The Case for Building Muscle FIRST in 2026 (Why Cutting Alone Won't Work) | Ep 419
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Every January, millions start cutting calories. By March, most have quit... frustrated, tired, and no leaner than before. The problem isn't discipline. It's that they're trying to diet their way into a body they never built.
Learn why muscle is an asset while cutting is just maintenance, how chronic dieting destroys your metabolism and body composition over time, and why people who build muscle first end up needing to diet less often for the rest of their lives. Discover the structural advantage that strength training provides, not just for how you look, but for glucose disposal, nutrient partitioning, and long-term metabolic health.
Whether you're stuck in the yo-yo dieting cycle, considering GLP-1 medications, or simply want to lose fat without grinding through months of restriction, this episode gives you a step-by-step framework for designing a muscle-first year.
Plus, learn about the Mini-Cut Accelerator, a counterintuitive approach that lets you lose fat faster while protecting more muscle.
Episode Resources:
Join Physique University to prep for the "Get Lean in 45 Days" workshop on January 20: https://witsandweights.com/physique
Try Fitness Lab AI-powered coaching for 20% off through January 2nd: https://witsandweights.com/app
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why your 2026 fat loss goal will probably fail unless you do THIS
2:23 - The cutting-first trap
5:45 - How muscle improves metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and nutrient partitioning
12:20 - Why short cuts beat long diets for body recomp
17:02 - How to design 2026 for a muscle-first approach
24:10 - The Mini-Cut Accelerator to lose fat faster without losing muscle
Most people start the year by slashing calories, adding cardio, and hoping the scale will unlock a new body. By spring, progress stalls, fatigue rises, and the cycle repeats. The core flaw isn’t effort; it’s strategy. Cutting reduces total mass, but without a base of muscle you don’t improve nutrient partitioning, work capacity, or metabolic resilience. Two people can lose the same 10 pounds and look radically different; the one who starts with and preserves more muscle looks defined and athletic, while the chronic dieter ends up smaller yet still soft. The goal is not to get better at dieting but to build a physique that requires dieting less often. Muscle is the asset; cutting is maintenance.
Muscle functions as metabolic infrastructure. It’s the primary sink for glucose disposal, improving insulin sensitivity and enabling higher energy flux without adverse weight regain. While muscle’s resting calorie burn is modest, its real power is in nutrient routing: more carbs to glycogen, more protein to repair, less spillover to fat. Myokines released by contracting muscles improve metabolic flexibility across the body, influencing liver, adipose tissue, and even the brain. Over time, a muscle-first approach allows you to eat more, train harder, and look leaner at the same or higher body weight. This is how long maintenance phases can slowly recomp without an intentional deficit, especially when paired with adequate protein, sleep, and steps.
Sarcopenic obesity—low muscle and high fat—predicts poor outcomes in aging more than either alone. Chronic dieting without resistance training accelerates this phenotype: you lose muscle during deficits and regain primarily fat after, degrading body composition year after year. The fix is not endless restraint but a reframe of the training year. Spend 80 percent or more at maintenance or a slight surplus to build strength and muscle while living a fuller life. Then, when desired, deploy brief, targeted fat-loss phases to refine definition. This structure reduces metabolic adaptation, preserves training performance, and keeps identity anchored to building, not restricting.
Designing a muscle-first year starts with assessment: training age, current muscle, recovery capacity, and lifestyle constraints. Commit to six to twelve months at maintenance or a slight surplus, adding roughly 0.3 to 0.5 percent of body weight per month. Train three to four days weekly with progressive overload, 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group, and a mix of compounds and isolations taken close to failure. Hit 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight, prioritize seven to eight hours of sleep, manage stress, and keep daily movement high. Track loads and reps to ensure steady progress; if numbers aren’t moving, muscle isn’t growing.
