June 09, 2011 Thoughts on this Cut

We're all fairly similar physiologically, but the small differences between us mean that different approaches will work better with different people when it comes to things like bulking/cutting (e.g. gaining mass / losing weight for the uninitiated).  The thing is, you won't know what works and what doesn't until you try different approaches.  I feel bad for people that follow some nutrition plan or workout regimen blindly without tinkering with it and seeing what their own body responds to. In my case I learned a few things:

1. I could have cut calories much faster than I did.  I peaked at 231 lbs. @ 19.5% bf at the end of this past bulking cycle.   I was taking in 5000 calories per day, and actually plateaued weight-wise for the last 2 weeks.  I laid out the first several steps of the cut, each step took one week.  The calorie numbers went like this: 4700,4400,4200,3800,3500,3250 for the first 6 steps.  So that's 6 weeks right there.  I could've probably started at 4200 and been fine, and then dropped to 3500 without any issue.  I was worried about protecting the muscle I had built though, so it's better to err on the side of caution. I'll probably never go up to 5000 calories per day again, but in the future I'll be more aggressive with early steps of a cut.
2. The reason for #1 on this list is probably this: Steady-state cardio really burns a sh*t-ton (that's a metric measurement) of calories.  I'm not doing any this cut, on account of a lot of those calories coming from catabolizing muscle tissue.  But pre-bulk I was 187 @ 10.5% body fat, and was consuming around 2900 calories per day to stay at that level. I was also doing 20-30 minutes of steady state 3x per week.  Even with the sprinting/tabatas/ropework/complexes I'm doing for cardio/conditioning on this cut, I'm down to 2300 calories right now in order to maintain losing about 1 lbs. per week, and will probably level off around 205. 
3. I really need to drop fat faster as well during cuts in the future.  My grams of fat went: 248, 240,228,201,192, 166 for the first 6 steps, (I was drinking a ton of milk, and eating lots of PB on the bulk).  Even as I was focusing on dropping carboyhydrates I left the fats way too high.  Since next time I'll be scaling back calories quicker I'll be able to drop both quicker.   I noticed that when I was stalling around 216 for a few weeks cutting carbs wasn't really having any effect at that point. I was already so low on them that cutting more out just left me feeling 'foggy' and unsharp.  I consulted with some people and they thought my fats were very high (at that point I was down to 120g/day), so I restored my carbs to their previous levels (back to about 110g on workout days) and cut the fat down to about 90g/day, and the fat started peeling off again.
4. Next time I bulk I'm keeping the fats down.  I'll probably bump up protein slightly.  What I'm going to do is tactically add carboyhydrates, slightly more in the mornings, and then many more pre-workout, and a bunch more post workout.  Pre workout will be a quick converting carbohydrate.  Post-Workout most of it will probably be in the form of brown rice, with occasional post-workout pasta.