Ep 246 – Bulk, Cut, or Recomp?

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TRANSCRIPT

[Giacomo]

Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Giacomo. I’m Ben.

Welcome to the show, everybody. Are we doing like a take two? I don’t see the thing in front of me yet.

[Ben]

No, we have the power of magical editing, so we can keep going or we can keep this in there for everyone’s entertainment.

[Giacomo]

Let’s keep going, friend. So catch me up with you. I feel like your life has been way more exciting than mine as of late.

You took a trip out west. Have you been out there before?

[Ben]

So I went to Colorado. I’ve never been to Colorado before. My girlfriend’s brother lives in Denver with his wife and their two-year-old son.

So we went out there and then her mom and her mom’s boyfriend flew in from San Diego and met us there. So there was seven of us and we stayed at this little cabin in Keystone, Colorado. We went to Keystone Mountain and I snowboarded for the first time, which was a challenge.

And I realized quite recently, I’ve always known this now that I think about it, but I really don’t like being bad at new things. And I get frustrated very easily when I feel like I’m not good at certain things. So I had to really try to be patient with myself and remind myself that I’m not going to learn how to do anything well in one day.

And so it was really just a process of, it was really a trial by fire because I didn’t take any lessons. I looked up some YouTube videos beforehand about snowboarding and basics about your heel turns and your toe turns and your stopping and how to chain things together. So I was kind of just learning on the fly as I went and I didn’t want everyone else to have to wait up for me all the time.

And of course they were nice and they did, but there was a lot of time kind of spent on my own going down the mountain. I don’t know if you’ve been out there, but I think the rating system is a little bit different because greens out there feel like blues and blacks out here. So I’m like, oh yeah, I’ve done blues and blacks for skiing after a couple of days.

And I went and did like a green and I’m like, oh my God, this is like as steep as some of the harder mountains out in New England. It was a challenge and I definitely fell a lot on my butt. I was barely walking after the first day because my butt hurts so bad from falling on it so many times.

But I did feel like by the end of it, I’d gotten the basics down of the turning and the stopping. So I’m like, next time I go, I won’t fall as much. I can spend longer on the mountain.

It won’t take me as long to get down on each of my runs. I can start, you know, practicing really sequencing the turns a little bit more. So it was a fun first experience, even though it was hard physically on my body.

I really wanted to keep going and keep going out for more runs and go the next day, but my body was just wrecked. So I had to just say, nope, this is going to be it for today. It’s not worth it to beat myself even more into oblivion.

But I had a good time and I think it would be fun to do that together sometime.

[Giacomo]

On the opposite end of travel, all four of my animals, all four, because we were down to, we have just one cat, but we had two dogs and two cats at one point in our life. And they would guilt me when I came back and they would guilt me when I left. They would hop in the luggage.

They would stare at me. I know you’re leaving. They would give me crap when I came back.

Xander would make sure to puke twice as much and say, this is what happens when you leave me. Never leave me again. How could you do this to me?

So that’s usually what it’s like. And it’s a shame because we travel for a third of the year. You think they would get used to it.

But one of these days I’m going to take Xander with me where I travel. We took him to our 10 year anniversary trip, 10 years married. And that was nice.

He was a little weird about it, but he enjoyed it and he had a good time and he, yeah, we had fun, but I feel like I got, I don’t know, whatever. So that’s usually what it’s like for me when I travel as far as leaving home is concerned. And we do have some travel coming up.

Actually, we are going to the Rhode Island veg fest. I don’t know if you’ll be there with us yet. You will.

Okay, cool. And then after that, we’re hopping on the holistic holiday. I’d see the digging cruise on March 1st.

So if any of you all are in the area in Rhode Island, please come say hi, hang out with us. We can talk it up and we can get to meet and whatever. And then obviously on the cruise, we’ll be there the entire time.

And you know, Ben, with that’s like you and your brother, Charlie came out with us. And that’s just a fun time because it’s a little bit of escapism, even though you’re plugged in for a specific reason with all the courses and all the people that you get to connect with and your friends and the people that you meet that become new friends, it’s still, you’re out to sea and it’s like the world kind of disappears. I think it also has to do with the fact that the internet connection is so poor.

So people are not plugged into the internet and they’re checked out from that world and hanging out with each other, which is really, really nice. Anyways, I know it’s been absolutely freezing and the weather has been ridiculous all over the place. That’s been pretty well.

What was the weather like over in, like was it good snow?

[Ben]

They actually, it’s been one of like the least snowy seasons they have had in a long time. So everyone was talking about how they’re waiting for this big snow. They’re waiting for the snow to happen.

So there was snow on the, on the mountain and kind of in the nearby area, but it wasn’t a ton of snow by any means. And it sounded like people were pretty disappointed about how it’d been so far, but I, you know, I couldn’t tell the difference going on the mountain and everything. It was, it was fine.

It was just more so their surrounding areas were not as snow. You expect the mountains to be and the nearby area to be covered with snow, but it was kind of just more towards the peaks and stuff. I still really beautiful out there with, you know, I’d never seen like the Rockies for instance.

And so that was a really cool site. I grew up in this area in New England. And so going to school in Vermont, we have mountains there, but it’s not to the same extent as it is, you know, out West.