When it’s time to cut, go short and deliberate. Six to ten weeks at about 0.5 to 0.75 percent body weight loss per week will drop enough fat to sharpen definition while minimizing fatigue, performance loss, and lean tissue risk. Many lifters benefit even more from a four to six week mini cut targeting roughly 1 to 1.2 percent loss per week, protected by the brevity of the phase and anchored by high protein and hard training. The point is to get in, remove the fat, and get out—then return to maintenance or building. Over years, body weight may trend slightly up from added muscle, yet you’ll appear leaner, stronger, and more capable, all while needing fewer and shorter diets.
Medications like GLP-1 agonists can help with appetite for those who need them, but the principle stays the same: resistance training and adequate protein are non-negotiable to prevent muscle loss. Tools that blunt hunger without strength training risk leaving you lighter yet metabolically fragile. Anchor your plan to muscle, use diet phases sparingly, and let performance drive the process. Build first, diet less, and create a physique that maintains itself with far less effort.
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Philip Pape: 0:00
Every January, millions of people start cutting calories to lose fat. By March, most have quit. Frustrated, tired, no leaner than before. And the problem isn't discipline, it's that they're trying to diet their way into a body they never built. Today I am flipping the script on how you approach 2026. You'll learn why muscle is an asset, while cutting is just maintaining what you have. How to escape the cycle of chronic dieting, and why people who build muscle first end up needing to diet less often for the rest of their lives. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Cape, also the creator of Fitness Lab. And as we head into a new year, into 2026, I want to challenge the default mode that most people are operating from. The assumption that fat loss is the goal, that cutting is the strategy to get there, and that everything else falls second behind that. Today's episode is about a fundamental shift in thinking. The idea that muscle is the asset and cutting is just maintenance. I want to kind of flip around how you think about both cutting and bulking. The goal is not to get better at dieting, it's to build a body that requires dieting less often. So we're going to cover three things. First, why cutting alone keeps failing you, even when you do it right. Second, the structural advantage that muscle provides for your metabolism, your fat loss, your long-term physique, and your longevity. And third, how to design 2026 so that fat loss becomes short, infrequent, and almost effortless compared to what you've experienced before. And then I want you to stick around until the end because I'm going to share a specific rule about cutting that most people get backward that will let you lose fat faster while protecting more muscle. It's counterintuitive, but it could change how you approach all of your fat loss phases from here on out. So stick around to the end for that. All right, let's start with the problem with this cut first mentality, this fat loss first mentality. And it's a pattern that I've seen hundreds of times where someone decides, hey, I need to lose that 10, 20, 30 pounds of fat, and I'm gonna go in a calorie deficit. Then you start seeing some results, then progress stalls, then you cut calories more, maybe you add some cardio, progress stalls again. Eventually you're eating very little, exercising a ton, maybe exhausted a lot, and then barely losing anything. And this is men, women, all ages, all sizes, all hormonal situations, right? I see it time and again. And so then you take a break, then you tend to regain the weight because you're not tracking, or it just was too restrictive. And then the cycle starts again next year. And you know, we see a pattern throughout the year as well between the seasons, especially as we get toward the holidays, which we're just finishing now. So this is a great time to reset this pattern. And for some people, this has been going on for decades, right? People in their 50s and 60s who've been doing it since their 20s. We know that on average, women try over 100 diets in their lifestyle, for example. And then you're just losing and regaining, I'll say the same 20 pounds, but it's not even the same 20 pounds. It's you're losing muscle and gaining fat in addition to the fat that you've lost and gained, if that makes sense. So you're actually getting worse and worse body composition over time. And then the frustrating thing is these are often very disciplined, smart people. They listen to this podcast. They're not, you know, failing because of uh willpower, as we've talked about before. It's because of the system and the structure. And I call this the cutting first trap. You guys, not you guys, but a lot of you listening fall into this. A lot of you are desperate to lose weight, are so obsessed with the scale, and that's the thing holding you back. And understanding this requires looking at what dieting actually does and what it doesn't do, right? So the core problem here is when you cut calories and you just don't have enough muscle mass, yes, you're reducing