Ultimately, there are pros and cons associated with both fast and slow rates of weight loss. Faster rates of loss will help you lose fat faster, but you’ll also experience larger drops in performance, sticking to your diet may become more challenging, and you’ll increase the risk of losing muscle. Conversely, slower rates of weight loss mean you’ll need to diet for a longer period of time in order to achieve your desired levels of leanness, which can also be a challenging prospect for some people. 

At the end of the day, the decision is up to you, but we tend to think that more gradual rates of weight loss are preferable for most people, most of the time. So, let’s dive in.

Looking for a quick answer? Check out our free Cutting Calculator below.

How quickly should you aim to lose weight on a cut?

Unlike the previous article on bulking, we don’t need to traverse through the research study-by-study in order to determine appropriate rates of weight loss when cutting. A lot more research has been conducted, so we don’t need to try to pull threads and identify patterns in a relatively small handful of studies. Furthermore, recommended rates of weight loss don’t need to be split out by differing levels of resistance training experience, because the principles of fat gain and fat loss are more-or-less universal. Recommended rates of weight gain differ with varying levels of training experience because rates of muscle growth vary with differing levels of training experience. But, for cutting, resistance training helps everyone preserve muscle when losing weight, and the rate at which you lose weight will just depend on your energy deficit.

A 2021 meta-analysis by Murphy and Koehler found that losses in lean mass increased as the size of daily energy deficits increased. With energy deficits smaller than about 500 Calories per day (which would equate to losing about 1 pound or 0.5kg per week), subjects (on average) were able to experience a bit of body recomposition (losing fat, while gaining a little muscle). With deficits larger than 500 Calories per day, subjects tended to lose lean mass, with the rate of lean mass loss increasing as energy deficits grew. For most people, this would result in a rate of weight loss of about 0.5-0.8% of body weight per week.

So, if your main priority is to lose fat as quickly as possible while retaining your fat-free mass, a rate of weight loss of around one pound/half a kilogram per week, or around 0.6-0.7% of body weight per week should do the trick. But, assuming you don’t want to teeter right on the edge of preserving vs. losing muscle mass, keeping a slightly wider range in mind can offer more flexibility without making the diet excruciatingly slow, and without virtually guaranteeing that you’ll lose a lot of muscle.

So, for most people, most of the time, a rate of weight loss in the range of 0.25-1% of body weight per week, or between 0.5-1.5 pounds (0.25-0.75kg) per week should be the default. As you get closer to 1%, 1.5 pounds, or 0.75kg, your rate of fat loss will be a bit faster, but you may lose a bit of muscle in the process. At rates closer to 0.25%, 0.5 pounds, or 0.25kg, your diet may take a bit longer, but you can be very confident that you’ll be able to maintain your muscle mass, or potentially even gain a little bit of muscle as you diet.

With that said, I’ll go out on a limb and posit that considerations solely focused on body composition outcomes are what drive decision making when planning a cut on the front end, but they take a backseat to motivation and tolerability as a cut progresses. For most people, cutting is fairly unpleasant. As you get into a cut, you may find that it’s hard to stay motivated when pursuing a conservative rate of weight loss – you just want your diet to be done with so that you can shift back to maintenance or bulking, even if that means you lose a bit of muscle in the process (especially since it’s fairly easy to rebuild muscle, due to the phenomenon of “muscle memory”). Conversely, you may find that the day-to-day experience of maintaining a moderate-to-large energy deficit negatively affects your mood, energy levels, performance, and levels of hunger to a larger degree than you’re comfortable with, even if you’re maintaining your muscle mass.

So, functionally, I think you should be open to rates of weight loss within a range of about 0.1-1.5% of body weight per week. We recommend starting somewhere between 0.25-1%, but don’t be afraid to adjust your target rate of weight loss to be a bit faster or a bit slower based on your motivation, feelings, and perceptions when cutting.

As one final note, I’d caution against scaling percentages of body weight infinitely. Aiming to lose 1% of body weight per week is a slightly aggressive but totally reasonable rate of weight loss for most individuals, but it can be very aggressive and result in very large energy deficits for heavier people.

Just to illustrate, if you weigh 150 pounds, losing 1% of your body weight per week would require an energy deficit of about 750 Calories per day. However, if you weigh 300 pounds, aiming to lose 1% of your body weight per week would require an energy deficit of 1500 Calories per day. That’s not only a much larger absolute energy deficit, it’s also a much larger relative energy deficit, because total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) scales non-linearly with body mass.

