Suggestions on cutting routine

[patricio]

Hi, everyone
I'm restarting my cutting routine. Due to work and family I've been off the gym for 1 month.
I know losing fat is all about diet, so I'm on
1800 cal/day;
160-200g protein
60-90g fat
around 50g carbs
Not easy for me to follow, but I did it for a couple of months on january and lost 9 pounds of fat

My routine:

Superseries
Multipower squats 3 x 5-8
Deadlift 3 x 5-8

Superseries
Pullups 3 x 4
Arnold Press 3 x 5-8

Superseries
Flat bench dumbell press 3 x 5-8
Bent over Barbell row 3 x 5-8

I'm doing this 3 times a week, trying to concentrate on compound movements. Rest between sets 45 seconds, between superseries 3 minutes.
After that 20 min of cardio, HIIT if I have the energy.
I don't have a lot of time to spend at the gym, and the whole routine with cardio takes 50-60 minutes.
I'm not doing any abs or arms.
I somehow feel that volume is too low, I don't know. Maybe I should increase lifting time and eliminate cardio.
Can anybody guide me to improve this? I need to lose 10-14 pounds of fat to get to 12-14% BF and start bulking.

 

[ihateschoolmt]

You are doing squats and dead lifts 3 times a week? or is that day 1?

 

[patricio]

3 times a week. Is it too much?

 

[ihateschoolmt]

Why don't you break that up into a push pull legs split, we have a good sticky for designing a routine like that. Is a super series a super set? Just go heavy do them seperate.

 

[patricio]

So you suggest doing legs one day and upper body another avoiding super sets?

 

[ihateschoolmt]

I wouldn't super set big compound movements like that, no. What was the reasoning behind that? Here I'll save you some time and go ahead and tell you what I would do. Feel free to make changes to it. Try to hit these sets hard since it's such low volume.

day 1 legs
squats 3 sets
leg press 2 sets

day 2 rest or cardio

day 3 push
bench 3 sets
dips 2 sets
military press 2 sets

day 4 rest or cardio

day 5 pull
deadlifts 3 sets
pull ups 2 sets to failure
db rows 2 sets

day 6-7 rest or cardio

 

[patricio]

The reason was saving time. Once a week for each body part would be enough to save muscle while on a calorie deficit?

 

[ihateschoolmt]

Ya it's fine.

 

[Built]

Not to disrespect my friend ihateschool here, but for cutting I personally wouldn't do anything to failure; three times a week full-body training works just fine for cutting, or you can break it up to a rotating two-day split if you like.

For example:

Workout 1 - quads, shoulders and lats
Squats 5x5 or 3x8
Millies or clean and press 5x5
Olympic bar corner press 3x8 each side
Weighted chins 5x5 or 3x8

Workout 2 - deads, chest and back
5x5 deads or 3x8 Romanian deads
3x8 bent over or t-bar rows and/or one-arm dumbbell rows
5x5 or 3x8 barbell and/or dumbbell bench (flat or low incline)
- optional weighted ab work could go in here, possibly some tris or bis, although ditch arms as your cut progresses -

Pay attention to your energy and vary up or down the training volume as required, but generally ramp it down and keep the iron on the bar as you lean out.

You could do 20-30 minutes of post workout cardio after this, perhaps with some sprint or other interval work for the first 5-10 minutes of it.

Does this help?

 

[patricio]

Yes it does. Thanks for helping out

 

[ihateschoolmt]

Oh I didn't mean go til failure by that, I just meant go reasonibly heavy because of the low volume. But prbobably should do Builts routine I don't know very much about cutting lol.

 

[Built]

ihate - thanks for the clarification. You were on the right track.

To the OP, for a three-day, another option would be to do the two workouts above, then for a third do the one in "homework 1" in my sig.

 

[patricio]

The routine looks great, also time-savey. After so many years of reading bodybuilding magazines with endless routines, I almost can't believe that this is enough. However, from january through march I tried the one for newbies posted by Built and it worked wonders.
Just hard to forget the "high reps for cutting" thing