your body weight, but you're not improving your body's capacity to handle the energy coming in, the food that's coming in. You're not building metabolic resilience, right? You are not creating a more efficient machine. What you're doing is getting smaller, which you might say, well, that was my goal. But then you're getting weaker and you're actually getting worse body composition. The research on this is pretty clear that energy deficits absolutely are gonna reduce your body mass, that's thermodynamics, but they don't improve your strength. They don't improve your work capacity, they don't improve your metabolic health on their own. Now, I've I've given the caveat before that if you have a lot of weight to lose, if you're like three, 400 pounds and you lose 100 pounds by almost any means, you're probably gonna have a net improvement in your health, but you could have a much better improvement in your health and the ability to sustain that health with what we're gonna talk about today, which is resistance training, sufficient muscle, so that dieting does not lead to losing that lean mass, reducing your training performance, lower energy flux, worse body composition just because the scale is lower, because the the end goal is not to have a lower scale weight, is it? And if you think it is, keep listening to this episode. Two people can lose the same amount of weight and end up with radically different physiques depending on how much muscle they started with and how much they held on to. One person can look very lean, very defined, very athletic. The other looks smaller but still soft, what people call skinny fat. We've talked about that before. And many of you have lost weight and then you're not happy, and then you think the answer is to lose more weight. Stop, stop. That's not gonna get you there, right? It's not the weight loss. This is why cutting alone is not gonna work. Not because cutting itself isn't useful, it's very useful, but cutting without the structural foundation of muscle is extremely inefficient. And you're somebody put it best that you can't sculpt a pebble, right? You can sculpt a nice slab of marble, but you can't sculpt a pebble. So the first shift here is stop thinking of fat loss as the primary goal. As much as I talk about fat loss on this episode as a goal, don't think of it as the primary goal. Start thinking of muscle as the asset, the thing you're building, the thing that you're gonna keep around for a long time that's gonna make everything easier. And then cutting is this little task to maintain that asset from a better state, whether that state is better muscle definition, physique, health, what have you. You've got to have the muscle there. So that leads me to the next point I want to talk about, which is muscle as this infrastructure for your body, not just for the for aesthetics, even though that's a wonderful side effect for many of us, right? It's not just about looking like you lift, even though that's a great selling point. Muscle is not just cosmetic, right? It's a major aspect of your health and of making fat loss easier. From a physiology standpoint, skeletal muscle, this is a major site, for example, of glucose disposal. When you eat carbs, muscle tissue absorbs a significant portion of that glucose. More muscle means better glucose handling, which means better insulin sensitivity. This is why strength training is probably the number one recommendation for people with blood sugar issues. I go on diabetes podcasts, I talk about pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and people ask me, like, what's what's the first recommendation you have, or what's the highest priority? And I usually say it's strength training because a lot of people with blood sugar issues know about walking. Walking is also important, sleep is also important. But if you're not strength training, that could be the biggest issue because muscle is a metabolic sink. It has somewhere to put that glucose instead of storing it as fat. And the insulin-triggered uptake of glucose, the first place it's going to go is skeletal muscle, or I should say 80% of it's gonna go to skeletal muscle. So if you have more of that muscle, you're able to dispose more of it. Another thing muscle does is releases compounds called myokines that influence your fat tissue and your liver, also other organs like your pancreas and your brain. These are signaling molecules that improve your metabolic flexibility. And that's your ability to burn different sources of energy, right? Carbs and fats, whatever, depending on how you're consuming your food and moving at the time. The metabolic value of muscle is far less about how many more calories it burns and more about things like nutrient partitioning and tolerance for what you're eating, how much you're eating, the types of food you're eating. People love to talk about how muscle burns more calories at rest, and it does maybe six to nine calories per day extra, which matters over time. It's not nothing, but it's not the main benefit. The real benefit is that you can eat more food with fewer negative downstream effects. You can have your carbs go more toward muscle glycogen instead of fat storage, your protein going toward muscle repair instead of oxidation, right? And so if I see