then I have this vacation. July 15th and then I want to like build into that right But what happens is like if we're for those of you on YouTube you can see me drawing these You imaginary lines with my fingers. We have this baseline, right? The I'm gonna call it the worst thing but in terms we're talking about building your best physique ever You need to deviate far enough away from that baseline for appreciable change to occur if we take you and we put on three pounds right of muscle and we distribute that three pounds from your neck to your calves. It's going to be visually imperceptible of a change, right? And you need to dev you need to grow enough so that when you diet back down, there's a visual difference because nothing is more frustrating than going through. Let's call it eight weeks of build and then 12 weeks of dieting. So we've just spent five months to look the same as you did on day one at the end of month five right because you didn't deviate far enough into the build or the deficit to really produce a sufficient visually tangible change so that's like really really important and why think that three plus three plus three plus three is akin to doing six plus six? You know what I mean? Wouldn't it be better to just commit to a six month build and then a six month deficit than to go this like three, three, three, three thing? Yep. Yeah. And what I like in terms of explaining this, I don't like picking numbers of weeks or months because it, it implies it's just a time construct, right? In just because you've built for three months doesn't mean it's been a productive or well spent three months. might take you nine months to really build what someone else might do in like five, depending on Accuracy, know, and a lot of other facets. So the way that I like to describe this is I suggest the minimum of a 7.5 % increase in total body mass. Right. Now what that looks like. Let's take, for example, someone who's small, 100 pounds. Right. And the reason I'm using that is because I suck at doing math in my head and this math I can do. Right. That is if you're a hundred pounds, we're starting this build. We're gonna at the minimum, we're gonna go to a hundred and seven pounds, 107.5, right? Seven and a half to 10 % increase in total body mass, I find is a pretty good sweet spot for a lot of people. That 10 % using that same individual, 110 pounds. If we were to double that, right? If you're starting at 200 pounds, you're male, you're decently lean, that's going from 200. to 220, is that 10 %? If we do that seven and a half percent, that's to 215, right? That's how that works out. And I think those are pretty reasonable targets for a generalized approach for people. Are there outliers? Yes. But you know, that is contextual, right? Yeah, and I think that the nice thing about that is that it's even for the person that's going from 200 to 220, that's still under 1 % a week because you're going up 20 pounds over 26 weeks. And so for that person, it's a little under 1 % a week, which is kind of on the higher end. But then for that smaller person who's going from 100 to 107.5 or whatever, it's even less. It's under 0.5. It's under half a percent per week. which yeah, mean just well, no, guess that's still 1 % a week. Yeah, nevermind. I was thinking in total pounds. So they're actually gaining 0.4 pounds a week or something along those lines. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a great thing that Brian brought up because as you as you break that down, like there's you know, we have published research on rates of gain and stuff. It's actually quite slow, like for changing appreciable size of six months for a build is not lengthy. I would say it's moderate if we're placing labels on it at best. You know, you take me my latest build minus a little hernia detour. is gonna be effectively an entire year, you know? So. Okay, now fat bringing in some other parts of life. Vacations, trips, travel are great during this time, especially as you get into the later phases of the build, where you kind of do get sick of eating a little bit because these things end up being almost like a reprieve. We end up eating at maintenance. Eating at maintenance is typically simpler to do because our core. current caloric intake is quite high and it's a nice reprieve from all of the food that you probably don't want to have anyway, as opposed to when you're dieting and in a restricted phase, you go on a trip. The likelihood of you overeating is higher because your current context outside of that is restrictive. When we go into a vacation or a trip or a wedding weekend or something and we're building and our food intake is consistently high, the signaling is likely going to be different and you will not overeat as much as in one of those like a dieting phase because of the environment that you're currently in when you start that trip vacation, et cetera. So I really, really like to plan those or would suggest planning those at those times because the margin for success over that trip for a build is significantly larger as opposed to it is being in a calorie deficit. Any follow ups on that part, Brian? Nope, nothing on that. cool. And then with builds, I strongly encourage prioritizing a hypertrophy style of training. This is arguably the best time to really dial in your training because you stand to gain the most progress because the environment is very conducive for providing that progress. We have