What to Expect During a Cut
If you’ve been building muscle for a while, you may be ready to enter into what we call a “cut” phase in your training.
A cut is a period of training where you focus on burning fat by eating a caloric deficit. You need to eat less energy than what you spend every day for a period of several weeks to several months. This will force your body to tap into the energy stored in your subcutaneous fat, which will allow you to get leaner.
It’s important to set a realistic, measurable goal for your fat loss, and then create a plan for how you will eat and exercise to achieve that goal. This will help to keep you on track and motivated throughout the course of your cut. Follow the tips below to get started.
Getting Started
Before beginning your cut, it’s important to set a clear goal of when your cut will end. Setting a clear and measurable goal will help you to track your progress and stay motivated along the way.
Many people opt for a certain body weight they want to be at by the end of their cut. Keep in mind that to stay healthy, experts recommend a fat loss goal of no more than 2lb of fat per week. Keep that number in mind while setting a deadline for when you’d like to end your cut.
Also take note that using body weight may not be the best measurement of progress during your cut—especially if you are in your first year or so of consistent strength training. This is because even as your body burns fat, you’re also building muscle (which takes up less space in the body, but is also heavier).
So for this reason, I’m a bigger fan of using other methods of measurement for fat loss progress.
A great way to track your fat loss is to use the measurement of inches around the belly and hips. If you are tracking inches around your waist, you can set a goal of how many inches your want your waist to be at based on the percentage of your body height--divide your waist in inches by your height in inches, and then multiply by 100:
Use these numbers to set a goal for yourself of where you’d like to be by the end of your fat loss phase.
Another way to measure progress is by body fat percentage. Our bodies need a certain level of fat to be healthy and maintain all our body functions. Essential fat levels are the minimum that our bodies need to be healthy. For women, that is usually about 14%, whereas for men it is about 8%.
The American Council on Exercise (ACE) categorizes body fat percentages according to these levels of fitness and health:
So when you set your goal for your cut, make sure to keep it in a healthy range and be realistic about how much of a deficit you’ll be able to maintain in order to reach it!
You can use this chart by BuiltLean to get a rough idea of what your will look like at different body fat percentages and use it to set a goal of where you’d like to be by the end of your cut.
Once you have set your fat loss goal, you’ll be ready to create a plan for how to eat and how to exercise to achieve that goal.
How to Eat During a Cut
We all have a certain number of calories that our bodies need every day to maintain themselves without gaining or losing weight. This number is called our maintenance level of calories.
When we eat more calories than our bodies burn every day for maintenance (i.e., a calorie surplus), our bodies use the surplus energy to build tissue (like body fat and muscle). To burn body fat, you’ll need to eat below your maintenance level of calories (i.e., a calorie deficit).
To determine how many calories you should eat every day, you first need to figure out what your maintenance level of calories is.
You can get a rough estimate of your maintenance level of calories by calculating your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) using an online calculator like the one linked below.
Keep in mind that your TDEE is just a rough estimation of your maintenance level of calories. Your actual maintenance calories is something you’ll need to test over the course of a few weeks by eating your goal number of calories on average every day and seeing how your body weight responds.
To test your maintenance level of calories, begin by measuring your body weight, and then eat the amount of calories every day that you calculated as your TDEE (use a meal tracker app like MyFitnessPal to track your daily intake). At the end of 1 week, measure your body weight again, and compare your results:
If your weight stayed about the same from the beginning to the end of the week, then the number of calories you ate each day is pretty close to your actual maintenance level of calories.
If you lost weight, then it’s likely that you ate below your actual maintenance level of calories–so you’ll add between 100 and 250 calories to your daily goal and test that for another week and compare results again.
If you gained weight, then it’s likely that you ate above your actual maintenance level of calories–so you’ll need to subtract between 100 and 250 calories from your daily calorie goal and test that new number for a week.
Keep adjusting and testing your calories until your weight stabilizes (stays the same). Once it stabilizes, you know you’ll have reached your actual maintenance level of calories.
Once you know what your maintenance level of calories, you can plan your cut by determining how much of a deficit you’ll keep your body in. This depends on how quickly you want to lose fat.
It takes about 3500 calories to burn 1 lb of fat—but you’ll need to spread that number out over the course of a few days or weeks. To lose 1 lb of fat per week, you’ll need to eat 500 calories below your maintenance level every day (for a weekly total of 3500 calories deficit). To lose 1/2 lb every week, you’ll need to eat a more moderate deficit of 250 calories per day (for a weekly total of 1750 calorie deficit). You shouldn’t eat less than 1,000 calories below maintenance every day (for a weekly 2lb of fat loss).