this with clients, I see this with a lot of you listeners who are doing this the right way. You focus on building muscle, you build, let's say, 10 pounds of muscle over a year. Totally doable for men and women, right? Men could probably build a little more, but doesn't matter. And their scale weight might be the same, might be a little higher, depending on how they approached it. Did they do a bulk? Did they do it closer to maintenance? But they're probably eating more food. Their metabolism has gone up, their energy is better, they're training stronger, they look leaner. That's the power of nutrient partitioning without even having to do a fat loss phase. And that's why two people can eat the same diet and have different body compositions. And that's why you see people complain that, you know, I can't eat as much as this other person. Now, we shouldn't compare ourselves to each other because some people just have genetically lower metabolisms on average, but they can still move the needle, right? It's the people with more muscle are gonna be able to handle the fuel a lot better. And it's gonna affect all these other things, which then become more critical as we age. Think about sarcopenic obesity. This is the combination of low muscle mass, high body fat, reduced functional capacity as we age. This is a phenotype, right? Low muscle and high fat. That is probably the most associated with the worse health outcomes, than either of them alone. Meaning, if you have a lot of muscle mass, you're gonna significantly blunt that effect. If you have low body fat, even if you don't have a lot of muscle, that's gonna be a benefit as well. But having both is extremely beneficial. It affects your mobility, your metabolic health, your longevity. And then chronic dieting all the time, especially without resistance training, accelerates this phenotype again of high body fat and low muscle mass. Where even when you lose weight, you're losing the wrong kind of weight. You're losing muscle and then fat comes back, muscle doesn't come back because you're not doing anything to bring it back. So from this lens, cutting without first building muscle, it's not just a matter of being inefficient. It is highly counterproductive. You're setting yourself up for this awful phenotype of aging, of sick aging, I'll call it, that creates the most problems down the road. So muscle's not optional, guys. Like anytime I hear someone say, Yeah, I'm not resistance training, maybe I'll do it. It's not my focus right now. I'm like, what are you doing? Get your act together. We have to resistance train. Doesn't mean lifting weights in a very specific way, but it does mean following the principles of resistance training to build strength of muscle, which we're gonna touch on a little bit later, right? It's not a nice to have. Muscle's the foundation that makes all of this work together. Now, before we move on to talking about how and when you should cut, if you're planning out your year, if you want personalized guidance on building muscle and optimizing nutrition and knowing when and how to cut and what to do on a daily basis. You want to wake up and know here are the few things that I should do to continue moving the needle. The Fitness Lab app is what I built to do exactly that. It's an AI-powered coaching app that is a game changer. It gives you daily briefings, it gives you daily activities based on your data, based on your training and your nutrition patterns, your biofeedback. It's not generic advice. It's highly adaptable and personalized to you. You don't have to go to ChatGPT and figure stuff out. It will literally tell you here's what to do today, and here and then tomorrow it'll tell you what to do tomorrow based on what happened today. So it adapts to what's happening to you in your body. And through January 2nd, just a few days left, you can get 20% off as part of our holiday promotion. Just go to wits and weights.com slash app. The link is also in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app. All right. Now let's get into the part most people miss, which is why short, infrequent cuts are probably the best approach for most people. And then quick reminder at the end of this episode, I'm going to share what I call the mini cut accelerator. All right, this is a specific approach that lets you lose fat faster than conventional cuts and still protect your muscle. And it's counterintuitive, but it's a nice balance between speed and sustainability. So stick around after for that toward the end of the episode. All right. So let's talk about cutting. If you're cutting most of the year, you're probably doing it wrong. If you're cutting most of the year, you're probably doing it wrong. Now, this doesn't, this is not speaking to someone who has like 50 or 100 pounds or more to lose and is doing this slowly over a long time because that is their priority. This is the vast majority of you who are more concerned with 10, 20, 30 pounds of fat to lose. Muscle is slow to build, but it's very durable once you have it. It's actually kind of easy to maintain. Fat is actually pretty easy to cut off. You might hear that and say, Oh yeah, right. Get in my body and tell me that. But it's it's relatively easy to cut off when you've built the muscle. This is my