So it was cool.

[Giacomo]

Nice. So one question I’m curious about, and I’m hoping this question helps us segue into what we’re talking about. Give me an understanding of what you’ve been doing with your clients as of late, what they’re looking for, where your guidance has been based on their goals, what kind of conversations you’re having with them.

And let’s see where that takes us. And maybe we’ll get into the discussion, what we’re looking to talk about today through that. I’m curious.

[Ben]

Yeah. So today we’re talking about how do you decide what sort of phase you should be in? So should you be doing kind of a re-comp phase?

Should you be doing a building phase? Should you be doing a fat loss phase? We’ll talk about different scenarios and what we kind of use most often with our clients, what we’ve done with ourselves, maybe how our views have changed over time.

So in thinking about recent conversations I’ve had with clients or, you know, more broadly, how I tend to have this sort of dialogue with them. I think when somebody is a newer client of mine, the first kind of initial phases of us working together are really just about establishing habits, establishing routine, figuring out what they’ve done in the past, collecting data. So for instance, you know, they may have been tracking their calories, they may have not.

So wherever they’re at with that, I’d like to try to kind of figure out roughly based on a certain amount of physical activity I’m going to give them or what they have been doing, what’s kind of their maintenance. And you can’t really determine what you’re going to prescribe for somebody in terms of are they in a surplus or a deficit if you don’t really know their maintenance. Of course, you can kind of try to estimate it, but usually what I like to do is pick kind of a conservative number for what I think, even if I’m putting them into a fat loss phase because that’s their goal, maybe they’re really gung-ho, they’re really excited about that, I’ll put them into what I think is kind of a reasonable deficit.

And you know what? I used to use the calculators a lot more often. Nowadays, I find just based off looking at somebody’s kind of like their body weight, their height, and kind of their general like lifestyle in terms of how active they are, I can kind of figure out what I think is going to be a good ballpark number for them and then trying to get them into like a gentle deficit to start and then monitoring that like based off their body weight because I just find that if you start too aggressively with somebody and it creates adherence issues from the start, that can really be a big blow to someone’s confidence in starting something out.

So even if like they’re a little bit, it’s a fine line though because then if they’re not seeing the weight on the scale moving as fast as they want, then they get discouraged in the other direction and that can cause adherence problems. So I really try to start them in a place that I think is going to be kind of a deficit that’s noticeable but not too extreme. And then if they’re saying, you know, this is easy, I can dial it up a little bit more.

Okay, you know, after a couple weeks of doing that, of getting our habits and getting our routines in place, then we can start to increase that deficit via activity or via, you know, calories. But I really think the first phases are about setting up a good routine. So getting into a good strength training routine, finding something that’s adherable, that’s not, you know, maybe they say they can do four or five, six days a week in the gym.

I’m going to start them probably on three and see if they, you know, are able to stick to that. And then we can go to four or five unless there’s somebody who, you know, they’re a gym rat and they love going to the gym and that’s not a problem for them. It really depends on the person.

But it’s about, you know, getting into good habits with getting their protein in each meal, getting some fruits and vegetables. If these are things that they’re not doing, you kind of have to just figure out where somebody’s at, what kind of habits they already have in place. And the more kind of down that road they are in terms of the consistency that they’ve had, the more you can kind of push them, I think at the start.

And then you could probably put them right into a build or a cut. If you know, kind of, okay, like they know this is their maintenance calories because they’ve been tracking it for months. And that’s what it’s been.

Versus somebody who doesn’t really know, I’m going to be more conservative with my recommendations. And then I’m going to observe. And after like a month or two of observation, then we might choose to go in a certain direction.

But we haven’t, I haven’t, you know, in this conversation or in this little monologue, I haven’t even gotten into, you know, how do you decide if you’re going to put somebody into a cut or a build or recomp? I’d love to know kind of what’s coming to mind for you when I’m talking about all of this.

[Giacomo]

Buying straight up. You want the client to be invested in their success and invested in the process. And nine times out of 10, when someone hires a fitness coach, they want conditioning, they want to be leaner, they want to lose weight, they want to lose body fat at any cost.

That’s the first thing that they want. That’s their buy-in. Not everybody.

Some people are willing to bulk right out the gate. Some people are willing to recomp right out the gate. But for the purpose of this conversation, I feel like it makes the most sense to talk about what the majority of clients look for.

The majority of people, I think, look for when they start doing something when it comes to their fitness. And maybe we can go ahead and tease that out a even though it is the buy-in for somebody. But I do feel like mindset is very, very important.

If that’s what somebody needs to get into it, then you’ve got to give it to them. So I feel like that’s the starting point. And then to your point, once the habits and behaviors are not just in check, they’re routine because you’ve assessed, you’ve observed, you’ve found some success.

I find that it’s sort of no man’s land after the fact when you’ve gotten them conditioning. And now you have to find a way for them to grow as an athlete. You need to find a way for them to make some decisions on how they’re going to, let’s see, appreciate their body image for what it is after their calorie deficit and after they’ve gotten leaner.

Because in many scenarios, they’re putting on muscle or maintaining muscle. So they’re getting leaner. They’re not losing muscle.

That’s the beauty of working with a fitness coach. You get to do that when you’re losing body fat. However, people lack direction after the fact.

