Bullshit, Brawn and Business

So you started hitting the gym. You start going consistently. You start making progress and begin to see some changes. And then all of a sudden… They Stop! As frustrating as they are unfortunately plateaus in performance and rate of visual change are completely normal and happen to everyone at some point in time. Some people manage to break through the plateau however for others it becomes an unbreakable wall, which they ultimately succumb to. It would be easy for me to sit here and analyse why many people succumb when a plateau in performance hits but instead I am going to highlight the factors which helped me when I hit a performance plateau earlier this year. It was Mid-June, I was 11 months into my ‘bulking’ phase, which after a mini-cut (for 2 weeks) prior to a holiday in May I was quite happy with the way things had gone. I was clearly more muscular in appearance and stronger in terms of performance than when I had started the mass-bulking phase in the previous July....

It doesn’t take a lot of scrolling through my instagram feed ( @joe_guy ) to see that in recent years my bodyweight and body fat has taken some pretty major swings. In December 2015 my bodyweight was 82kg, which then dropped to 69kg in July 2016, which then ballooned to 93kg in November 2016, before leveling out again to 85kg today. To some people that may look like the classic stereotypical bodybuilding cycles of bulking and cutting, bulking and cutting, but others may sense that there’s a deeper issue there, which there was. After breaking my ribs in October 2015 I was unable to train for 3 months and although my diet was still relatively tight the lack of training meant aesthetically my physique went backwards. Upon returning to full training I decided that I was going to ‘prove’ to all those who said that I’d let myself go a little just how good a physique I had. After 4 months things were going well, I was looking ripped and training well but I wasn’t ‘cover model rip...

After eating and drinking myself silly over the Christmas period I decided to go on a bit of a cut in the lead up to Easter in order to lose a bit of fat. When I say a 'bit of a cut' I mean I dropped my calories into a deficit of 200 under maintenance. This was the first time that I'd ever purposefully put myself into a calorie deficient for a prolonged period of time and upon reflection it taught me a few things, which I will outline for you below. 1. Meal Timings - Naively when I started out on the cut I thought I'd be able to eat like I had previously when bulking i.e. have a massive breakfast containing around 1200 calories, a decent lunch of around 700 calories, and then a 900 calorie evening meal. However, what I quickly found out when cutting was that eating this way and having the traditional three meals a day caused periods of extreme hunger and massive energy lags. After a number of weeks I realised that instead of having three meals a day at an average of...