point. With reasonable training and nutrition, you can maintain muscle mass with as little as an eighth of the effort that it took to build it. So that's what I mean by it's an asset, it compounds. It's like once you've got it, it's pretty easy to hold on to it. Even if you lose it because you stop training for six months, it'll come back very fast. Amazing how the body works. Fat loss is different. It's very fast, it's a lot faster than muscle building, but it's kind of fragile, right? It's easy to reverse and it's hard to maintain without ongoing effort. The moment you stop a deficit, the body is going to return to its previous state. I don't mean you're gonna gain all the fat back, but it's going to want to get to some level of homeostasis. If you're not careful, that could then also mean creep up in weight. And then the deficits accumulate a lot of costs to you and your body and your psyche. Diet fatigue, physical fatigue, reduced performance, hormonal disruption, downregulation, increased hunger, decreased motivation. It's not great to be in a diet for very long. Let's just be honest. There's no, there's no like good diet in terms of a dieting phase. So if your default state is that level of restriction, then something structurally is not going to work long term. It's off. You're paying these costs in you're paying costs to try to maintain something that you don't even have yet, instead of being in a more fueled state and building something that's then going to allow you to cut without the same level of cost. So it's I to me it's a win-win to do it this other way. So, what does that look like? What does a well-designed year look like for most people? In my opinion, rule of thumb, 80% or more of your time is spent at maintenance or a slight surplus, focused on building strength, on you know, building muscle mass, on recovering, on enjoying food, on living life to the fullest and not worrying about dieting at all. In fact, I just had a client reach out to me who's been in maintenance for a while now. She's getting stronger, and she lost she lost a bunch of fat initially together, and then we went back to maintenance. And a little doubt in her mind was like, I feel like I have to lose another couple pounds, but I'm loving what I'm doing. And people say I look great. And and then, and it was like, look, you answered your own question. Like, this is not the time to cut. If you have, if you want to cut two or three pounds at some point in the future, we could do it very strategically. But let's be honest, you're loving this life, and that's where I want most of you to be, dear listener. That's where I want you to be. So 80% or more of your time spent in maintenance or slight surplus, and then maybe six to 10 weeks at most, either two short phases or one medium to long phase at most, and some of you just a very short phase of intentional cutting to remove any accumulated fat for whatever goal you have, which for many people is like in the spring leading to summer, get a little bit shredded. I hate to use the word shredded because it implies extreme leanness, just to get a little get a little bit more muscle definition when you, you know, have your shirt off or you're wearing a bathing suit, whatever. And that's it. Shortcuts, infrequent cuts, the rest of the time you're building or maintaining what you've built. Now, what kind of lifestyle is that? It's that's an awesome one. And compare the style most people operate, where they try to cut for four to six months or indefinitely, let's be honest, and then they might break the cut for a few weeks to recover or because they just can't do it anymore, and then they keep going and they're always in a state of metabolic adaptation. They're always restricting, spending 70, 80% of the year in restricting, restricting, restricting, wondering why they never actually look better and get the result they want, and thinking this stuff just doesn't work, or even that calorie deficits don't work. Here's why the muscle first approach works so much better. I mean, guys, this is my opinion, but I think it's very well supported by evidence and what I see with my own clients, those using my app, those in the group program. Physiologically, short cuts, okay, doing a cut for a short period of time, what's it gonna do? It's gonna limit how much lean mass you lose, how much muscle mass you lose, if any, because the longer a cut goes, the greater risk you have for losing muscle mass. Your body adapts to that restriction also, right? Your metabolism will slow down slightly. This just is gonna happen. It's totally normal. Your hunger is gonna go up, your training performance is gonna drop. And again, shortcuts are gonna minimize this. I don't want to call it damage, but this not so great living state of you know, low energy because you're not giving your body time to adapt to it in a shortcut, which is a good thing, right? Like a shortcut is gonna maybe dip into that regime a little bit, but then you're done before you know it. Psychologically, living mostly outside a deficit is gonna reduce burnout. It's gonna improve your adherence over the long term. The S-word, sustainability. It's gonna reinforce also your identity as a lifter, as an athlete, someone who's building, someone who's operating