If you are an athlete or avidly strength train you may have heard of periodized training.  Periodization is an organized approach to training that involves progressive cycling of a training program during a specific period of time. The same concept can also apply to your nutrition. This is the process of planning out your diet phases, recovering from that by building back up to maintenance calories, living at maintenance, and the optional bulking to gain muscle.

I would honestly say 90% of the people who come to me have the goal to lose weight, gain muscle. What they really mean is cut body fat and gain muscle. This is where periodization comes in, and also why this goal is not really possible simultaneously. In theory to lose body fat we need to eat in a calorie deficit, to gain muscle we need to eat in a calorie surplus, so you see how those two things don’t line up. With periodization, we can break these goals up and make a plan for the year where we cut, recover, maintain, and bulk. 

The first phase which I think everyone misses, even some coaches out there is the pre-diet or prep phase. Unfortunately, just because you want to lose weight and are willing to cut calories doesn’t mean it will always happen right away. If you have dieted at all the last three months starting another diet is not a good idea right now. To start a new diet phase, we need to make sure of a few things.

First and foremost, you are eating at your maintenance calories or above. In order to burn body fat you need to pull calories, and how can we pull from a cup that is half full to begin with? If you are a 130-pound woman regularly eating 1400 calories, lifting 5 days a week, doing cardio 4 days a week and maintaining that doesn’t leave us any wiggle room to create a calorie deficit and inevitably lose fat. Dropping much below that number would be a determent to your health. A reverse diet to restore metabolic capacity and give us the hormone profile we need to even begin to diet will be required. The one point to take home here is that dieting and training hard is an incredible stress on your body, combine that with the stressors of everyday life, work, kids, bills and you have created a recipe for disaster. This starts the vicious cycle of fatigue, nagging injuries, and exhaustion! Diet and exercise are meant to keep us healthy, not have the opposite effect.

Once you are healthy and ready to cut, you start the diet. This can be planned out in many ways. You can go for a shorter amount of time and be more aggressive, or you can plan for a longer 12-16 week cut where you are doing it slow and sustainably. This will all depend on you and your lifestyle. I always recommend slow and sustainable, especially when there is a lot of weight to lose.  Once your optimal results are achieved it’s time to recover and reverse!

This is the part that I would most people miss, the recovery phase where you find your new maintenance. It is safe to say that if you had success losing weight on your own you likely didn’t worry about a reverse diet after you worked so hard to get to your goal body composition. This is the main reason so many people cannot keep the weight off. You diet for 8 weeks, lose ten pounds, and then it’s back to business as usual with your eating habits. Low and behold the weight comes back. Planning your recovery from the diet is the key to long term success and sustaining your results. 

Your recovery period looks like a slow increase in calories, mostly carbs at first, week by week until you reach a new set of maintenance calories. This maintenance number will likely be lower than when you started dieting because you are smaller now and require less energy. Hence a slow and methodical approach to adding back food and limiting weight gain. Once that maintenance is found it’s now time to chill out and live there for a bit. Depending on your goals this amount of time can vary. I would say without hesitation most people do not spend enough time eating maintenance calories.

If you are trying to then gain lean muscle, you would enter a bulk and eat in a calorie surplus. Ever reached your goal weight you had in mind and thought you looked skinny fat? Been there! Once you peel away all those layers the muscle won’t just show unless you have worked hard for it! This is when you flip the script and start increasing calories to get into a calorie surplus where all the extra energy you consume will help you build lean muscle mass. To be clear there may be some fat gain during this phase, and working with a coach will certainly help you minimize that. 

This is a lot to think about! Which is why it’s always good to hire a coach. But the main takeaway here should be having a plan. You cannot always be dieting. If you are constantly restricting calories and pushing your training I promise you that your body will stop responding eventually. I promise you will end up with nagging unrelenting injuries from lack of recovery. You will create a recovery debt, and that debt will need to be paid back. Everything works until it doesn’t.