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Progress update: Week two of the mini cut

Today marks the end of the second week for my cutting phase, and I was both pleased and unnerved at the result. I weighed in at 184.5lb on the morning scale, that’s about 3.5lb down from the start of the cut.

Pleased?

Well, this is a cutting phase after all, so seeing the scale move is both desirable and appropriate. I was also largely happy with the number. While 1.75lb per week is a little on the high side, I’d expect to see that rate of loss drop-off in later weeks… at least not without another significant change.

But why unnerved?

When you’ve just spent the last six months bulking hard to add size to your frame, seeing weight come off fast is definitely unnerving. It’s even more scary in these early days when you just see the numbers dropping but don’t yet see progress in the mirror! That said, I’ve been keeping food intake up and training intensity high, so I am 99% confident that I haven’t lost any lean tissue.

Luckily, I was listening to an episode of the Modern Musclehead podcast this morning and was reassured to hear Bryan, Scott and their guest, Mike Samuels, talk about this exact thing. i.e. the anxiety of seeing the weight drop on a cut, especially when you don’t yet see those results in your physique.

As a reminder, my process is pretty different to the last time I cut fat.

I am not calorie counting, and I don’t have macros. I am simply eating healthily, as I normally do, and limiting snacks between meals. I am not calorie cycling; I am not even carb cycling. I am literally trying to keep this as simple as humanly possible.

In fact, this weekend, I managed to get a break away with the wife to Calistoga and ended-up eating a LOT of food far outside my normal comfort zone. Hell, I even had french fries for the first time in years! And yet, good discipline in all other areas has me down in weight.

I’ve posted extensively about my change in programming, switching over to a three-day split, run six-on, six-off, with a strong emphasis on density for the workouts. And they have been tough. Frankly, they feel like solid hypertrophy workouts just condensed down to forty-five minutes. And while I haven’t done the math, it feels like the overall volume is, in fact, pretty darn high. I might even be doing more total volume than when I was bulking.

After two full weeks, the shock of the change in workout pace has gone and I find I can already recover a little faster than I first was. That said, I am still pretty sore on a day to day basis… the workouts are just darn hard.

No cardio as yet, at least not with the intention of burning fat. I’ve completed just two cardio sessions so far, both under the guise of active recovery. One session was thirty minutes on an elliptical, the other was last night on the StairMaster, where I completed just ten minutes to round-out my quad-centric leg day.

Anyway, that’s the progress so far. I’ll keep posting as interesting milestones are reached.

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