I just got here. Okay, do I stay here forever? How do I gain muscle?

Do I want to go through the pain of intentionally gaining and or losing weight to get my body stronger? Do I even need to? I find that this crossroads, if you will, once you have the client that gets what they came here for, got what they came here for after like, say, six months or something like that, or three to six months, or sometimes longer, there’s a bigger conversation that you have to have with them.

I find that conversation doesn’t happen over the course of one week. It happens over the course of many weeks and many months. And sometimes you get pushback.

Sometimes you get straight up avoiding the conversation. Sometimes someone just straight up falls off. And sometimes you get some constructive dialogue going.

And that’s what we go for. I mean, how could we not? And that’s what I’m curious about, Ben, when you reach that line with a client, how does that conversation look for you?

Think of maybe some, if you could think of some previous experiences or some current ones that you’re going through with others, or maybe where your head’s at with that at that point in time?

[Ben]

I think it’s always going to depend on what sort of ambitions that person has. Are they just trying to get to a point where they feel satisfied with their health status, with their, you know, aesthetic ideal, whatever that is? Of course, for most of us, we never really quite reach that kind of aesthetic ideal that we have.

For the lucky few who are happy with their bodies all the time, you know, I envy you. I feel like I’ve gotten to the point personally where, you know, pretty soon into getting into fitness, I got what a lot of people, you know, would want. Like I had, you know, a very defined six pack.

You know, I had enough leanness to show off some muscle groups. But being with someone who has kind of an extreme personality, I like to push things as far as they can go. So of course, you know, my next direction was I want to put on as much muscle as possible.

I want to be a bodybuilder. That was something I kind of discovered along the way. But actually, after doing my first real cut, I started out on my fitness journey, I guess you could say, by doing a pretty harsh, pretty aggressive, pretty strict cut.

And we’re actually going to have some coaching interviews coming up where we’re going to go through and talk about each of the coaches kind of journeys and how that’s shaped us into the coaches that we are today. And you know, the athletes that we are today. So I’ll save most of the details for that podcast.

But really, once I got to the point where I was really lean, I had what I wanted, I didn’t even really know what I wanted it when I set out, I just wanted to like, look better. I wanted to learn about my body, I want to learn about resistance training. And so I kind of took on myself as an experiment.

But as I continued to go further in it, I got kind of sucked into I’ve never looked like this before. Now you’re getting all the compliments, people are saying things to you. So then I started to identify as that, you know, the lean person.

And it was really hard for me to understand that actually, I was probably too lean, I was trying to maintain a body composition that didn’t feel good, that caused me to be more restrictive than I wanted to be put me into cycles of under eating and overeating. And it took me probably like a year, year and a half, two years to really break out of that. And to really kind of clarify for myself, what are my goals?

What do I want in the long term? Am I willing to put aside what is uncomfortable now, which was actually gaining some weight, gaining some body fat in order to put on muscle in order to, you know, feel better on a daily basis. But the thing is, when you’re in it, it’s kind of hard.

And you can convince yourself that what you’re doing is, is the right thing or what you want to be doing. So I think everyone’s a little bit different. Obviously, that was kind of an extreme example.

But even somebody who you know, they lose the 15 or 20 pounds that they wanted to lose, they feel like they got to that goal. I think there’s sometimes, you know, I try to have this conversation beforehand that what it took to get here is really what it’s going to take to maintain those results as well. Maybe not to the exact same degree, maybe instead of, you know, if you’re a foot on the gas 100% for this cut, you know, maybe now it’s 80 or 90%.

But that doesn’t mean you can let all your habits go out the window. So then it’s a matter of, you know, do you want to build more muscle? Do you want to kind of learn how to maintain this, but make it more sustainable?

There’s lots of different like avenues and things that you can work on with somebody, just depending on where they want to take it after that. But I think the hardest part is when you’re really kind of tunnel vision on this goal for a decent amount of time, and then you finally get there. There’s almost this feeling of like you said, like now what?

Okay, you know, I did the thing, where do I go from here? And I think that that kind of speaks to the challenges around short term goals and not having a long term vision. You know, when I think about people who do, you know, and we’ve done these before, we’ve done fat loss challenges, and things of this nature, and they can be an incredibly helpful kickstart for the right people and getting them to kind of build momentum.

But the issue, I think, and where we do this right is we try to provide education along the way while we’re doing these fat loss challenges, and not doing anything that’s too extreme or too unsustainable. But for certain people and certain coaches in the fitness industry, they’re just trying to get a transformation photo of people, hey, you know, the best transformation wins, this sort of thing. Again, we do that too.

But the thing is, we are teaching people, we are making sure that they’re not doing anything too extreme, whereas other coaches might not have that same sort of, you know, care for the client or care for the, you know, the person who’s in their program. And they’re just going to try to get them to, hey, this person who’s never tracked their macros before, they’ve never tracked their steps before, they don’t have any sort of routine. Suddenly, they can make a complete 180, they’re tracking their macros, like super diligently, they don’t understand that you have some flexibility with that, they’re just following a meal plan, they’re doing, you know, an hour or two of cardio every day, they’re in the gym, and maybe there’s some aspects of this that they genuinely enjoy, and that they can carry on with them.

