Q: I see lots of bodybuilders on the Internet bulking up in the winter and then cutting in the spring and summer. Some get downright fat in the winter. Is that a good plan to add extra muscle?
A: In my 45 years of training, I’ve done it more than a few times. And every time I felt as though I did gain more muscle—but quickly lost any extra mass during the cutting phase…
The heaviest I ever got was about 217, and it was not pretty. I was fat—forced-to-use-a-necktie-for-a-belt fat.
The problem is that to lose all that extra fat, you have to diet hard. That means you tend to burn off muscle. Caloric deficit is not conducive to hypertrophy; however…
Eating fairly clean over the winter with enough of a calorie surplus to put only a thin layer of fat over your abs is a good semi-bulk strategy.
If you try to stay too lean all year ‘round, it’ll be difficult to add any muscle. I like to keep my abs barely visible in the right light over the winter.
Then you can gradually decrease your calories to lose fat slowly—one to two pounds a week. That should minimize the muscle loss. Jonathan and I did that over the course of 12 weeks. You can see the gradual calorie cuts in the diets in the X-treme Lean ebook on pages 30-31. Here are my progress pics during that 2005 cutting phase…
The last photo was taken about eight weeks in, so I still had a few weeks to go. Looking much leaner, though, without much muscle loss. A tan helps too.
My wife Becky also used the gradual-calorie-cut method, but she was considerably heavier at the start, so it took her longer. She spread out her small pull-backs over the course of about four months while gradually ramping up her activity outside the gym.
The workout and meal-by-meal diet she used back then in her 40s, along with the carb-stacking strategy, are on pages 45-56 in X-treme Lean.
In those days we weren’t familiar with intermittent fasting. That’s my go-to lean-machine diet now (as outlined in The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” free with OMYM below).
Becky will use it, but only sparingly. She can’t handle low blood sugar, as it makes her feel faint. I embrace it; faintness makes navigating stairs a challenge—and the possibility of a viral video for YouTube.
New: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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