Skinny-fat men gain fat very easily (even when using a very good diet plan and training program).
The reason for the easy fat gains is most likely existing fat cells that you created during your youth (if you were skinny-fat while growing up).
Once you create fat cells before the age of 20, these fat cells are always ready to be filled up and they can’t disappear unless you get a liposuction.
I personally have a massive amount of fat cells around my love handles, and these start filling up really fast after a week or two of bulking.
Most skinny-fat guys have fat cells there, and that’s why it’s absolutely crucial that you track progress regularly when you’re bulking and to stop your bulk at the right time.
If you don’t, you risk gaining back all the fat you worked so hard to lose, and then you’re looking at doing a long fat loss phase to get lean again.
When To Stop Your Bulk
When you complete Phase 1, we will usually start off your muscle gain phase by first being in a caloric maintenance where you maintain your bodyweight.
By doing so, I found that it’s sometimes possible to gain quality muscle while adding close to no fat (at least for a short amount of time)!
This is especially the case for those of you who are under 25 years old.
Once this stops working, we will start playing with a small caloric surplus, and stay in that surplus for 2-4 weeks at a time.
By keeping your bulk cycles short, we ensure that you stay lean while adding muscle mass.
In each bulking cycle, we will first check your “lean base hip and waist measurements”, and then bulk until one these increase with a maximum of 3 CM.
Once you’ve increased your waist with 3 CM, you cut your calories back to what they were during Phase 1 and cut back to your lean base measurement. (The cut should be quite “pain free” and take 10-14 days at most).
So, if you’re a guy with a 80 CM waist and hips at the start of your bulk, you will bulk until your waist or hips get to 83 CM, then start your cut.
Now some of you may wonder why you can cut waist and hip size very fast after bulking for a short amount of time compared to when you were in Phase 1 (cutting 3 CM usually takes a month for a Phase 1 trainee, but only 10-14 days for the same Phase 2 trainee).
I’m not sure about the exact explanation, but my theory is that your body bounces back to its lean base much faster when you are able to train hard, your nutrient partitioning is better and your hormones are optimised.
Regardless of the scientific explanation behind this, the key take-away is that you can keep your cut cycles to 10-14 days as long as you make sure that your waist or hips increase by no more than 3 CM.