a higher intake of calories. We have a higher recovery capacity. and we can really stand to put those to work in terms of improving the physique. last part I want to talk with training in this context is. prioritizing the muscle groups that you may want to improve the most during this phase, right? We've often on the podcast talked about specialization cycles and those sorts of things. Again, like I just made on my previous point, we have the environment, we have the recovery capacity, the increased resources to put the most work in there. If we were to play devil's advocate and talk about like a prioritization phase during a calorie deficit, There may be some improvement, know, but the environment just is nowhere near as conducive during the build there. And then in this point, sorry, go for it. No. Okay. yeah. So there's a five hour podcast by the data driven strength guys. If you can believe they talked for five hours about hypertrophy research, but, it's an amazing podcast. I'm not done with it yet, but they obviously go down all the rabbit holes as they usually do. And, they're big proponents of this idea of utilizing increased volume load to prioritize the muscle group. Like Aaron is saying. And because we can't do that across our entire body at once, we can kind of take advantage of this additional volume or stimulus in this phase. And obviously a building phase is going to be the best place to do it. And then just as, as one point of being pedantic, I think that we're reaching a point in the industry where talking about volume is almost irrelevant because using the term stimulus is much more, apropos or poignant way of kind of describing what you're trying to do in the gym with volume. Because doing 20 sets of something with relatively poor execution, mind muscle connection and form is likely going to be less stimulus than doing 10 sets that are extremely focused with proper exercise, execution and selection and things like that. And so as we kind of like think about volume as stimulus, if we kind of use those terms interchangeably, What we're really trying to get at is the dose of stimulus that's being provided through the training. And a build is going to be the optimal time for you to really dial in the stimulus for the muscle groups that you. Yep, really good point. And then lastly, to touch on cardio a little bit, mostly for maintaining health during the build and just not letting it deteriorate to where you're starting from kind of ground zero. And then, know, through things that we've talked about on the podcast from a health first standpoint, even though some of these things I would argue push outside the bounds of health, once you get into the extremes, it's it's You lose it where you lose it sort of thing. And I, the days are behind me where I could really say, I think that steps are enough or something like that for someone who's at higher body weight, higher muscle mass sort of things there, even like naturals. I do believe that. Yeah, I agree. And then I'll also add that I just, you shouldn't be doing cardio to burn calories. The goal is to add body weight, as Erin was saying in the build. And so the cardio literally is to just strictly be for health maintenance and not about like, I need to go burn off this food that I just ate. Yeah. So transitioning into the deficit, I'm using that first kind of avatar here. Brian, I'm curious, do you, everyone has kind of different opinions on this. How do you feel about, okay, I'm at the end of my build phase. Do we need to spend some number of weeks, you know, holding at this higher body weight? Maybe we do a maintenance there before. Wow. Excuse me. Before getting into the calorie deficit. How do you personally feel on that? I don't personally do that because once I am at a point where in the past, I haven't done this so much anymore, but recently, but once I was at a point where I was pushing body weights high, I was just ready to stop eating all the food and get myself kind of back into more sustainable habits. And especially right at the end of a build, appetite is diminished. And so I personally just love going directly into the deficit. Cause what I've found in the past is if I spend that time at maintenance, it almost returns my appetite at some level. And then I find it harder to go into the deficit. Whereas I'm so burdened by the build at the end of it that I'm just ready to go into the deficit. And so psychologically, it seems to make more sense that way for me. I agree. And that's what I typically use it for the psychological aspect. Like at the end of a build, you're kind of almost fantasizing the days of less food because you're so sick of it. And the motivation is high, you know, to get into the diet. So some things that I might use there is I'll diet people a little bit more aggressive for a couple of weeks because, like I said, motivation is there. We have the most amount of body fat that we have. So the preference, the preferential reduction of that. is a little bit higher and then we could settle into more like moderate style dieting. But yeah, just a little aside, I do prefer that as well. Okay, so we'll cover maintenance then that, know, kind of on the back end of the deficit. Now with the deficit, the hardest thing is you need to double to triple your estimated time. I find that. I mean, like this is just what I see, numbers with clients, like so much so now that when I plan my phases with clients, I