But the thing is, there isn’t, there wasn’t this like gradual exposure to these things. And so when that 12 weeks is over, when that goal is kind of over, a lot of people are going to probably be like, Oh, my God, thank God that’s done. I’m going back to what I was doing beforehand.

And then they end up losing those results that they got. And that’s really sad. And people kind of go through those cycles over and over.

And they repeat the same patterns, like this worked for me when I when I did it. And so I have to keep doing it this way, even if it’s unsustainable. You’ve seen this so many times yourself.

So I think that really, it’s important to identify where you’re at in your process and in your journey, and not try to rush to what is going to get you there the fastest, because that’s not going to stick, it’s not going to last. And you’re not going to give yourself time to really understand the why and build up to that.

[Giacomo]

Yeah, absolutely. You touched on so many good points. I think the body image one is really important, because there is an attachment to what you look like as you’re dieting down.

And once you settle out, there’s like that fear that you’re going to not have the look that you’re going for, because you just got attached to that idea of like getting leaner and leaner, but you’re really just thinking about like, Okay, well, how much body fat am I losing? And then when you finally settle, I think there’s there could be a little bit of not just fear, but even disappointment, like it almost like a attachment or addiction to the actual process, and you want to repeat it. I think also once you if you especially if you haven’t been there before, let’s talk about somebody who’s gotten there for the first time, right?

They’ve wanted to say lose 50 pounds or 15 pounds or whatever and put on their first five to 10 pounds of muscle, we’ll say that’s that pretty much encompasses, I would say, just about any person who hasn’t been there yet, more or less. Now they finally get to look at that now they finally get to where they want to be because they’ve put in the work they’ve put in the effort they have the routine. Now they have to now they have to take a look at themselves and be like, Am I happy?

And unfortunately, it’s usually not the case, because you really don’t know what to expect. So I think body image wise, it can be really confusing for someone. And that’s not a conversation that has an easy answer.

I think it’s just something worth noting and something worth thinking about, because it can also affect your judgment and your decision making on what direction to take. There’s also the matter of what’s necessary to gain muscle. And I think, I mean, depending on the person, some people believe it’s necessary to bulk to gain muscle.

Some people are not interested in recomp, because it doesn’t excite them. And they’ve gone through that period of time where everything was exciting, and everything was changing so fast. And you’re like, well, what’s the point of working with a fitness coach?

And what’s the point of doing this and being motivated if I’m good? But other people fall in love and they get passionate with it, fall in love with the process. And they say, okay, well, what can I do now?

And even in that kind of scenario, do they need to intentionally go in a calorie surplus? And I think it depends for those that aren’t already in the know, depending on who in our audience is listening to this. Some people are, some of y’all are newer to this process.

Some of you, y’all are very familiar with it, and very well versed. If you’ve been lifting consistently for more than three years, then this conversation is not for you. If you haven’t been, or this part of the conversation, I should say, if you haven’t been, there really is no inherent need to be in a calorie surplus, in most cases, in order to gain muscle.

Because you’re still going to be gaining plenty of muscle by getting in the right amount of protein, by focusing on recovery, by training really hard and intelligently with the appropriate dose. But trying to sell someone on that idea when they’ve gone through this whole exciting period of time where they’ve stripped away so many layers of body fat and the process itself has been exciting can be pretty tricky. It can be pretty tricky to have, like you said, that long-term vision, if you will.

So I feel like that conversation, if you do that legwork with somebody while they’re in the middle of a calorie deficit, you’re more likely to guide them on the way out to get there. But still, sometimes it’s still tricky. Sometimes people want more, or they have different goals after the fact, like you said, and you have to honor that.

So it’s not a cut and dry kind of situation on whether or not you want to put someone into a bulk, or if you want to re-comp them, or if maybe they’re looking for another deficit down the road, or what have you. I think it’s mostly- I’ve got some thoughts. Go ahead, Sharon.

Let me hear.

[Ben]

I think that setting goals after you achieve a certain goal I think is helpful, usually, for most people. So you think about the bodybuilder who’s gotten to the end of a contest prepper as an extreme example. Having a goal of, okay, I really want to bring up these muscle groups before I compete next, so I’m going to design a training program that’s going to accomplish that.

That can be exciting. Or somebody gets to the end of a cut, they’ve lost the weight that they want to lose. Okay, maybe I’m going to really focus now on my barbell compounds.

I want to compete in a powerlifting meet or something like that. Just giving them a goal to work on that’s not so aesthetically focused I think can be really helpful, and just focusing on that training performance. Now, that’s kind of the training side of things.

In terms of the nutrition side, like you said, there’s a couple different directions that they can go. I think that oftentimes just going to maintenance for a couple weeks or a month or two and just thinking about what you want to do next before you make any immediate decisions I think is helpful, because you’re usually in a pretty emotional place, I think, when you’re dieting, especially when you get towards the end of it, you’re kind of tapped out mentally, you’re not always thinking clear headed. So like giving yourself some weeks and months to recover before you really make a decision about what you want to do next. When you’re at maintenance, unless you’re extremely lean, you can recomp over time, you can use your body’s body fat as its energy source, you can either take it from food, or you can take it from your own bodies.