On average, people who weigh 150 pounds have a TDEE of around 2400 Calories per day (there’s certainly a wide range, but that’s the norm), whereas people who weigh 300 pounds have a TDEE of around 3600 Calories per day. So, aiming to lose 1% of body weight per week would result in a relative energy deficit of about 31% for the person who weighs 150 pounds. In other words, they’d be consuming about 31% less energy than they were burning on a daily basis. For the person who weighs 300 pounds, aiming to lose 1% of body weight per week would result in a relative energy deficit of around 42%. That’s a very large relative difference. A ~30% energy deficit is fairly aggressive, but it’s typically relatively tolerable and sustainable, whereas an energy deficit of >40% usually feels rough.

All of which is to say, we think a rate of weight loss of about 2 pounds or 1 kilogram of body weight per week serves as a good “upper limit” for most people, most of the time. Once daily energy deficits begin exceeding 1000 Calories per day, diets tend to get quite unpleasant and unsustainable for the vast majority of people.

So, how fast should you aim to cut? That will ultimately depend on how long you’d like to diet, your comfort with potentially losing a bit of muscle, and your motivation and perceptions as your cut progresses.

You can use the table below and cutting calculator at the top of the page to help inform your decision making. But, if you don’t have a strict timeline for when your diet needs to finish up, we’d generally recommend opting for a “Conservative” to “Moderate” rate of weight loss, since it will help you feel better, maintain (or even build) muscle mass, and preserve your energy levels and performance throughout your cut.

The post How Fast Should You Lose Weight When Cutting? appeared first on MacroFactor.

Ultimately, there are pros and cons associated with both fast and slow rates of weight gain. Faster rates of weight gain might help you build muscle a little faster, but you’ll gain considerably more fat in the process, meaning you’ll likely want (or need) to cut again sooner. Conversely, slower rates of weight gain might mean that you’re not absolutely maximizing your rate of muscle growth on a week-to-week basis.

At the end of the day, the decision is up to you, but we tend to think that more gradual rates of weight gain are preferable for most people, most of the time. So, let’s dive in.

Looking for a quick answer? Check out our free Bulking Calculator below.

An overview of the controlled research on bulking

Assuming your goal is to maximize muscle growth while minimizing fat gain, optimal rates of weight gain are heavily influenced by your level of resistance training experience.

For instance, a classic study by Rozenek and colleagues using (essentially) untrained subjects found that relatively fast rates of weight gain resulted in very rapid gains in fat-free mass, with minimal changes in body fat. Subjects lifted weights four days per week for eight weeks. One group just lifted weights without any intentional change to their diets, while two other groups used supplemental energy-dense beverages to increase energy intake. All three groups had great results: the group of subjects that didn’t intentionally change their diets gained about 0.6kg of body mass, lost about 0.8kg of fat, and gained about 1.4kg of fat-free mass in eight weeks. Meanwhile, the two groups using the high-calorie supplemental drinks gained about 3kg of body mass, 3kg of fat-free mass, and didn’t gain or lose any meaningful amount of fat.

Next, we have a study by Smith and colleagues. In this study, subjects had at least six months of training experience, but they were still (relatively) untrained enough for their bench press strength to increase by 12.5%, and their leg press strength to increase by 37.2% in just six weeks. Rather than split things out by group, the researchers used regression analysis to detail how much fat-free mass was gained in relation to total gains in body mass. They found that, when gaining less than ~0.55% of body weight per week (about 0.4kg per week), subjects experienced body recomposition, on average (simultaneously gaining fat-free mass while losing fat mass). But as rates of body weight gain increased, more and more fat was gained, relative to gains in fat-free mass. Furthermore, rates of weight gain were only weakly associated with gains in elbow flexor and knee extensor thickness (and the association was actually negative for elbow flexor thickness).