double to triple their times and then I show them why. You know, we're gonna have a trip, like over a 15 week or 16 week diet, we're gonna have three trips. Those are non-progress weeks, you know? And I bake those in and that's one thing that I see that kind of people, I think foolishly pick dieting for a number of weeks. as opposed to dieting to X outcome, right? They say, I'm gonna diet for six weeks. And then it doesn't produce what they want. And they're like, I'll get it next year. You know, as opposed to kind of putting the carriage before the horse in that scenario. So if you are kind of pre-planning or ballparking timelines, double to triple your estimated time, and then double to triple the amount of weight that you think you need to lose. So then do you bake that into that six months? Cause we're talking here about having your best physique in a year where it's 365 days and you have six months of building and six months of cutting. So in theory, you're saying we should be able to do this cut in two to three months, but we're going to give it six months because we have to double or triple the time. No, the six months is very practical, right? I'm kind of speaking more in like generalizations. Like it's still very common, like six weeks, summer shredding. You're not doing fuck all in six weeks to really change your physique unless you're already 12 % body fat or something like that, you know? And I just, I just don't see it. Even my clients, like my best of my best clients who are meticulous eating the same foods. day in and day out, week over week, who are hitting that 1 % rate of loss, we're still 12 weeks absolute minimum to like 12 % body fat, something like that. If they wanna get 10 sub 10, we're at 16 to 20. Yeah. So if this hypothetical athlete who is 200 pounds and goes to 220 on the build, then they now have 20 pounds to lose, maybe even more because they're trying to get to their best physique ever. Right. We're not assuming they started at their best physique ever. So they need to now lose 20 pounds or even more to get to the best physique ever. And I mean, man, even at like a pound a week, that's, that's literally like six months of dieting. Right. That's 26 pounds is 26 weeks. So yeah, do think, know, man, just, it complicates the paradigm a little bit, I think. It does, it definitely does. And I think what we could do to make it a little bit more practical is like, let's give this avatar a few more details, right? 220 pounds, right? Let's assume that's a male. How tall is this 220 pound male, approximately? Six foot. then he gets up to for easy math, 15 % body fat, maybe 20. I don't know which what's reasonable. would say a little bit higher than 15, maybe like a 16 and a half, 17, realistically. But well, the reason I'm saying this is because you see it enough times at like five, five foot 10 to like six foot one. Let's put that in like your about six footish athlete, natural, right? They're gonna need to be about 180 to 190 pounds to be like pretty shredded, right? I know these numbers because that's me, right? Five foot 11. I was 215 when I started my last when I started my last deficit. I was 190 pounds when I ended it, right? That's 25 pounds, right? And I've done that with with clients before at that six foot ish, you know, with a good amount of muscle being like shredded 10 % ish 8%. You're you're 185 to 192 pounds. That's unless you're like a Brian DeCosta, you end up in that. and that's really, and that's, and that's good, you know, progress week over week, but it just takes you about that 25 weeks, you know, to really build like that, get that shredded physique that we're talking about for the episode. And if we were to take that, we cut that in half, right? We use a smaller individual. It's not 25 pounds anymore. Let's call it 13 to 15. Yeah. It's right. And that's, you know, ends up being, you know, they're not doing The higher rate of loss is half. So instead of like, you know, approximately two pounds per week, whatever they're starting at lower and then that tapers as you, your total body mass gets smaller and the timeline looks pretty much the same. Yeah, the percentage of loss is the same because you're a smaller human, but the actual direct amount of weight that you're losing is going to be half of what it is for So the additional note I had here, I have 12 to 26, but that 12 is, I don't. It depends on how you, you know, as the listener are defining your best physique. If you're someone who's starting in your, you know, overweight and this isn't something that's has been that high of a priority in your life for that long, getting to 12 % body fat might be like a massive victory for you. Getting to 15 % might be like a massive victory for you. Those things are more achievable in shorter timeframes, but as we get leaner, the... it things start to kind of work against you, your body starts resisting things a little bit more going from 15 % body fat to 10 % body fat, as opposed to 20 to 15, even though it's only 5%, right? now into the deficit when possible, avoid planning trips, vacations, et cetera, during this time. Can it be done? Yes. Does it require kind of bullying situations? Yes. And for a majority of people and I'm speaking from, you know, my clientele, most do not find it worth bullying the situation over a vacation, a trip just to stay adherent. And I would say more frequent than not even coming back even is a pretty good