You know, if you have a lot of weight to lose, that’s going to that body fat is going to be used, it can be used to build muscle. So even when you’re kind of at maintenance during that time period after a diet, you might even be recovering some muscle that you lost during that dieting period. I’m going through this right now with Sawyer, you know, he was in a pretty steep deficit, we brought him out of that.

He’s actually still kind of maintained or even lost a little bit, but his training performance has gone up and he’s feeling good, like he’s looking fuller. And so it doesn’t always have to be you jump right into this building phase where you add a bunch of calories back, like being in a caloric surplus of, you know, 200 calories above your maintenance, that’s a pretty slow rate of weight gain, you know, like a pound a month, maybe not even. And that’s going to be more than enough to, you know, to build the muscle that you need.

Usually the leaner that you are, the more likely that you’re going to need some sort of a calorie surplus to build muscle, the more body fat you have, the less likely it is, and you can probably continue to recomp or to lose weight and build muscle at the same time, even if your weight is changing. So those are the some considerations there when you’re thinking about where you want to go next. So after you’ve done that fat loss phase, you might decide, hey, I still have a lot of weight I want to lose, I would probably do, you know, you lost maybe, you know, let’s say 10% of your body weight.

So you started at 200 pounds, you got down to 180 in that first fat loss phase, you decide to take a couple months at maintenance, let’s say two months at maintenance, and then you can go through another fat loss phase where maybe you lose another 15 pounds or something like that. And then you maintain maybe that for a longer period of time. Alternatively, you could just decide to sit at that body weight, that new body weight for you and just, you know, build muscle and live life if you’re pretty comfortable with where that is, and you can always decide to do another fat loss phase in the future if you want to.

Or maybe the most exciting thing for you is, hey, you know what I cut down, I didn’t have as much muscle as I thought I did. That’s a very common scenario for people who are starting and their buy in is going through a fat loss phase. And you know, we as coaches can look at them and say, I don’t know if you’re gonna really have like the result that you want at the end of this, but sometimes they have to experience that themselves.

That was me, I had to like get really lean to understand like, okay, you know, I actually don’t have as much muscle as I thought I did. And then that kind of spurred me on to eventually commit. And still, even it took me a year and a half to really decide that I wanted to commit to doing a build.

So it can take some time to really figure that out for yourself and trial and error. And it’s okay to, you know, make mistakes and to, you know, to feel frustrated. Again, it’s definitely happened to me.

I’ve been another reason why having somebody to provide some guidance and some clarification for your goals or, you know, some support for the way that you’re feeling can be helpful. But yeah, if building muscle is exciting to you, then hey, that’s the next phase that you can go into is really focusing on getting your gym performance up. And that can be gratifying in its own right.

So those are kind of some scenarios. If somebody has started with a deficit, I talked about how when I get new clients, oftentimes I’m just trying to start them at maintenance and kind of do, I’ve heard people refer to it as like a primer phase. So really, you’re just trying to prime them from whatever, for whatever you’re doing next by establishing these habits and establishing these routines.

And I think that one archetype that kind of encapsulates this, this perfectly, and I’ve seen it work so many times is, and I’m sure you’re gonna have thoughts on this, is maybe the smaller female client who comes to us and they’ve been dieting, you know, chronically dieting or going through these cycles of yo-yo dieting their whole life, and they have some body fat to lose, but they’ve been eating so little that it seems like this monumental task that’s impossible to kind of get under.

Because it’s what am I going to do two hours of cardio every day and eat 800 calories in order to lose the weight that I want to lose? It’s heartbreaking when somebody comes to us and we see that as a coach. When I get those kinds of clients, I think that’s a perfect example of somebody who I’m going to try to steer them towards a re-comp or at least starting with trying to kind of slowly taper their calories up.

And maybe if they’ve been doing a ton of cardio, their activity down, have them actually feeling recovered and they can push themselves in the gym for the first time, which is going to actually allow them to build muscle, have more, you know, skeletal muscle on their frame, which is going to increase their metabolism. And then when it actually comes time to diet down again, not only have they built their calories up, they have more muscle mass, they’re not as fatigued from all the activity they’ve been doing, so you can taper that up. And I find that the fat loss phase after that initial kind of re-comp phase, or even if they just started with me at a certain weight, a year later when they’re at that same weight, they look dramatically different.

They look leaner, they’re more toned, as people would say. They’ve got, you know, more shape in a lot of these different places that they want. It can be a hard buy-in, like you said, because there’s not this immediate dopamine hit of like chasing a goal.

I think that’s the biggest struggle for people with re-comp phases is just understanding that you really have to be process oriented and like trust that what you’re doing, if you’re getting stronger in the gym and you’re getting your protein and you’re getting good sleep and all this, trust that it is working. And I think in the short term, trying to focus on how this makes me feel, you know, maybe if they were always hungry, they were always tired, they could never sleep well. Focusing on, hey, I’m sleeping well, I’m feeling better, I have more flexibility in my life.

So sometimes you have to get away from the outcome-based stuff as much and really just try to get them to buy into what you’re doing and then come back to it after a long enough time frame for them to really see those results. Because a re-comp, when you’re staying at the same weight, it might take three or six months to really notice a difference. And I think it does most of the time.