Next, we have a study by Helms and colleagues. The subjects in this study had a higher level of training experience than the subjects in the Smith study (over eight weeks of training, bench press and squat strength only increased by about 5-5.5%). The subjects were divided into three groups, and were either instructed to a) eat at energetic maintenance, b) pursue a very small energy surplus (aiming to increase their body weight by about 1% per month), or c) pursue a larger energy surplus (aiming to increase their body weight by about 3% per month). To account for subjects’ actual rate of weight gain differing from researchers’ recommendations, regression analysis was used to see whether faster rates of weight gain were predictive of enhanced muscle growth and/or greater fat accumulation. Ultimately, faster rates of weight gain were unrelated to rates of muscle growth for the quads and triceps (R² = 0-0.08), and only weakly related to rates of biceps growth (R² = 0.24). However, faster rates of weight gain were much more strongly predictive of rates of fat accumulation (R² = 0.49). So, faster rates of weight gain didn’t seem to significantly increase muscle growth, but they did lead to more fat gain.

Next, we have a study by Sanchez and colleagues. The subjects in this study were a mixed group of men and women who were “involved in sport, military, or training at the recreational, collegiate, or elite level.” But, their rate of strength gain suggests that their average level of training experience was somewhere between the subjects in the Smith study and the Helms study (Bench press and squat strength increased by about 10% in 10 weeks). There were two groups of subjects in this study, and they gained weight at slightly different rates (0.16 vs. 0.27kg per week), but the ratio of fat-to-lean mass gained was similar in both groups. The group gaining weight faster gained about 70% lean mass and 30% fat mass, while the group gaining weight slower gained about 75% lean mass and 25% fat mass. So, this study suggests that that, in this population, gaining weight at a rate of 0.24-0.38% of body weight per week results in gaining about 70-75% lean mass and 25-30% fat mass.

Finally, we have a classic study by Garthe and colleagues. In this study, elite athletes (people who competed for the Norwegian national team in various sports) either gained weight with a self-directed diet, or they gained weight using the dietary advice of sports nutritionists. The self-directed group ate a bit less protein (1.7g/kg vs. 2.4g/kg) and gained weight a bit slower (0.12kg per week vs. 0.27kg per week, or 0.16% vs. 0.38% of body mass per week) than the group given nutrition counseling. Gains in lean mass didn’t differ significantly between groups (1.2 vs. 1.7kg). Furthermore, while neither group gained a ton of fat, the group gaining weight faster put on about 5 times as much fat (1.1kg vs. 0.2kg) over the 8-12 week duration of the study. Thus, a faster rate of weight gain only slightly increased the rate of lean mass accretion, but it did lead to considerably more fat gain. Gaining weight at a rate of 0.16% of body weight per week resulted in gaining about 85% lean mass and 15% fat mass, while gaining weight at a rate of 0.38% of body weight per week resulted in gaining about 65% lean mass and 35% fat mass

So, what we see from these five studies is that relatively fast rates of weight gain – up to around 0.4kg or 0.5% of body weight per week – lead to large increases in fat-free mass and little-to-no increase in fat mass (on average) in people with relatively low levels of training experience. Past this point, the study by Smith and colleagues suggests that rates of fat gain begin increasing.

For subjects with more training experience – like those in the Helms and Garthe studies – gaining weight faster seems to primarily just increase the rate at which you gain fat. Both studies did suggest that faster rates of weight gain may increase muscle growth a little bit. In the Garthe study, faster rates of weight gain did result in non-significantly larger increases in fat-free mass, and in the Helms study, faster rates of weight gain didn’t increase quadriceps or triceps growth, but they did slightly increase rates of biceps growth. However, these studies also suggested that gaining weight faster primarily just increased rates of fat gain. In the Garthe study, for instance, gaining weight at a rate of 0.38% of body mass per week resulted in about about 60-65% of the weight gained being fat-free mass, and about 30-35% of the weight gained being fat mass, versus gaining (on average) 85% fat-free mass when gaining weight at a rate of 0.16% of body weight per week. The Sanchez study corroborates these results – gaining weight at a rate of about 0.24-0.38% of body weight per week meant gaining about 70-75% lean mass and 25-30% fat mass.

Recommended rate of weight gain for bulking

So, how fast should you aim to gain weight? That will ultimately depend on how long you’d like to bulk for, and your degree of comfort with gaining fat as you gain weight. The table below (and the bulking calculator at the top of the page) can help guide your decision making; here’s how to interpret it:

Conservative: this is the quintessential “lean bulk.” You likely won’t absolutely maximize your rate of muscle growth, but you should experience little-to-no fat gain, and you might even experience some degree of body recomposition (especially if you’re a beginner-to-intermediate lifter).

