garethhe

when on a cut, does it make sense to stress volume over hypertrophy?

wild

Er...when your eating below maintenance, as in dieting, hypertrophy is a little difficult, given that you need to be eating above maintenance in order to gain muscle. Your goal while cutting should be to maintain all the muscle you have while dropping the fat. You should be strength training during a cut, low volume, heavy lifting. Number one myth about cutting is to drop your weights and lift for high reps. Huge mistake...if you're not making your body lift as heavy as it was previously...it has no reason to keep the muscle you have.

TJ Cline

Good post I agree...

Hypertrophy on a cut is only possible for a beginner or when a person is using steroids and/or other growth drugs, and even then it is very difficult for many.

Thunder

Training during a fat loss stage should be used to preserve (or even increase in special cases) muscle mass and not to stimulate fat loss. Nutrition and cardio are for fat loss.

You have to be cognizant of the following:

When dieting, your body's recovery ability decreases due to a lack of substrate/fuel. Less carbs (typically) means less glycogen so you have be wary of excessive volume (for more reasons than just lowered glycogenc)
When you're dieting, one of the big attempted adjustments is your body trying to decrease muscle to adjust metabolic rate down towards your new caloric intake. Remember, muscle is a caloric pig.

You have to give your body a reason to keep the muscle. Too much volume is bad because of the aforementioned reasons. Keep the tension high by lifting heavy and following a relative strength program for the most part. What builds it, keeps it. Stay strong and you'll likely be in a good position to stay big.

And don't do too much cardio.

CowPimp

Woo, some intelligent responses. Good to see a couple of knowledgeable people joining this forum.

I just wanted to add one thing. Although it is highly unlikely that you will be gaining any muscle mass in a negative energy balance (As stated, preserving it is really your goal), it is certainly possible to enhance neural adaptations. This is done by lifting heavy. It is well known that improvements in intramuscular and intermuscular coordination are most marked when lifting at a high level of intensity.

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Thunder

Good point. And the enhanced neural drive will have a carry over effect to when one returns to more of a hypertrophy phase of training since they'll be able to recruit more motor units/muscle fibers.

garethhe

definitely helpful stuff.

for cutting, i was thinking of keeping my calories consumed at my current maintenance rate (factoring in my existing weight training and HIIT)--basically taking out the extra couple hundred calories from my bulking diet, but keeping my diet otherwise the same.

the calorie deficit, rather than from reduced eating, would come from adding cardio to the existing program.

sensical or no?

PS last time i tried to lose weight, i ate 2500 calories (which is well below my maintenance rate) and lost weight too quickly.

Thunder

A deficit is a deficit, whether you create it from nutrition or from energy expenditure. I think a combo of both is preferable otherwise you may end up having to do too much cardio. Be wary of excessive cardio and as great as HIIT is for fat loss, don't overdo that either, especially if you're hitting legs twice a week. You may run into recovery problems.

I prefer to see most of the results come from nutrition, not cardio. I think the best approach is to try to lose fat on the least amount of cardio possible.

garethhe

i hit legs once per week, not counting HIIT. that's one part of my body that i've never had any problems with recovery-wise. i can go do an all-out HIIT or bust my ass on squats/leg presses/etc and feel up for a run a couple hours later.