What does cutting mean?

When you add muscle, you are almost guaranteed to add some amount of fat, whether the amount is small or large depends largely on your metabolism, exercise regime and body type.

The three basic body types, ectomorph, mesomorh and endomorph all gain muscle and fat at different rates. It is important to have a good understanding of your basic body type before engaging in a weight gain or weight loss program.

The process of eating surplus calories to gain muscle mass and weight is often referred to as “bulking”. Some people can even lower their relative body fat percentage by gaining more muscle weight than fat, but most of us aren’t so lucky.

Cutting is the process of losing excess fat to decrease your body fat percentage to a point where your muscular definition, visible separation and vascularity (in bodybuilding and fitness, the term vascularity pertains to the visible appearance of veins below the skin) are at a point you are satisfied with. Competitive bodybuilders go to extremes with their cutting cycles to get to a very (and unhealthy) low body fat percentage.

A healthy and maintainable body fat percentage for men is around 9-12% and it is at this point where you will see good definition of the major muscle groups, good separation (you will see a strong division between the muscle groups), and an appearance of veins below the skin on most of the major muscles. Women will not want to go below 12% body fat, as many consider this to be below the safe limit, and a healthy body fat percentage for women ranges from 16-25%.

Everyone needs a minimum % of body fat to maintain good health and fitness, and even though competitive bodybuilders and fitness competitors go below this level for shows and competitions, it is not maintainable or healthy to stay at those extremely low percentages.

Cutting unfortunately also involves losing some muscle mass. When you are on a caloric deficit to lose fat your body also cannibalizes some muscle tissue in the process as well. This is why it is important to gain AND lose weight slowly. A good rule of thumb is to lose (or gain) no more than two pounds per week, and if you notice significant decreases in strength while training, you may want to increase your calorie intake slightly. During a bulking phase, if you are gaining more than 1-2 pounds per week, you may be gaining a lot more fat than is desirable. And gaining too much fat makes it that much harder to cut down to a desirable body fat percentage.

If you try to lose weight too quickly, your body may enter into a catabolic state and you will lose too much of your hard earned muscle mass. There are many dietary, nutritional and training related tricks you can use to reduce the amount of muscle lost during your cutting phase, and we will explore these tips in a future article.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | furl | google | yahoo | technorati