Happy medium: this would be our “in a vacuum” recommendation. You should come close to maximizing your rate of muscle growth, fat gain should still be minimal (around 2/3rds-3/4ths of the weight you gain should be fat-free mass), and you should be able to stay in a surplus and keep building muscle for an extended period of time before you feel the need to cut again.

Aggressive: this is the point at which you can be very confident you’re not leaving any short-term muscle growth on the table, but you’ll likely gain quite a bit more fat, and not be able to bulk for nearly as long. This is about as fast as most people should consider bulking.

Extremely aggressive: if you want to completely ensure you’re not leaving an ounce of muscle growth on the table, and you’re comfortable with gaining at least 50% fat as you bulk, you could select this option.

Beginner: you’re able to add weight to the bar every workout. Your strength in most exercises is increasing by at least 2% per week. This applies to very few people with more than about 3-6 months of serious training experience.

Intermediate: you’re able to add weight to the bar most workouts. Your strength in most exercises is increasing by around 1% per week (in other words, if your rate of progress continued, you’d confidently expect to be lifting 50% heavier weights within the next year). This applies to very few people with more than about a year of serious training experience.

Experienced: strength gains have slowed down to well below 1% per week. If the weights you were lifting were 25% heavier at this time next year, you’d be thrilled. This applies to most people with at least 1-2 years of serious training experience.

It’s also worth noting that body weight-based scaling doesn’t work indefinitely. 0.5% of body weight for someone who weighs 50kg and someone who weighs 150kg amounts to very large differences in total weight gain, and the person who weighs 150kg likely isn’t capable of gaining muscle at three times the rate of the person who weighs 50kg. So, these are reasonable caps, in terms of total pounds or kilograms of body weight per week.

As you bulk, be sure to monitor your rate of strength gains in the gym. If your rate of progress noticeably slows down, that suggests that your rate of muscle growth is likely slowing down as well, and it may be wise to reduce your target rate of weight gain. Furthermore, as mentioned in the first article in this series, if you have a goal of maximizing your total muscle growth long-term, we think it’s advisable to spend as much time as possible in neutral-to-positive energy balance. So, when in doubt, we’d typically recommend opting for rates of weight gain in the “Conservative” to “Happy Medium” range. Furthermore, if you think you might be gaining fat faster than you’d prefer, we’d generally recommend reducing your target rate of weight gain, rather than sticking with a faster rate of weight gain and just planning to shift back into a cut sooner. If you gain muscle 10-20% slower, but you’re able to spend twice as long bulking before you need to cut again, you’ll come out ahead in the long run.

Why we updated our bulking recommendations

The rates of weight gain in the table and the bulking calculator reflect the bulking recommendations you’ll now find when setting up a new weight gain goal in MacroFactor. These recommended rates of weight gain (specifically for beginner and intermediate lifters) are considerably faster than our prior recommendations. The main reason for this change is that the amount of research on bulking has increased by 150% since we were initially formulating our recommendations (in that there were previously two controlled studies on the topic, and now there are five).

As mentioned previously, we do still think it’s preferable for most people to err on the “slow and steady” side of things when bulking – you’ll likely get a lot further by staying in a small surplus for 2 years than by hammering an aggressive surplus for a few months before feeling the need to cut again. So, when there were just two studies looking at the effects of different rates of weight gain on body composition outcomes (one in totally untrained lifters, and one in international-level athletes – none in “normal” lifters with sub-elite levels of training experience), we thought it best to keep our recommendations fairly conservative.

However, we continuously monitor the research to ensure that our recommendations reflect the best available evidence, and we deemed that there’s now sufficient evidence to conclude that beginner and intermediate lifters can achieve faster rates of muscle growth, while still minimizing fat gain, with rates of weight gain that are a fair bit faster than our prior recommendations.

So, that wraps up this article. But bulks don’t last forever. In the final article of this three-part series, we cover how quickly you should aim to lose weight on a cut. That article includes a cutting calculator similar to this article’s bulking calculator.

The post How Fast Should You Gain Weight When Bulking? appeared first on MacroFactor.