Really a year, I find, is where you see that you really like the switch goes off for people where they’re like, oh my God, this was me a year ago and this is me now. And I didn’t even notice it because I look in the mirror at myself every day. I don’t see these really small changes, but then they see someone they haven’t seen in a while.

Wow, you look so different. Wow, you look great. Or they put on a pair of jeans or a shirt that they haven’t worn in a while.

This fits completely differently. I’m the same weight, but it fits completely differently. Those are some really cool things to see.

[Giacomo]

Yeah, absolutely. And then the other thing that I think is hard to reckon with for someone who stayed on the smaller side at the expense of not being conditioned, leaned, or having the shape they want. And I know that.

They understand that logically. I think the hard part in that kind of scenario is that there is a focus on the scale weight and there’s a fear of the scale weight. And it can hold them back from realizing, well, maybe you need to weigh more.

As crazy as that sounds, it doesn’t mean that you need to weigh more. You see, I even say that and I can think in my mind, the trigger is like, oh my gosh, are they suggesting that I’m going to have more potty fat and I’m going to have a shape I’m not comfortable with? No, in order to get the shape that you want, you’re probably going to sit at a higher scale weight all the time.

For that kind of specific person, whatever they’re weighing in at, they probably need their average weight up. Even on the leaner side, they need to up it by whatever, three to six pounds. In order to do that, they need to gain eight to 15 pounds.

And you try saying that to somebody who’s been on the smaller side their whole life, I mean, that’s not a conversation that’s going to go. Sometimes you get someone’s complete trust, but often, again, the pushback, the fear, the uncertainty, they’ll try it, but they’ll immediately be like, all right, should I do this? Can I do this?

Blah, blah, blah. Because they’ve been in that cycle, the pattern’s going to repeat itself. It’s not easy.

Just because they understand it doesn’t mean that they can trust it. But like you said, I think some of the low-hanging fruit there is to get the focus off of what they look like, to get the focus off of all of that and to put the focus on how they feel energy-wise, how strong they’re becoming, anything you can do to move the conversation away from there and still dangle that carrot and be like, okay, so should you want to come back here, you’re going to have an entirely different shape.

But if we don’t get you away from here, it’s not going to happen. That’s 100% of the time that is a situation where a calorie surplus is the way to go, even if they’re newer to lifting. Absolutely.

Because like you said, the results will be so much slower. And I feel like there’s, you know, not to pivot away from that archetype, but I feel like it’s important to talk about the concept of being in a calorie surplus, even for individuals who are well-trained, in that if you do really want the most results, the best results that you could possibly get, yes, it’s a little more work after calorie surplus, because now you have to put in the work to be in a calorie deficit to get back to where you want to be at some point, if you decide that you do. That’s to say, who’s to say you might not? You might love the way you look with more mass on your frame, not just muscle, more muscle, more body.

You might love that look. But if you want to get back to where you are, there’s effort involved. There’s work involved.

But I look at you and I mean, you’re how many pounds away from your stage weight?

[Ben]

Right now, I’m about 30 pounds, maybe 30 or 35 pounds away from my stage weight. But I’ve been as much as I’ve been as much as let me think about this. I got as low as like 145 during my prep.

Now at that time, I’d probably lost some muscle. So I really think 150 would have been like a good stage weight for me had I done everything appropriately. And I’ve been as high as 190, 195, almost close to 200.

But I would say that generally, I perform my best at like kind of 180 ish kind of sort of body weight, which is, yeah, that’s like, well, that’s above 20% above my stage weight.

[Giacomo]

So my point has been like, you know, going through that process, maybe I mean, for someone who wears, I’m reaching over here for someone who wears triple XL or cardual XL shirts for the fun of it, maybe being there is is enjoyable for you. That’s where you want to be. And for you, it’s worth it.

Because you like you like being at that size, even though maybe you don’t need to be at that size to reach all of your goals and to perform you like that look. And that’s perfectly fine, too, as long as you don’t mind doing the work to get back to where you want to be, right. So you may you may even find that there’s a there’s a look you haven’t even discovered yet.

And I’ve tried to focus on that with some of my some of my male clients actually to be like, okay, I know that you’re I know that diet focus aside, I know that you want to be conditioned all the time. But why don’t we see what you look like when you’re at the top of a bulk weight? And why don’t we fall in love with that with that guy, you know, and it’s a hard sale.

It’s a hard sell. And I don’t know that people I don’t know those kinds of clients completely buy into the idea of it. But I feel like it’s a healthy thing to do aside from taking their mind off the the desire to be conditioned all the time.

I think it’s a healthy thing to do to get them to appreciate their body for what it can do and what it can look like at all times, at all shapes, right? Just like I, I don’t know the next time I’ll I don’t know that I’ll the last time I tipped the scales above 190 was years ago, with the exception of after my last prep, because I definitely had some a lot of struggles after that one, because I had never gotten that lean. And there was a lot of my play.

But But on the whole, like, I don’t I don’t tip I don’t tip the scales above 190. I stay once on a 170s. But if but I but I love the way I look at 190.

It’s not how I want to look. But I know if I was to be there, I’d be like, wow, I look really good. You know why?

Because I’ve spent the time there. So if you don’t spend the time in a body with more muscle and more mass, you won’t you won’t be able to appreciate it. It doesn’t that that’s not to say like, don’t get lean again, but it’s something worth at least exploring.

