Starting of cutting phase

Hi everyone,

The past 10 months was an incredible period of adding size and muscle to my body and have exceeded my previous best size with a good margin.

I am at the end of my building phase and my stats are: 1.75m, 91kg and about 9-10% body fat.

This is how I look at the end of my building phase:

 

Click here to view video “Start of strongman cutting phase”

 

I am starting my cutting phase on 20 July 2015 and it will continue for 3 months. The target is a level of 5% body fat.

A photo shoot and video shoot will be done at the end.

As you all know, my cutting phase is where I never train to failure but use lighter weights (anything from 20% to 40% lighter) and do higher reps per set (12 – 20 reps).

Very little rest in between sets and many superset exercises. The idea is a combination of resistance training with a degree of cardio involved (due to lighter weights and higher reps).

The fact that training is never to muscle failure also means the tendons and joints now have a chance to recover and strengthen from the punishing period of the building phase where EACH set was to absolute muscle failure.

The focus during the cutting phase is to keep the muscle size at the same level and then manipulating the body fat to a very low percentage factor. This can be very difficult because most guys (and girls) put their bodies in starvation mode (due to too little calories) and as a result lose more muscle than fat. I am following a very specific process whereby I monitor the effect my diet had on my muscle and fat reserves every 14 days and then adjust the calories accordingly, to force the diet to burn fat and not muscle for energy. I thus make sure that I stay just outside of a starvation mode which eats into the muscle size.

Wish you all many blessings and much success with your training!

Gert Louw (51 y/o)