7.7 Body Composition Phases: Cutting, Bulking, and Maingaining

Your body composition goals will determine how you set your calorie intake relative to your maintenance. There are three possible states: a deficit (cut), a surplus (bulk), or maintenance (maingain). Understanding when to use each one is the difference between efficient progress and spinning your wheels.

Step 1: Find Your Maintenance

Before you can cut or bulk, you need to know where your maintenance calories are. Here is the most reliable method:

  1. Start with a TDEE calculator. Use any reputable online calculator (search “TDEE calculator”) as a rough starting point. These use your age, sex, height, weight, and activity level to estimate your daily expenditure. Treat this number as a hypothesis, not a fact.
  2. Eat that number for two weeks. Track your food as accurately as possible and weigh yourself daily at the same time (ideally first thing in the morning, after using the bathroom).
  3. Average your weekly weight. Ignore day-to-day fluctuations—water, sodium, and glycogen swings can cause ±1 kg variation overnight.
  4. Evaluate:
    • If your weekly average is stable → you’ve found your maintenance.
    • If it’s going down → you’re already in a deficit. You can either keep cutting or increase calories to find maintenance.
    • If it’s going up → you’re already in a surplus. Reduce calories to find maintenance.

Cutting (Caloric Deficit)

A cut is appropriate when your goal is to reduce body fat while preserving as much muscle as possible.

  • Rate of loss: Aim for 0.5–1% of bodyweight per week. Faster than this and you risk muscle loss, hormonal disruption, and adherence collapse.
  • Protein: Increase toward 2.0–2.2 g/kg/day during a cut. Higher protein preserves muscle mass, improves satiety, and has the highest thermic effect.
  • Training: Keep training intensity high. Maintain the loads you were using—do not switch to “light weight, high rep” during a cut. You may need to reduce total volume if recovery becomes compromised, but intensity should stay.
  • Duration: Cut until you reach your target body fat level, then transition to maintenance for at least 4–8 weeks before considering another phase.

Bulking (Caloric Surplus)

Bulking only makes sense if you are already lean. For men, this generally means around 10–14% body fat; for women, approximately 18–22%. If you are above these ranges, you are better off cutting or maingaining first.

Body fat percentage estimation is notoriously unreliable. DEXA scans have a margin of error of ±1–3%, bioimpedance scales are worse, and mirror estimates are subjective. Use these numbers as rough guideposts, not precise targets. The mirror and how your clothes fit are often more useful than any number.

Most beginners are not lean enough to justify a bulk. The traditional “dirty bulk”—eating everything in sight to maximise muscle gain—is a relic of bodybuilding culture that produces mostly fat gain with a small amount of muscle. For natural lifters, the efficiency of muscle growth in a surplus is low: even in optimal conditions, a natural male might gain 0.5–1 kg of muscle per month in the first year of training, tapering sharply afterward.

  • Surplus size: A modest surplus of 200–300 kcal/day is sufficient to support muscle growth without excessive fat gain. There is no evidence that a 1000 kcal surplus builds muscle faster than a 300 kcal surplus—it just builds more fat.
  • Duration: Bulk until body fat starts to climb uncomfortably (roughly 15–16% for men), then cut.

Maingaining (Eating at Maintenance)

For most people, most of the time, eating at or very near maintenance is the best strategy. Train hard, eat enough protein, sleep well, and let body composition shift gradually over months and years. This is not as dramatic as a bulk-cut cycle, but it is more sustainable, avoids the yo-yo of gaining and losing fat, and produces comparable long-term results for natural lifters.

The recommended cycle for most people: cut to a lean baseline → maingain indefinitely, with occasional short, controlled mini-cuts if body fat creeps up.

The “bulk until you need to cut, then cut until you need to bulk” cycle is popular in certain fitness communities, but in my opinion, it reflects poor planning. If you need to do a drastic cut, it means you ate too much during the bulk. If you need to do an aggressive bulk, it means you cut too hard and too long. A well-managed approach rarely requires either extreme. Cut once to get lean, then stay there.