How to Manage a Successful Building Phase
One of the by products of moving into a building phase is the inevitable gains in body fat. We can employ various strategies to minimize the amounts of fat we gain. However, if you're looking to put on as much tissue as possible, you will gain body fat. So if we're looking to get the best out of our building phase without putting our health makers at risk and gaining too much body fat, it's best to break the process into stages.
Phase 1 - The Push
We're looking to increase muscle mass by progressively increasing food and training volume in this initial phase. So I'd suggest holding this phase for at least six months, but slowly, the increase in food will cause GI stress, lower appetite alongside high inflammation, and decreased performance when training. So, therefore, it's a stage we don't want to spend too long holding when body fat goes above 18% for males and 27% for women its time to employ the next phase.
Phase 2 - Mini Cut
We can employ a 4-6 week mini cut to drop any excess body fat gained during phase 1. First, increasing our cardio/NEAT, then progressively decreasing our food while keeping our training stimulus high to maintain muscle tissue. By doing so, we'll see a decrease in the inflammation we've gained during the push phase, improve insulin sensitivity while giving our GI tract a break, and improve appetite. The biggest takeaway from this phase and an essential for me is the psychological break lets face facts building tissue, and often forcing meals down isn't the most pleasant experience.
Phase 3 - Maintenance
This stage will be the transition point between the previous two phases. You'd begin by slowly increasing your calories to a maintenance level and dropping training volume to allow the body to recover from any injuries while holding muscle tissue without causing too much fatigue if you were to keep the volume high. Then, maintaining cardio/NEAT slightly high to help balance health makers and be psychologically ready to get back into the push phase. Staying in this phase will be person-specific depending on the time for injuries to heal, health makers to be in baseline levels or the simple things like life commitments.
Building an incredible physique is a marathon. How we manage this phase will be person-specific, but if you can see it as a long-term process and take steps to minimize the potential health implications that may come along the way, the greater the longevity we'll have in our training and life.