at a high level of performance, not as someone who's always dieting and saying no and restricting and feeling, you know, emotionally stressed by all of this. And then here's a counterintuitive observation that I've seen repeatedly with clients. Many people with sufficient muscle mass just naturally lose fat over time while they're in maintenance phases for a long time. And they're not even intentionally doing it, they're not restricting. It's just because that higher energy flux, they're eating more, they're training hard, they're moving more, they're not packing on a bunch of fat from being in a big surplus, but they're just slowly recomping over time. And that creates an environment where the body naturally wants to be leaner, right? That's recomposition. Now, the the most optimal or quickest way to build muscle is to go into a slight surplus. And by slight, I mean really slight. But for many of you, just being at maintenance, living with enough muscle that your body handles the energy more efficiently can get the job done. So, the goal I want you to internalize here is not to become a better dieter. I think a lot of you are trying to develop this skill of dieting, which to be fair, we give you the tools here on the show to try to do that because at some point you do go through a cut and there's tools for that. But what I want you to internalize is building a body that requires dieting less often. Then fat loss is just these brief, almost routine maintenance tasks. And I see it all the time. People I've worked with for a while who've spent the time to build the muscle, they're like, yeah, I'm just gonna do a quick fat loss phase, gonna take four or five weeks, cut a few pounds, boom, then get back to it. That's far better than this exhausting year or years long struggle that most people experience. So I went. briefly connect this to the GLP1 era we're in now as well. Stick with me. Okay. I don't think this is going to be controversial. I'm going to I'm going to apply some nuance to this. Medications like semaglatide or zepitide, you know, are wake are making rapid weight loss very accessible to millions of people. And many of you are probably taking these. And I have clients who take these. All good. For some people, they are genuinely helpful tools that address real physiological challenges with appetite regulation. Okay. We had Jamie Selzeron talked about that exact thing and he's doing it the right way. Love it. I'm not anti-medication. Okay. The concern is this that rapid weight loss without the resistance training is what creates the scenario I've already described. And it tends to accelerate it the reduced muscle mass, the lower metabolic capacity, a physique that is lower on the scale but may not be improved or feel different the way you want it to be. And many people are taking these medications need to lose weight for health reasons. And so it's an independent goal, let's say. And then when you stop the medication or when your body adapts, then you, you know, you get back where you're started. And many people on these medications then are worse off and they end up gaining the weight back and they're gaining more body fat. And then it's kind of this vicious cycle to the extreme. And that's why I think the muscle first philosophy matters today more than ever, to be honest. So whatever tool you use to manage appetite, which we're going to have a whole series on appetite starting next week throughout January, we're going to talk about lifestyle-based appetite management, natural appetite suppressants, pharmacological, we're going to talk about all those tools. Whatever tool you use to do that or to create a deficit, the strength training piece is still non-negotiable. The solution is the same no matter what tool you're using. Resistance training, adequate protein to preserve and build muscle during weight loss. Right. So this again this is just the cut side of the equation. So if you're already if you're you know considering using these meds or you're already on them, make sure to double down on strength training. I don't mean do double the strength training I mean double down as in do it, make it a priority, make muscle and strength a priority. Let the medication handle the appetite piece and those two can work together really, really well because the goal isn't just weight loss. It's building the physique that's durable, that's functional, that's sustainable and that requires muscle. All right so how do we design 2026 as your muscle first year and not worry about things like getting too bulky or gaining too much fat. All right. How do you do this? I would first assess where you're starting from how much muscle do you have? Have you never lifted before or have you lifted for two decades? Two different populations, right? How well do you recover? What is your training age? How long have you been lifting consistently? Because if you've been cutting a lot for many years without any time building at all, then you probably have very little muscle to work with and that means your first priority is absolutely to build muscle, not to cut. If you look like you lift right now, whatever that means to you and the answer is not really, I don't, then you probably want to build because you're not going to just by continuing