victory. Many people regress and then we lose the week of the trip the following week after the trip just to get back to the baseline that we were at the week before the trip. And now we look and we kind of have three weeks where we're effectively body weight stable and no productive fat loss has occurred. You know, and we bake that into that 15 week timeline or whatever, you have one trip, it's effectively three weeks that are effectively unproductive. You get where I'm saying where I'm talking about doubling and tripling your timelines. Okay, and then the additional note I had here on training is I believe, right, and I'm sure Brian will have some additional input onto this, deficit is a great time to incorporate other training modalities, muscle retention becomes the primary desired outcome of our physique focused training, but getting into different cardio modalities or things like that can not only serve purpose to add some additional like. variability for an overall enjoyment aspect, it can actually help along the fat loss through some additional caloric expenditure as well. Yeah, I'll just caveat this statement of other training modalities by saying that that doesn't mean to go do like light circuit kettlebell training or crossfit or something along those lines that we're in the pursuit of muscle retention. As Aaron stated, being the primary desired outcome, we have to be very specific and calculated with exactly what we're doing in the gym to make sure that we don't lose muscle in a deficit. And so going outside the bounds and doing these kettlebell circuits and CrossFit style stuff, it's kind of going to be counterproductive to the goal of maintaining muscle. So what Aaron is likely referring to is just the addition of different cardio modalities that are easier to track, that you can kind of use as a tool to help you create the caloric deficit and not this kind of randomness of these CrossFit style. workouts that you really have no idea what sort of muscle damage is occurring through the novelty factor, or how many calories you're burning or anything those lines, it just it just really complicates things. Yeah, thank you for adding onto that. was a poor word choice by me. I guess I should have said maybe like activity. Like I've had a client that comes to mind who was like, hey, if I wanted to like join a once per week like men's basketball league during the calorie deficit, is that a good idea? And I was like, it's a brilliant idea actually. Like I would encourage something like that. So that was more so what I meant by that word choice, but you know, a poor word choice by myself. No, all good. We get the point across, yeah. Okay, I believe we've covered the deficit for the most part. Is there anything you want to add on that you think I missed going through there? We've covered this a bunch on prior episodes, but so that people don't have to go back and find them. We both are kind of proponents of, you know, slightly lower volumes during a deficit, you know, making sure that you're really working close to failure, still trying to push for progressive overload, even though you're in a deficit, using that kind of as an assessment of making sure that you're not losing so much muscle. personally, I also love working in slightly lower rep ranges, you know, all the time, but especially during a deficit because there just isn't as much, glycolytic kind of carbohydrate resource to push into the more glycolytic rep ranges. And so there's probably less benefit in using that 12 to 20 rep range and more benefit in staying in that like five to 10 in a lot of cases to kind of be able to assess progress and use. I mean, it's all anaerobic metabolism, but to primarily be using the fuels that are going to go into those kind of short bursts of energy as opposed to the more enduring sets. Plus the psychological side of it's just harder to sit in that pain cave when you're in a deficit. So for a number of reasons, think lower volumes, higher efforts are usually great tools to use in a deficit. Yeah, there's something that you said that I wanted to touch on. What was it? your training performance. As you go through the deficit and as the deficit prolongs, your training performance will slow and eventually stall. However, that's not in week three. It's not in week four. It's probably not even in like weeks five, six, or seven. And it's typically the duration plays a large role in it. I would say the leanness plays the largest role in it. Once you start getting decently lean, your training performance will even very likely start to regress. Pressing movements are some of the first that this happens to. And you might be losing like three to four reps on a movement, you know, that were that you were able to do, let's say eight reps for at the end of the build. you might be into like four reps, you know, by the end of your deficit. A rule of thumb that I like to use is if we're in a deficit and we're dropping under five reps, I like to reduce load. I don't really want to be performing under five reps for anything or what clients do. But that's just, you know, an Aaron rule of thumb that other people might feel differently about. Yeah, I think that's pretty reasonable. I remember, I just keep thinking about this poster article that Chris Barakat put out there when he went and won his pro card maybe two years ago. And he was saying that one of his big things that he changed for that prep compared to