In addition to eating a calorie deficit, during a cut it’s important to focus on getting the right amount of protein and micronutrients to stay healthy.
Being in a caloric deficit puts your hormonal balance into what’s called a catabolic state—meaning your body is focused on breaking tissue down to access the energy stored in it. For this reason, it’s normal to lose some muscle and strength while in a cut. You can combat this breakdown of skeletal muscle by eating plenty of protein every day and by doing resistance training (more on training below).
Experts recommend eating between 0.7 and 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight to build muscle. While you’re in a cut, you’ll want to eat on the higher end of that range. So for example, if you weigh 150 lb you’d need to eat between 105 and 150 grams of protein each day—preferably closer to 150 grams.
To reach your daily protein goal, include a good source of lean protein at every meal and snack. To figure out how many grams of protein each meal and snack will need to be, divide your daily protein goal by the number of times per day that you eat.
For example, if your goal is to eat 150 grams of protein per day and you eat 3 meals and 1 snack every day, then you’ll need to have about 37 grams of protein every time you eat.
You may need to increase how often you eat each day to ensure that you’re hitting your goal—especially if you’re used to eating only twice or three times per day.
You can find tons of protein-rich meals and snack recipes on my Patreon page.
Experts generally recommend eating plenty of fruits and vegetables every day to stay healthy. This is especially true in a calorie deficit!
When your body isn’t getting the energy it needs and has to tap into its fat stores, other systems get reduced to save energy. You may notice your skin gets dryer, your nails become more brittle, and you may shed hair at a faster rate than normal. Your immune system also gets reduced while you’re in a calorie deficit. For this reason, it’s incredibly important to get plenty of micronutrients that boost immune function.
Increasing your intake of vegetables will allow you to get in those micronutrients while also decreasing your caloric intake (since vegetables are generally low in calories). Shoot for 1-2 servings of vegetables at each meal, and eat a variety of vegetable types throughout the week. If your diet and calorie goal allow, you can also eat 1-2 servings of fruit every day as well (just be mindful of the sugar content in fruit).
To make sure that you’re staying within your calorie and protein goals, track using MyFtitnessPal. Make sure to reset the daily calorie goal and protein goals (don’t use the number of calories that MyFitnessPal gives you).
How to Exercise While in a Cut
If you’re already staying active every day, doing cardio 3-5 times per week, and doing resistance training 2-5 times per week, you don’t really need to change much to your current exercise plan to burn fat.
However, if you want to burn even more calories, you can add more cardio to your weekly routine and focus on muscle-building in your resistance training workouts.
Cardio
The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends a total of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise each week to stay healthy. Accoding to the CDC, moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise is anything that gets your heart rate into its moderate-intensity zone (between 64% and 75% of your maximum heart rate).
You can use a heart rate monitor or fitness tracker to keep an eye on your heart rate while you exercise. Use the calculator linked below to calculate your target heart rate zone (THR):
If you don’t have a heart rate monitor or fitness tracker, you can also use the talking test to monitor your cardio intensity. For moderate-intensity cardio, you should be able to speak in full sentences, but you should not be able to sing. If you’re able to sing, your intensity is too low and you should move faster or increase your resistance to keep your heart rate in the right zone.
To burn more fat, you can double your moderate-intensity cardio to 300 minutes per week or you can incorporate high-intensity cardio into your exercise routine. High-intensity cardio is any vigorous activity that gets your heart rate between 76% and 93% of your maximum heart rate (you can use the same heart rate calculator linked above to see what your high-intensity heart rate zone is). The talking test also works for monitoring high-intensity exercise. At a high intensity, you should be able to talk in just a few words at a time between breaths. If you can’t talk at all, you’re working too hard and need to slow down or reduce your resistance.
There are lots of ways to get your cardio in!
Steady State is one of the most common styles of training moderate-intensity cardio. You can do Steady State cardio by going on a walk, bike ride, swim, or by using a cardio machine at the gym (like a treadmill, cross trainer, or stationary bike). For this style of training, you move at roughly the same pace and keep your heart rate within your moderate-intensity zone for between 20-50 minutes.
Another popular style of cardio exercise is Circuit Training. This involves alternating between several different exercises for a number of rounds. Depending on the exercises you use, how fast you move, and how much resistance you use, you can get your heart rate into the moderate- or high-intensity zone throughout your workout.
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is another great style to get your heart rate into the high-intensity zone. This involves alternating between intervals of vigorous exercise and lower intensity exercise or rest. You can incorporate HIIT into many kinds of exercise. For example, during a running workout, you can alternate between 15-second intervals of sprinting followed by 2 minutes of jogging at a more moderate pace.
