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Q&A for: 28-Jun-07

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Ask Mike Your Fitness Question:

2415. Q: From Q. 2410, sry I said u werent updating often enough, I thought you get paid (which you should) to keep this site running. And to add, ur a human who has to have a life too :) Sry for the post. Once again Great Site, keep it up, ur helping a lot of people.

A: Thanks again and there's definitely no need to apologize! I 100% agree that it'd be great for the site and its visitors if I could respond daily -- unfortunately that's just not possible most of the time. But I do very much enjoy running this site and will continue to do my best to help as many people as possible achieve their fitness goals.

I do want to plug the new Blogs feature that I just added to the site -- I hope it catches on as much as Q&A did. It allows you to keep a fitness blog and I will make sure to visit it and leave my comments and suggestions to help you get results faster. As the rest of the site, it's completely free, but you do need to Register with Mike's Fitness first and Login before you can start your blog. If you run into problems with registration or usage of blogs, email me at mike@mikesfitness.com -- but it should be very straightforward. Hope to see many of you start fitness blogs here!

2416. Q:

Mike, I understand about caloric intake as it pertains to cutting and bulking cycles.  What I understand less clearly is what kind of weight training program applies to each.  Some say that when cutting, you should lift heavier and do fewer reps, while bulking involves doing lighter weights and more reps.  I personally think that the weight training method is less important than your caloric intake, i.e., no matter how you lift, you'll bulk up when you eat more and cut when you eat less.  Relatedly, will lifting more weight at fewer reps during a cut induce more definition than will cutting and lifting lighter weights at more reps?

 

A: There is no need or reason to vary number of reps in your training program just because you go from bulk to cut or vice versa. As you said, the difference between bulk and cut is entirely in the diet and calories (and people usually do more cardio on a cut, as well). It's certainly NOT the case that lifting at higher reps somehow produces better muscle definition -- definition comes from having muscle mass and low body fat. Very high-rep training simply becomes a form of cardio which is fine but which is in no way superior in fat loss to regular heavy whole-body weight training.

I do recommend that overall people try different programs and periodize their training throughout the year, going through both very heavy low-rep and lighter higher-rep phases and similarly low-volume and higher-volume phases. I would recommend timing higher-volume phases with bulks since you'll be less likely to overtrain then. But as far as the number of reps, I don't believe there's a reason to tie them to a bulk or a cut.