prior preps was that for his big compound style movements that he's using to kind of assess whether he's losing muscle or not. He basically just kept the exact same weight throughout the entire prep. And he understood that he was going to lose, you know, some reps toward the end. But his goal was to try to maintain his performance with that same load, the entire prep. And so he wasn't trying to add load or change rep ranges or finagle the system in any way. It was just, Hey, I'm a hack squatting four plates for six at the beginning of prep. I'm going to hang onto that as long as I can. And I want to say at the end, he said like the week before he stood on stage, she did the same weight for four reps. So through that commitment, he was able to essentially lose only two reps and keep load the same across the board. And so that's an interesting approach as well. think mentally it's tough to be like, man, I have to go in and do the same thing again and again and again to not make any progress. But I think it's an effective approach if you have the psychology for it. I think it's a highly effective approach because what it allows is then a little bit more of a gamification of parts of your diet, right? Because we know training performance, like, you know, Chris used in this example is a pretty decent indicator of muscle retention, right? If I'm able to retain my performance, I'm probably retaining my muscle. If you're early-ish on into your diet, your training performance is starting to slide. it is probably a pretty good indicator that you may want to redistribute some of your feeding so that you can get more food in before your training in order to preserve training performance. So it becomes a little bit of like a strategy. That's what I'm looking for. Like maybe you're still having a full 150, 200 grams of rice with dinner, but you're only taking in like 25 grams of carbs or something like that before you're in your pre-training meal. It might behoove you, or I would say it will probably behoove you to start to distribute a majority of those dinner carbs to prior to training in a context where training performance is already degraded. Yep, thank you. Okay, I feel like we beat deficit pretty good and have a pretty good understanding there. Now, maintenance, right? Maintenance is kind of like the redheaded stepchild of the nutritional periodization phases because the placement is kind of tricky. What I kind of like to do is my maintenance, I really like to use when people are kind of starting at Troubling times, like let's say a new client starts and it's November and we're heading into like Christmas and Thanksgiving, dieting is gonna be pretty hard. Calor is surplus is not the wisest if we're new to something. like a maintenance is great there. However, in the context of a year, you probably don't wanna spend too much time at maintenance because it's the opportunity cost that you could be gaining or shredding, right? With this, so. It's important to understand that in the context and I would say in a year to the best physique, I would spend as little of time at maintenance as possible. What do you think? Yeah, I don't see a whole lot of utility and maintenance except kind of where I'm at in my stage of training where I'm not really trying to push the boundaries in either direction. But for most people that are still trying to work toward a goal, you should be working toward that goal, whether it's increasing or decreasing. so, so yeah, maintenance, I, it had kind of a Renaissance maybe like four or five years ago, revived stronger in the group, kind of was following some research that there was a bunch of benefit in maintenance phases, primarily in the shifting from one to another to kind of cement gains, so to speak. And I think that that has mostly been debunked at this point. And so if you're using a maintenance phase and you're a goal oriented person that's trying to either gain or lose, it likely is mostly just for psychological reasons and probably doesn't provide any significant physiological benefit. Yeah, I agree completely. The notes that I have here, it's great timing for holidays and for like shorter durations throughout the holiday season. And then I have a little bit of a caution of caution about high surpluses throughout the holiday season. Like let's call it that Thanksgiving to Christmas period, because, you know, we've talked about numerous times, you cannot force feed hypertrophy. And if you're already at a sufficient surplus to produce your, you know, hypertrophy that you're after feeding in excess of that does not turbo boost up your hypertrophy. just makes you fatter faster, which then you pay for with the extra fat, but then you double pay for in the diet because now you need to diet more for these, you know, additional overages. So if we have things around that, like I like to encourage, okay, it's this Thanksgiving week, we're gonna pull calories down to like maintenance. know you're gonna overeat the day before the day of probably the day after by likely hundreds of calories. So this kind of is a little bit of a hedging of our bet there. Yeah. Go ahead. I was going to say something about I want to kind of, I'll hold it off till later. Okay. And some, some additional information like maintenance, in my opinion, is the best time to flex your increased flexibility of food choices because of the inherent inaccuracy of estimating and reporting, right? If we're