to cut. So that's that's the first one. Step two is you have to commit to this. And by commit I mean eating at maintenance or a slight surplus for six to 12 months. We're not talking about a dirty bulk that's that's 1990s where you gain excessive fat. I'm talking about a control building phase where you add muscle slowly while staying relatively I'll say relatively lean or whatever your leanness is now and you're just going to get leaner because you're adding the muscle right it's very hard for people to grasp this, but you could actually gain a little bit of weight and be leaner because more most of that weight is muscle. Now how much of a surplus? In terms of percentage body weight a week I'm going to say anywhere from 0.3 to 0.5% body weight a week all right which for a lot of people is like maybe a half to a pound a month maybe more than that for men maybe it could be two pounds a month no more than that. It usually amounts to a hundred to three hundred calories above maintenance. So you could do this with macrofactor you could do this by by hand you could do this using my app. It doesn't matter just that you are intentional about it and making sure you're not dipping into constant restriction like before step three is of course you're training you've got to train for this that means enough volume, right? Typically 10 or 15 hard sets per muscle group per week. Use progressive overload which means you're gradually increasing the weight or the reps or sets over time but generally the weight training within one to three reps of failure on most working sets, using compound movements combined with isolation work, all that fun stuff we've had several episodes recently about training, about training volume. We did an episode about strength versus hypertrophy. It's all in the library if you need something specific reach out. How about find me on Instagram at wits and weights and send me a message this is the part that requires consistency and this is the part that a lot of people screw up because they're like okay I'm going to go into a slight surplus and then I'm going to train and then I miss a training session and then I miss another one. You're probably going to want to train three or four days a week and you're going to want to track your progress. So again there are multiple ways to do this you can use an app, you can use a notebook, you can use Fitness lab, it doesn't matter. If you've been using the same weight for months, the same pink dumbbells that's I'm sorry if that's derogatory but that's it kind of gets the point across. If you're doing the YouTube circuit training workouts, if you're doing the CrossFit style workouts and nothing's improving, you're not building muscle, right? At best you're maintaining something and being a little bit fit, but you're not actually building maintaining muscle. Then of course you've got the protein and the nutrition side. And so we we talked about being in a surplus but part of that surplus is having sufficient protein up to a gram per pound of body weight. For most people it's 0.7 to one gram per pound. So take your body weight and get kind of close to that like just a ballpark it I weigh about 180 so I try to get 160 to 180. If you weigh 200 it's 180 to 200. If you only weigh 150 pounds you're trying to get like 120 to 150 something like that. And then we've got sleep and stress sleeping at least seven to eight hours managing your stress also getting enough steps all that stuff. We're not going to go through all these pillars again today but whatever you're doing in fat loss to maintain your energy and metabolism you're still going to do that when you're building muscle it's not like you give that up you still want to be active you still want to move around you're not going to sit around all day. And then and then only then so we're talking six to 12 months of building when you then decide to cut you to make it short and deliberate. I would honestly just do the whole building phase continuously and then do a focused six to 10 week cut at around a half to 0.75% of your body weight a week. We're going to talk about a different option later in the episode that might be even more strategic for some of you, but that's generally what I recommend. And then you're going to get back to maintenance or building so you're not going to stretch the cutout. You're just going to not chase a lower number on the scale you're going to get in, remove the fat, get out. Understand that your overall body weight may actually trend kind of slightly up over time. You know it's going to go up and down with the building and the fat loss but then the net effect is probably slightly up because of muscle. And that's a great thing because you're going to be leaner, higher body weight higher metabolism more food all that jazz. And then just repeat this going forward and most of your ears are going to look like this long periods of building or maintenance brief periods of cutting you're going to accumulate muscle you're going to improve your metabolism the cuts are going to be really short and easy. And that is what I mean by becoming a person who rarely needs to diet that will be your identity as you you perform you're an athlete you lift you train you eat you fuel and occasionally you drop some fat. And