And when you get into a controlled bulk, if we’re using me as an example, let’s just say I’m at 170. And now I’m at 185. Right?

It’s a controlled bulk, I can say, okay, maybe I prefer to be a little leaner than this. But I’m pretty happy with the way that I look at 185 right now. And it’s only because I went into a controlled bulk.

So like different ways to plant seeds, not just I guess, in this situation, you are focusing on this, but but it can also help that person move away from the idea that they they need to be conditioned all the time.

[Ben]

And I think the first bulk or the first build is always the hardest because as you gain more muscle, the muscle kind of pushes out against the body fat that you have in the body fat actually starts to kind of contour the muscle that you have. It’s almost like, you know, putting shoulder pads on a football player and just kind of seeing that it’s almost like that with different parts of your body. You know, having more I store a lot of body fat in my glutes.

So I have a you know, I have a bigger but when I’m a little bit of a higher body I like that look. So I think that you start to appreciate these things when you have been doing it for long enough. But I remember the first really bulk that I ever committed to.

After the end of it, I was really uncomfortable. I didn’t really like the way that I looked my you know, I had kind of my face was more round. I had more acne like it was not my favorite thing.

But I put on probably like 10 pounds of muscle in that bulk. And so when I cut back down, I was like, wow, I look so much different. And that really gave me the buy in that, okay, you know what, it’s okay for my body to change over time.

And like you said, I became more comfortable with how I looked at a higher body weight and a lower body weight. You know, if I was leaner, I was kind of more bulked up and you come to appreciate the different parts of these phases. When you’re leaner, obviously, there’s an aesthetic component to that.

Sometimes you might feel a little bit more fit as well. But then when you’re a higher body weight, maybe you like the way you feel your clothes a little bit more. It really depends on the person.

But I think, like you said, the spectrum, whatever kind of that range is for you, you tend to find that you can appreciate different aspects of both. And I never thought that I would really enjoy kind of sitting at a heavier body weight, wearing, you know, big oversized clothing, like that was never something that I would have thought that I would have enjoyed. But then as I kind of just went about the process naturally, and went through these different phases, and you know, obviously, growing muscle to me is like the most fun part of what I do.

So that kind of lent itself naturally, you become more comfortable with doing these things, you find the benefits in each and you can kind of the cool thing is that you can decide what your preference is at a given time. And based on the, you know, your goals and your timeframe there, you can kind of go through these different phases. But you know, for myself, I was surprised to find you know what, I actually feel my best when I’m a little bit heavier.

And it was something I was kind of in denial at first, because I wanted to be one of those people who just could be okay being lean all the time and feel good. And especially if you follow a lot of fitness influencers, maybe they’re kind of more naturally predisposed to stay lean all the time and be fine, you know, feel fine, have enough energy, but that might not be you. And actually, that might not be them, they might be putting on a, you know, a charade for fitness, for social media, and you know, pretending that they feel fine, and they feel great, because they look great.

But the thing is, for anyone who’s been really, really lean, you know, that you really don’t feel great most of the time. So just remember that remember that there’s pros and cons to every different kind of body composition. And you know, at a certain point, you might enjoy one and a certain point, you might enjoy another.

And it’s really about you know, what your goals are, and you know, what’s what’s most important to you. But I do think that if you’re first kind of coming into this thing, just just being mindful of the long term plan. So like, okay, once you do this, this cut, what comes after that.

And I think that for most people, if they kind of just establish a lot of these habits, they build some muscle, people used to always say, and I would hear this a lot, and sometimes it’s still the right call. But okay, you got it, you got to take off the body fat first, and then build the muscle because you’re going to be more sensitive to growth when you’re leaners, people might have heard this before, you’re going to, you know, people sometimes have called it a P ratio, partitioning ratio, basically amount of body fat to muscle that you put on when you’re in a caloric surplus, it used to be thought that if you’re leaner, you’re going to have a better kind of ratio here. And so you get lean first, and then you build muscle. But really, what I think it is, is what we talked about earlier, which is getting the buy in, I think that’s why really cutting first and then building muscle can be the right move for people, not because there’s any sort of special magic about you’re going to build muscle better when you’re leaner.

And I found actually, you know what, I build muscle better when I’m a little bit heavier, because I enjoy my training in the gym, I push myself harder, I can handle more, you know, more work in the gym, because I have more energy coming in through my, you know, my diet, and I feel good. You know, there’s a lot of different factors to consider when you’re going through this decision making process of, you know, should I do a recomp and kind of, you know, main gain or maintain, gain, tame, you know, some different terms these days, or should I, you know, do a build or a bulk or an improvement season, you know, again, so many different, different terms that you can use for these different things.

That’s, you know, that’s, that’s what I would say to somebody who’s kind of trying to make this decision for themselves.

[Giacomo]

Recomping, while it isn’t as sexy as cutting, and it’s not as exciting as bulking, it is where you’re probably going to make the most gains, and where you’re probably going to spend the most time. Having controlled bulks is overrated, and I think that while it can happen, it’s not easy to do, and not for many people. And if you have, if you’re the type of person that’s into lifting because you want to look a certain way, it’s not for your health and your strength and your energy primarily.