already at a surplus and we're being super flexible, what's going to happen? We are now super into a surplus. And again, we increase the rate at which we get fatter, obviously in a deficit more smaller margins of success extends the timeline, which we talked about. earlier. And then I think at maintenance, like let's say we do have a maintenance phase, you know, post achieving your best physique, I think is a great time, you know, to have this, which I'm going to touch on a little bit more at the end is a great time for reduced training frequency, volume, or prioritizing other modalities, maybe entering some additional seasonality type stuff. The note I have here, big adventure hikes, like maybe you know, it's summer in Colorado or something like that and you don't want to do a bunch of big long hikes doing that in a deficit. Performance kind of sucks. You might really crush training the day after if we're going in like super glycogen depleted, that sort of thing. Or in a big surplus, breathing kind of heavy, you're sweating like I'm sweating right now. It's not a lot of fun. And then I'll also add maybe just some potential resensitization aspects to maintenance as well. Resensitization seems to be a hot topic in the industry, both for training and potentially here as it relates to diet too. And so there could be some small benefits there as I agree, I think. I think the physiological benefits are probably small. I think the psychological benefits are probably moderate, if not more. I would love a maintenance week where I only had to eat three meals per day. I would sign up for that immediately right now sort of thing. So again, a little bit of a reprieve. think a lot of the things are many cases that the utility is. from the utility is rooted in its psychology, but the psychology influences like the physiology. So it's more indirect, I would say. And then the kind of last thing, let's say we have our six month build, we are up 10 % total body mass. We have our 25, 26 week diet. We're shredded now. We're very, very lean. We have achieved our greatest physique that we've ever had. Congratulations. You've done very, very well. I encourage you to stop and smell the roses for a bit because we always want what we do not have. And as you are nearing those final weeks, you are going to start to fantasize around building more muscle because you were like, man, I'm shredded, I'm lean, but I thought I would have more muscle than I do here. And I really want to get back to building more muscle, right? Which is what happens. And then we, six weeks later into building muscle, you're kind of like, you know, I've already put on more body fat than I really wanted to. And I really wish I would have just like enjoyed being really shredded for a little bit longer. Now, big caveat here. I have about like maybe a month or so, maybe six weeks, especially if the level of leanness you got to is what would be considered unsustainable for yourself or. unhealthy from a purely physiologic standpoint, like maybe you're a female example and we now don't have a cycle or something like that. That's a pretty, you know, objective signal that your body doesn't want to be that lean sort of thing. Take some photos, enjoy it and then start to move on. But I just I've done this personally myself and I've had it happen with numerous clients where it's like, you know, I was like a month ago, I was shredded and it was pretty cool. and I only spent two weeks there and now I wish I would have spent a little bit more time there and enjoyed the fruits of that labor. Yeah, no, it's a really good point. Every really structured diet that I've done has ended with a photo shoot that was planned ahead of time. And that's just such a great way to validate all of the work that you put in for yourself, to be able to have kind of some images and be like, look, this is what I achieved. And another thing that I know you've experienced as well is that sometimes your physique actually looks the best, like two to six weeks after you think that you've peaked. And so a lot of times I've done these photo shoots and been like, I wish like I would have had more carbs or given it another two weeks or like started to add food back in more. like, you know, there's the worry always that, but if I do that, I'm going to lose some of these cuts. And like, I'm really at my peak right now, but almost always it seems that once you get back to like eating maintenance or maintenance plus on and you're reversing back out of that. around that like two week point, it's just like the physique pops and you're still lean and you're like, there's like this constant, consistent regret of fuck, I should have waited an extra two weeks to do the photo shoot or maybe next time I'll like go into this differently or something. And so I do think that there's a lot of that kind of honeymoon phase after the cut as well, where you still get to kind of live in the glory of what you achieved for a number of weeks there. And so you have that to look forward to as well. Yeah, that is that is my favorite of all the nutritional periodization like that. Diet's done. Food is coming up. Stress comes down. We've taken a little break from training, so we've reduced some training related information. We're sleeping better again. The carbohydrate are in. We've dropped cortisol and then you wake up and you just look like it's by far the best physique you ever had. And you're like, yeah, why