This may seem like a perplexing question if you’ve spent most of your life awash in diet culture that encourages everyone to try to lose weight and be smaller, but many people with athletic, fitness, or physique-related aspirations have goals for which weight gain can be beneficial. Being heavier can be an advantage in certain sports, and it’s much easier to build muscle while in an energy surplus. But, the “bulk or cut” question comes up so frequently because the advantages of gaining weight are weighed against health-related concerns associated with carrying more body fat, and aesthetic preferences related to a desire to achieve or maintain a particular level of leanness.

A quick note before I dive in: this article is written (and the “bulk or cut” quiz below is made) with the assumption that you’re lifting weights, or engaging in some other form of challenging structured resistance exercise. I feel like it’s a safe assumption that most people reading this article lift weights already (the “bulk or cut” terminology is fairly specific to the resistance training subculture), but if that doesn’t describe you, some advice in this article may not be applicable, as it assumes you’d be gaining weight for the purpose of building muscle. However, if you’re not currently following a structured resistance training program, but you’re interested in lifting, I’d encourage you to start – it’s great, and there’s no better time than the present.

Furthermore, the question of, “should I bulk or cut” is usually asked by people who have the long-term goal of being both leaner and considerably more muscular. So, this article is written (and the “bulk or cut” quiz below was made) with those goals in mind.

Looking for a quick answer? Take the free “Bulk or Cut” quiz below.

Returning to the topic at hand, our actual advice for most people, most of the time is simple: go with whichever option excites you more. If you can’t decide, or you don’t have a strong preference, there’s never any issue with spending some time at maintenance.

The “bulk or cut” decision is usually driven by a desire to be both leaner and more muscular. If you aim to gain weight, you’ll have an easier time building muscle, but you’re likely to temporarily lose a bit of leanness. If you aim to lose weight, you’ll get leaner, but you’ll have a harder time building muscle (and you may even temporarily lose a bit of muscle, depending on how lean you get, and how aggressively you diet). Since neither option perfectly aligns with your long-term goals, that can make it difficult to decide between bulking or cutting.

However, maintaining weight – when paired with sufficient protein intake and an adequate resistance training regimen – can usually allow people to achieve some degree of body recomposition: simultaneously losing fat and gaining muscle. So, if you’re not excited to bulk or cut, or you don’t want to deal with the temporary downsides associated with either gaining or losing weight, spending some time at maintenance is a great default option.

At maintenance, you won’t build muscle as quickly as you would when bulking, or lose fat as quickly as you would when cutting, but most people can still make some progress on both fronts at maintenance. Many people have a tendency to want to pursue something at a maximal rate at all times – either aiming to build muscle as quickly as possible, or lose fat as quickly as possible – but you don’t need to either be actively gaining or losing weight at all times. Spending some time at maintenance is very rarely a bad option.

With that being said, most of the time, if:

1. You’d like to be more muscular
2. You’re torn between bulking and cutting, and
3. You’re also not enthused about spending time at maintenance

Then our typical recommendation would be to bulk.

Building muscle takes a long time, unless you either respond particularly well to resistance training, or you’re using chemical enhancement. Most drug-free male lifters wind up with around 20-30 more pounds of total fat-free mass (most of which would be muscle) than they started with. For women, it’s around 12-20 pounds. Furthermore, the largest chunk of muscle growth occurs during the first year of lifting, and the rest is gained very gradually over the next 5-10+ years. Losing 20 pounds of fat, on the other hand, takes a few months.

As training experience increases, it becomes harder to build muscle in an energy deficit, and eventually, it also becomes harder and harder to build muscle while maintaining weight. So, to maximize your muscle growth over time, you need to spend a lot of time in neutral-to-positive energy balance: either maintaining or gaining weight.

So, if there’s an acute reason why you want or need to be lighter or leaner in the next few months, then by all means, you should be perfectly confident and comfortable spending some more time cutting and losing weight. But otherwise, cutting moves you closer to your goal of being leaner in the short term, while increasing the amount of time it will take to achieve your long-term goal of being both leaner and considerably more muscular.

Long story short: if you’re not sure whether you should bulk or cut, we’d generally recommend either maintaining or bulking. Maintaining will generally allow you to both lose fat and gain muscle, moving you closer to both of your long-term goals (albeit not at the maximal possible rate). Bulking, on the other hand, will help you build muscle faster, and muscle growth requires much more time than fat loss. So, if you have the long-term goal of being both leaner and more muscular, most of your time should be spent in neutral-to-positive energy balance, either gaining or maintaining weight.