it's not being genetically blessed. It's because you're working on building this infrastructure of muscle. So we've covered a lot all right before I wrap up I want you to stick around I'm going to share what I call the mini cut accelerator. It's a specific approach to fat loss where you can push a little harder finish a little bit faster and protect more muscle than conventional cutting that I just talked about and it might change how you approach your cuts. But a lot of you are looking for tools to help you do this. So if you need a tool to help implement any of these approaches whether muscle building executing a strategic mini cut and you're looking for support from human coaches and others in a community physique university is where we coach people through this. And what's cool is coming up on January 20th we're going to do a workshop called Get Lean in 45 days. It's going to be a complete framework for executing the kind of short aggressive muscle sparing cut that I'm about to describe in a second. It's the exact setup it's the macros it's training we're going to have a specific training program for the 45 days how to transition out without rebounding. And again that's going to be January 20th but if you join physique university now you'll have a few weeks to do some of the prep work because you want to be ready for this. This is not for everyone you can't just jump in. This is not a quick fix. You have to have your nutrition a bit dialed in you have to have your baseline your training things like that dialed in but we can get you some of those resources in advance only if you join physique university or if you're already in and if you're ready hit the ground running then in January 20th that's how you can do it. So go to wits and weights.com slash physique link in the show notes go to wits and weights.com slash physique join us in physique university for the get lean in 45 days workshop. All right so let's talk about that strategy the mini cut accelerator most people are going probably too slow for too long which sounds anathema to what I talk about because we are all about sustainability. The problem is a 12 or 16 week moderate deficit even though it sounds sustainable because the rate of loss is less it tends to be psychologically hard on some people it really is. 12 or 16 weeks on paper doesn't sound like that long. It's three or four months but in reality it starts to feel kind of fatiguing and kind of tedious right and again not everybody. For some people it's perfect but for others I've found that something like a four to six week mini cut is going to be extremely effective and it's a balance between very rapid fat loss. That's a different protocol that I've that I teach and kind of a standard cut that we talked about earlier. And in a four to six week mini cut you are pushing about one to 1.2% of your body weight loss a week right so it's a little bit faster than that typical half to one percent recommendation. And because it's short, you're still not risking any muscle loss. So this brevity the shortness is what protects you. You know you again going back to my earlier points about your metabolism will start adapting, your hormones start to downregulate, you don't really get much time to hit that phase, which is a good thing. And then psychologically you can push harder knowing that there's a clear end date. So for a lot of people this is really powerful. Let's say you're a 180 pound person that might look like 1.8 to 2.2 pounds a week for four to six weeks which is eight to 12 pounds of fat. This is a very common archetype especially a lot of men that I work with who are eating a decent amount of calories and they weigh around that 180 to 200, they can lop off like 10 pounds of fat. If you are let's say 130 or 40 pounds, you could still get you know four to eight pounds of fat. It's all relative, right? Compare that to someone who kind of has to grind away for like four months for 16 weeks and there's this little bit of hunger and fatigue the whole time it's not a lot but it's enough to make it feel like a grind even though on paper it seems more conservative and sustainable. The problem or the key here is it only works if you've built the foundation first. So this doesn't happen next week or in two weeks as we start the new year. This is either during a long building phase or after. And so I mentioned early earlier I recommend doing these after you do have the option let's say you're planning to build for 12 months let's say after six months you do a mini cut and then you get back in it and finish the year out strong. So you're kind of sandwiching the mini cut in between two maintenance two building phases. And really that's all it is. So you've got to get that in place first and that workshop I mentioned the get lean in 45 days that's exactly what we're covering a full framework for executing this. So if you want to get access to that and do the prep work join us in physique university go to witsandweights.com slash physique and we're going to help you execute that 45 day mini cut and learn all about it. All right until next time keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that 2026 is your year to build not just to cut I'm Philip Pape and I'll talk to you next time here on Wits and Weights