was where was this, you know, seven days ago when I had this photo shoot like, no, you needed a really good sleep, higher food. You're full now, but not. so much food that we've entered the surplus, so we're spilling, everything just comes together and you look amazing. And that is by far the most enjoyable time. Because you have the physique that you've worked for, but there's no more food focus as food's back in, you're sleeping good, like the pressure is down. That's by far the best. Cool. I was going to add in that extra section at the end. Do you have anything to add before I talk about that? Because I don't think I want to do it. OK, so we had this great question come in from a longtime listener, and I think we're going to address it next week because I think next week is our October Instagram Q &A episode. But a really great question about someone who is 15 years in and really hasn't been able to gain strength at all recently and curious what his what he should do to ensure that he's gaining muscle. He won't use his goal is hypertrophy, but he's like, I can't gain strength. So how can I be sure that I'm gaining muscle? And man, it's a complicated question. I've been ruminating it over in my brain for like a week and I think I have a little bit of clarity on it. We'll attack that one next week. The thing I wanted to finish on here is just as a thought experiment or to hear your response, because I get this question about calorie cycling all the time in my DMS. And so I think it would be prudent for us to at least address this. So let's in theory assume that instead of this person taking six months to build and six months to cut to get to their best physique ever, they're like, Hey coach, could I do nine months where I'm in a surplus four to five days a week and I'm in a deficit two to three days a week so that I'm gaining weight, but I'm gaining weight slowly for nine months. It'll mitigate some of the fat gain that I would gain if I just went hardcore in the paint for six straight months. So I get to this point at nine months, I'm only a little bit fatter than I was. So we can probably get this off and strip it down to my best physique ever in three months or four months. A, what are your thoughts on calorie cycling in this approach? Does it have utility? And is that a crazy idea? I think it's one of those things like in theory, it works out on paper. I don't think it really works in practice. As humans, we like to conceptualize things to, you know, a 24 hour period, but that's not how things actually work. Like we've talked about before post a hard training session. Like we're we have peak elevated NPS 48 hours after that training session. And something that's really funny is I was really just, I read something today about this scientist, I think it was in the 70s, they put him in a cave, completely like a super underground, completely removed from light, you know, all that stuff. And he would radio in when he woke up in the mornings. His circadian rhythm turned into like a two day pattern where he'd stay awake for 36 hours straight, and then he would sleep for 12 hours. So even like our human circadian rhythm, it's not actually how it always is. It's just like what we've adapted to with the cycle of the sun and those sorts of things. like, like I said, as humans, like to break things into, hey, like sun up to sun down or midnight to midnight, whatever. That's not how things actually work. That's just what makes the most sense from a time construct. Do I think it's crazy? I don't think it's crazy. Do I think it's gonna work out the way that you think it is would? No, because if it did, everyone would do that. Like there's typically reasons why there's like a system of things, right? Like the thought that comes to mind is like, hey, I'm a basketball player. I wanna go to the NBA, but instead of going the route of like going through college and then getting drafted, I think I'm gonna like graduate high school. and then go do a year in France and then go play in China for a year and then go to this Euro league. Could that work? Potentially. Should you do it? Probably not because there's a tried and true way that everyone uses, the best physiques in the world use, success leaves clues. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I guess the only thing I would push back on is just to play devil's advocate and do this thought experiment a little bit further would be like you could in theory organize your training so that all of your training where you really need to be highly recovered and have food afterward could be placed in the like five day surplus window. And then you could have like a period of two days where you're not training around those times. And maybe it's like, okay, that you're not in an anabolic state. But yes, I mean, like 100 % agree with you. Like that was kind of why I brought that up was to get the exact response that you Yeah, I would love things like that to work out. You know, I really do. if you were to say, Aaron, you have to pick, I think this person would spend nine months and they'd look pretty much identical to where they started at because they're trying to play two games at once. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, well I think that was super productive and then next week we'll come back and hit our October Instagram Q &A. Sounds good as always guys. Thank you for listening Brian, and I will talk to you next week