Cutting and preserving muscle mass – powerful tips

Intro

It’s no secret that cutting can be tough.

Even the thought of potentially losing hard-earnt muscle tissue can be enough to turn even the most die hard gym-goer into a permabulker – destined never to see their abs and get to a point where they can see the muscle they’ve spent so much time and effort into actually building through months and years of hard training.

Diet adjustments

Cutting successfully and retaining muscle requires your diet to be adjusted to fulfil TWO key criteria.

1. Total caloric intake is below maintenance

Cutting requires a calorie deficit. The sweet spot for most people is typically a 10-20% reduction in total calories

If a persons mainenance was 2500kcal daily. A good starting point would be 2000-2250kcal, or a 250-500kcal (10-20%) reduction.

Calculate your maintenance here – https://www.musclehacking.com/calorie-calculator/

More aggressive deficits tend to lead to rapid losses in strength and muscle, and may also cause intense food cravings leading to diet relapse. So unless you have a short time window to achieve a certain weight and/or have extremely good willpower, then such aggressive cuts are not recommended.

On the other hand, I also advise against cutting too slowly. Slow progress can demotivate someone looking to see changes in body composition.

9/10 times its better to take a middle ground approach as this is where you’ll likely get the best results.

For more information on fat loss, check out my complete ultimate fat loss guide

2. Adequit protein consumption

There’s been tons of debate and back and forth studies to determine how much protein you actually need to consume to spare muscle mass during a cutting phase.

A good number to aim for is 2g per KG of bodyweight. Going beyond this amount doesn’t have further impact in terms of muscle preservation for the majority of people.

Training adjustments

Frequency needs to be increased, I would recommend that each muscle is trained twice per week. This is to provide adequate signalling so our body can recognised that the muscle is still needed and wont catabolize it as easily.

You’ll need to train hard and not let your foot off the gas when it comes to trying to keep up with your PR’s.

Of course performance is going to suffer especially as you get lean, but it’s very important to remember that the skeletal muscular system is a product of adaptation that’s trying to be as calorie efficient as possible – if you are cutting and provide it will less stimulus IT WILL ATROPHY!

Cutting natural vs Enhanced

There are different degrees of enhanced. In this discussion we will be assuming by enhanced, we are talking about exogenous androgens (which allow the body be in a constant state of anabolism).

Due to a constant high degree of androgenic signalling, they can allow a user to preserving muscle mass and strength much easier than a natural can, even in a severe calorie deficit.

Even someone using just 150mg of testosterone a week, putting them at the top end of the ‘natural’ range will still have a big advantage over a true natural. Especially as they get very lean – an optimal hormonal profile can go along way to preserve muscle and generally make someone feel much better when calories are restricted.

Some enhanced athletes take it further and use certain steroid ‘stacks’ to achieve a particular look. As they get lean, their physiques often take on a dry, grainy, vascular and hard appearance – This is often a result of DHT-derived steroids like masteron, winstrol and anavar removing the subcutaneous water layer between the muscle and the skin while also keep the muscle full of nitrogen and minerals.

Certain anabolics, namely trenbolone and anavar bind to the glucocorticoid receptor and inhibit muscle protein breakdown providing strong anti-catabolic effects.

Fat burners could also be considered enhanced because they speed up the rate of lipolysis to a degree which is not achieveable naturally.

Such fat burners include, clenbuterol which acts on the beta-2 receptor, speeding up metabolism and yohimbine which blocks the alpha-2 adrenegeric receptors in fat cells allowing them to become ‘unlocked’ for fat burning.