Reasons you might want to cut

So, our default answer to the question of “should I bulk or cut?” is to go with whichever option excites you more. But, if you don’t have a strong preference between bulking and cutting, we’d typically recommend either bulking or spending some time at maintenance. With that said, there are some considerations that may (or may not) make it preferable to cut. So, let’s explore those considerations.

Health

One reason you might want to cut would be due to health-related concerns from carrying too much body fat. As adiposity increases, so do rates of insulin resistance, high blood pressure, elevated blood lipids, and other predictors of cardiometabolic disease risk, but all of these risks increase in a nonlinear fashion. So, at what point do elevated levels of body fat begin increasing long-term health risks?

Around 25% body fat for men, and around 35% body fat for women.

I think that’s a bit higher than most people in the fitness world suspect, due to how frequently leanness is presented as a proxy for health. It’s not uncommon for people to believe that men shouldn’t get above 15% body fat, and women shouldn’t exceed 25%, but research suggests that there’s quite a bit more wiggle room. 

Now, those are just population-level estimates. For more personalized insights, you could monitor your cardiometabolic disease risk factors with the help of a medical professional to determine health-related body fat cutoffs for yourself. Furthermore, we pass no judgment on differing methods of assessing risk. You might want to ensure you stay 5% below these thresholds (20% for men and 30% for women) to take a “better safe than sorry” approach, or you might be comfortable with the small increase in risk that comes from exceeding these thresholds by 5% (30% for men and 40% for women). Or, this may not even be a significant consideration for you in the first place.

But, to the extent that health-related concerns impact your decision to bulk or cut, men might want to consider cutting if they’re above 25% body fat, and women might want to consider cutting if they’re above 35% body fat.

Enhanced muscle growth when you’re leaner?

One common reason people provide for wanting to cut is the belief that they’ll build muscle more effectively when they’re leaner. However, this belief appears to be erroneous.

The belief that leanness enhances muscle growth largely stems from overfeeding studies analyzed by Forbes in a popular paper published in 2000. His analysis suggested that when leaner people gain weight in response to overfeeding, up to 80% of the weight they gain is lean body mass. However, when people with more body fat gain weight in response to overfeeding, their lean mass gains may account for less than 40% of their total weight gain.

However, there’s good reason to believe that these results don’t generalize to “bulk vs. cut” decisions. 

One major factor here is path-dependence. In other words, the physiology of naturally lean people isn’t identical to the physiology of people who are similarly lean following weight loss. Naturally lean people are naturally lean because they have a lower propensity to gain fat in general. People who are lean following weight loss typically had to lose weight to get lean because they had a greater natural propensity to gain fat in the first place. Forbes’s paper suggests that overfeeding preferentially increases lean mass in naturally lean people, but experimental evidence suggests that fat is preferentially regained with refeeding following intentional weight loss.

Another major factor is the nature of the interventions used in the studies included in the Forbes paper. Resistance training is the single largest (legal and controllable) factor influencing muscle growth, but the studies Forbes analyzed involved overfeeding without a resistance training stimulus. I don’t think it would surprise anyone that overfeeding alone would primarily cause fat gain in people who already have high levels of body fat, but that tells you absolutely nothing about the ability of these individuals to build muscle in response to resistance training in an energy surplus.

A final factor is that the populations assessed in some of the studies Forbes analyzed were unique populations that likely have unique responses to overfeeding. Namely, some of the overfeeding studies in very lean people were weight regain studies in anorexic patients. And, while fat may be preferentially regained following “normal” weight loss, severe anorexia can significantly reduce the mass of internal organs and other critical lean tissues. Upon refeeding, these tissues may preferentially increase in size again, before fat mass begins replenishing. In a 2007 re-analysis of this topic, Dr. Kevin Hall notes that, “a referee kindly pointed out that the weight gain data originally presented by Forbes in support of his theory included data from weight regain studies in anorexic patients…after removing the data from the anorexic subjects with very low initial [fat mass], there was insufficient evidence of a relationship between the composition of weight gain and the initial [fat mass].”

With that in mind, we performed a subject-level meta-regression of studies with open data, reporting gains in fat-free mass following resistance training in subjects with differing levels of initial body fat. In both men and women, we found no relationship between baseline body fat percentage, and gains in fat-free mass following resistance training.