I think it’s important to, to think about how much of your identity is attached to the idea of looking a certain way, because it can cloud your judgment on what to do and how to do it. And if you do find yourself in a period of time where you’re recomping or bulking, especially if you haven’t lived lean, it can actually give you a little bit of, from learning about, learning how to put in all the effort that is required. Like you said in towards the beginning of our conversation, 80% of what you did to get there, you have to do.

No, you’re not going to feel the same way. You won’t feel physically hungry, and the way it took to get there, it won’t feel like that on the way out once you get used to it, but it still does, like you said, it requires more effort. And just because you got there for, over the course of like whatever, 12, 18 weeks, eight weeks, it does, the likelihood that you’re going to be a little burnt out from that process is relatively high.

So to expect yourself to keep up with 80% of those habits and enjoy living lean in that process, to expect that your feelings are going to, like you’ll be emotionally regulated and really bought into the process is, I don’t think that’s a proper expectation. If anything, you’re probably just focused on, okay, well, I want to look this way. And then the fear of what if I lose this?

So it doesn’t, it takes time. It takes time to learn how to live lean. I’ve personally been focused on it for gosh, like 30 years of my life, still through trial and error, and I’m still learning.

It takes a long time. And whenever you think you get there, trust me, there’s more to learn if you’re looking to live leaner. And it takes time.

It’s a process. And it’s honestly, it’s not necessarily even the best thing you might find, again, that you don’t want, you might find on the other end of the spectrum that you’re really enjoying that person or something in between. And all the while you can build muscle.

And if you have the right guidance and the right support from the right person, like a fitness coach, it can help you with all the mental muck and it can help you get out of your own head and out of your own way. And that’s where we come in. What about you?

What are your parting thoughts, Ben?

[Ben]

Yeah, I think that knowing yourself, knowing that there are going to be certain things that probably excite you more than others, motivate you more than others, and also understanding that things can change, you can go back and forth between different methods. So just to give an example, in the first five or six years of me being into fitness, the bulking and cutting cycles and going through those really fun, really exciting, kept me engaged with the process. I think there’s certain people out there who are like that, where they need to have some sort of goal that they’re working towards to really stay kind of attentive to everything that they’re doing.

But over time, I think most people get to the point where they kind of just want to create a stable foundation of habits that they have. And that should be the goal is to even if you’re going through bulking and cutting phases, the things that you do are pretty similar on both in both different ways that you’re going, you’re just making these small alterations. So it’s not like your nutrition is wildly different.

When you’re cutting or bulking, you know, you’re eating similar things, but it’s just you have a little bit less flexibility or a little bit more flexibility. You know, you’re still training hard in the gym, you’re still getting your steps in either way. And then over time, I think that most people want to get closer to the kind of that recall, which is just like, okay, you know, I’m, I’m pretty happy with where I’m going, where I am right now, I’m going to try to make these small gradual improvements over time.

So it really always starts with habits and being process oriented. I mean, the results naturally come as a result of being process oriented. And I think that’s the nice part.

Just to give people some kind of practical ranges, obviously, with with recomping, you’re kind of staying in the same body weight. I think people don’t necessarily understand that maintenance can be a range of body weights like maintenance can be, you know, 170 to 175 for you, you might bounce up and down a course of many months, that’s that’s maintenance, you know, there’s a range of calories that you can eat that are going to roughly maintain your body weight. If you are going through a building phase, I think one to 2% of your body weight gained each month is more than enough, you can probably take it a little bit slower than that even.

And if you’re going through a fat loss phase, half a percent to 1% of your body weight lost each week is also reasonable, it’s okay to go slower, I probably wouldn’t go faster unless there’s kind of, you know, select cases where that’s applicable. But again, it comes into play having a fitness coach, it can be helpful for some of these things for making that decision for having somebody to kind of save you from doing some of the mistakes that would push you maybe in a wrong direction where you might burn yourself out. So if you’re looking for additional guidance or support, that’s what we do here at Vegan Proteins, we’re full time online coaches, and we work with clients.

And obviously, a lot of the topics that are informed by our client experiences that we end up discussing here on the podcast, as we did today. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, we have information in the description below. Or you can head over to veganproteins.com and fill out an application and we’ll get back to you within a business day and have a conversation about what is coaching, what that entails. If you want to connect with us, social media is a great place to do that. You can find us all on Instagram. So jacomoshandle is at Muscles by Brussels, Benny’s is at Vegan Proteins.

Ein is at Ben A. Mitchell. Sawyer’s is at Sawyer Boy Fitness Coaching.

Alice’s is at Vegan Proteins Alice. So you can find us there if you want to have more conversations. We love connecting with people.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, it would mean a lot if you could share it with anyone that you feel like would benefit from listening, that you think would enjoy the podcast. You can post it on your story, share that you’re listening to this episode on your social media and tag us and we’ll reshare. Leaving a rating or a review, a five star review would be super helpful if you’re listening over on Spotify and then YouTube obviously liking and commenting and all of that good stuff.

So thank you again for everyone for listening for another episode of Vegan Proteins on Muscles by Brussels Radio. I’m Ben. I’m Jacomo.

And we’ll see you on the next one. Bye everyone. See ya.