If you’re working out at home, you can alternate between 20-second intervals of jumping jacks (or some other vigorously-paced exercise) and 10 seconds of rest for 8 rounds, followed by 1 minute of rest (we call this HIIT style Tabata).
To prevent overuse, burnout, or injury, however, experts recommend doing high-intensity training no more than 2 times per week.
Many people also enjoy playing sports as part of their weekly cardio routine--volleyball, soccer, tennis, pickleball, and basketball are all great ways to have fun and socialize while you exercise! Google “recreational sports" in your local area and check out what organizations you can join.
There are also plenty of day-to-day tasks that can count as cardio! Some of my clients work in their yards or gardens, or they do housework (like cleaning and home improvement). Anything that gets your heart rate up for more than 10 minutes counts!
Some activities burn more calories than others, depending on how much effort you exert or how quickly you move. You can see a comprehensive list of different activities and the number of calories they burn by clicking the button below:
Muscle-Building
Being in a caloric deficit will allow you to burn body fat--but your body also breaks down muscle tissue to make up for the energy you’re not getting from your food. It’s normal to experience a loss of strength during a cut—and you will likely lose some muscle size as well.
To offset the loss of muscle during a cut, you can practice muscle-building styles of resistance training like bodybuilding or hypertrophy programs. The goal of these workouts will be to stimulate the muscle-building process to combat the loss of muscle as much as you can.
Bodybuilding and hypertrophy workouts feature high-volume training, usually with 2-3 sets per exercise of 6-15 repetitions per set and rest periods of between 30 seconds and 2 minutes between sets. You’ll want to use a moderate level of resistance that allows you to feel “the burn” and your muscles fatiguing in the last 2-3 repetitions of each set. For training with weights, the Strength and Conditioning Association recommends using between 67% and 85% of your 1 rep max weight for hypertrophy training.
There are many hypertrophy and bodybuilding programs available for free online. However if you would like a bit more guidance on workouts that I recommend, check out my Body Sculpt training plan library here on my website or on Patreon.
During your workouts, you may fatigue a lot faster and have a harder time recovering afterward. This is a normal (and annoying) part of being in a caloric deficit--but it shouldn’t be too extreme. If you’re frequently feeling dizzy and lightheaded during your workouts, it may be a sign that you’re in too deep of a deficit and need to either 1) add in more calories to your daily diet or 2) cut back on the frequency or intensity of your workouts.
Things to Note
Remember that being in a calorie deficit is not an ideal state for the body--it’s actually a stressor on your system! The deeper your deficit, the harder it will be to maintain due to the increased stress on your system. So before you go into a 500 or more calorie deficit--make sure that you are in a good place to be able to maintain that level. If not, think about doing a more shallow cut to your calories (100 to 250 calories below maintenance) and allow yourself more time to reach your goals.
While in a cut, your body is in low-power mode, so some systems will not function as well as when you’re in a maintenance or bulk phase. You may experience some of these symptoms:
Being cold more often (body fat is our body’s insulation, so getting leaner exposes you more to colder temperatures)
Overall fatigue and tiredness (not just in your workouts)
Feeling hungry more often
Sex drive decreases
Skin looks less vibrant, may become more dry
Nails and hair become thinner and more brittle (you may also lose hair faster)
Lowered immune system leading to more frequent sickness (this can be combated by taking a multivitamin!)
Irritability, mood swings, lower stress threshold
While these things are common while in a calorie deficit (especially if you’re cutting a large number of calories), keep an eye on them. If they become excessive, then you’ll want to adjust your calorie goal or workout plan to ease up the strain on your system.
Stay Consistent!
One of the most challenging pieces of burning fat is staying consistent with your plan. Help yourself by scheduling your workouts and meal prep each week in your calendar. Treat these as very important appointments, and avoid cancelling or rescheduling as much as you can.
Also, make sure to stay on top of tracking what you eat in MyFitnessPal. This will help make sure that you’re staying within your calorie goal each day. For best results, plug food into the app before you eat it while you’re planning your meals or snacks, then make adjustments to the meal as needed.
Make sure to join the Coaching Corner Discord to connect with the community and share your progress! This community is a free resource that allows you to interact more with me and my followers as well as get notified first hand as new content gets released.
Let me know if you have any questions in comments below! Don’t forget to “like” this post if you found it helpful, and share on social media if you think it might help someone else!
JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and affiliate streamer on Twitch. She has been an active trainer since 2014 and now specializes in comprehensive weight loss coaching. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch on Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am EST for a Fit Q&A session.
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