So, if you have a goal of building muscle, we don’t think that the decision to cut should be predicated on the assumption that you’ll more effectively build muscle following your cut. The belief that you’ll build muscle faster when you’re leaner (following a cut) is based on data from studies and populations that aren’t particularly applicable to most people who lift weights. Furthermore, the data in people who do lift weights suggests that body fat levels don’t impact your ability to build muscle.

Aesthetic preferences

For many (perhaps most) people, I think decisions to cut are primarily influenced by aesthetic preferences, which is entirely understandable. If your goal is to be both leaner and more muscular, you probably don’t want to gradually build muscle for the next 10 years, and never check in on your lean physique in the intervening years.

So, if you want to cut just because you prefer how you look when you’re leaner, go for it!

I think there’s a general tendency for people to feel like they need to justify their desire to look a certain way. I suspect that’s a major factor motivating people to promote the idea that being super lean is necessary for health and longevity, and the idea that being leaner enhances muscle growth. Those ideas may sound more “worthy” or “noble” than simply saying, “I prefer how I look and/or I like the type of attention I get when I’m leaner.” But, I think we’re deluding ourselves if we can’t acknowledge the fact that aesthetic preferences are a major reason (perhaps the primary reason) many people want to lose weight in the first place. There’s no need to feel any shame about that, and you shouldn’t need to justify it – just embrace it.

Circling back to the start of the article, we said:

If you’re deciding whether to bulk or cut, our actual advice for most people, most of the time is simple: go with whichever option excites you more.

If you’re excited by the prospect of being leaner in the next few months, that’s all the reason you should need to pursue that goal.

Competitive reasons

For some people reading this, sport-related concerns may make cutting advisable in certain situations. It would be impossible to address every contextual factor in every sport that may influence this decision, but if you compete in sports, I suspect you already have a decent grasp of the relevant considerations for your particular sport. But, here are some high-level considerations that might make cutting an attractive option.

In many sports, competitive success is strongly influenced by speed, jump height, and the ability to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, and change directions. All of those capacities are influenced by power-to-weight ratios, so cutting some body fat might improve your competitiveness.

Many other sports have weight classes, and it’s usually best to fit into the lightest weight class you can manage without compromising your performance. If you’re 80kg, the next weight class down is 72kg, and you think you could get below 72kg without sacrificing performance, you’ll probably have more competitive success (at least in the short-term) at 72kg than in a class with a weight limit of >80kg.

In endurance sports, losing fat generally increases your absolute movement economy. More mass requires greater energy expenditure to maintain a particular speed of movement, and it increases the total energy cost of covering a particular distance. This is especially salient if you’re training for a race with significant elevation change.

Finally, for physique sports, leanness is one of the primary criteria that you’re judged upon. If you need to be 6% body fat on stage, and you’re currently 15% body fat at 20 weeks out from a show, you’ll obviously need to cut before stepping on stage if you’d like to make it onto the podium. 

However, in many sports, it’s also advantageous to build muscle to increase your ability to generate force and power. This goal is facilitated by bulking or maintaining. So, you’ll need to balance long-term development against considerations of near-term competitiveness.

Burned out from bulking

One final consideration is that bulking can simply burn some people out. If you’re a naturally skinny person with a small appetite and a very high total daily energy expenditure, eating hundreds of calories per day beyond what your appetite would dictate can become a grind after months of being in an energy surplus. In the same way many people feel the need to take a break from cutting after a while, you may feel the same need to take a break from bulking.

In general, for pursuing the goal of building muscle, spending some time at maintenance is likely preferable (in a vacuum) to cutting. But, eating enough to just maintain a higher body weight may still be a slog. So, if you feel like a short cut will give you the psychological break you need to pursue a surplus again, I’d never tell you that you’re wrong if you want to cut for a few weeks.

So, should you bulk or cut? Ultimately, the decision is up to you, but this decision tree should help you narrow it down, based on the factors and considerations we’ve covered in this article. The “bulk or cut” quiz at the top of the page simply takes you through this decision tree.

That wraps it up for this article. The next two articles in this series discuss the optimal rates of weight gain to facilitate muscle growth while minimizing fat gain, and the optimal rates of weight loss to facilitate fat loss while maximizing muscle retention.

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