Should I Bulk Or Cut? Here's How To Know

This is probably the most common question we get from blokes starting the program: "Should I bulk or cut?"

And almost every time, the answer they want to hear is neither. What most blokes actually want is to "maintain and recomp" — stay the same weight, but somehow build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Sounds great in theory. In practice? It almost never works. Here's why.

Muscle takes ages to build. If you're doing everything right — training hard, eating well, sleeping properly — you're looking at maybe 4-5 kilos of actual muscle per year. That's a great result. Most blokes won't even hit that.

But here's the kicker: most blokes are holding way more body fat than they think. And that changes everything about how you should approach this.

You Probably Need To Cut First

Almost every bloke who walks through the door thinks he needs to lose "maybe 2-3 kilos." That's it. Just a little trim around the edges and he'll be right.

The reality? It's usually more like 15-20 kilos. And I'm not exaggerating.

If you're not already lean, you are carrying more body fat than you realise. You've been looking at yourself in the mirror every day for years — you've normalised it. But the fat is there, and there's a lot more of it than you think.

Let me show you what I mean.

Antti came in at 114 kilos. He was hitting the gym, working a stressful job, and not seeing any results. He thought he was just a bigger bloke. Nope. We dropped him all the way to 82.8 kilos. That's 31.2 kilos of body fat. Not 2-3 kilos. Thirty-one.

Paul came in at 131 kilos wanting to bulk. He'd been training for years and thought he just needed to pack on more size. The reality? He was carrying 38 kilos of body fat on top of a physique that was already there. Once we stripped it off, the body he'd been building for years finally showed. At 51 years old. Proof it's never too late — you just have to cut first.

Chris lost 27 kilos over 38 weeks. If you'd asked most people before he started, they would have guessed he needed to lose maybe 5-10 kilos. Not even close. Twenty-seven kilos of fat was sitting on top of him the whole time.

Why Recomping Doesn't Work For Most Blokes

Let's do the maths on this, because once you see the numbers it becomes really obvious.

Take Antti at 114 kilos. He's carrying over 31 kilos of excess body fat. If he wanted to "recomp" — stay at 114 kilos and just swap fat for muscle — he'd need to add 31 kilos of muscle to replace the fat he lost.

At 4-5 kilos of muscle per year, that's 6+ years of perfect training and nutrition just to end up where he could've been in 10 months.

Even after a full year of recomping — let's say he gains 5 kilos of muscle and loses 5 kilos of fat — he's still sitting at 114 kilos with 26 kilos of fat on top. He'd look basically the same. Maybe slightly different if you squinted. But nothing close to the transformation he actually got.

This is why "maintain and recomp" is a trap for most blokes. It sounds like the smart play. It feels like you're not sacrificing anything. But you end up spinning your wheels for years and wondering why nothing's changed.

What Happens When You Cut First

Here's the part that surprises most blokes: you build muscle during the cut.

When you're new to proper structured training — especially if you've never done progressive overload before — your lifts go up the entire time you're in a deficit. You're losing fat and getting stronger simultaneously.

So you're not "just losing weight." You're stripping off the fat that's been hiding your frame, and you're building new muscle underneath at the same time. The result is a completely different physique in a fraction of the time recomping would take.

Then — once you're actually lean — you push into a surplus. Now the extra food has somewhere to go. Your strength pushes even further, and the weight you gain is mostly muscle instead of fat piling back on top of more fat.

Christian is the perfect example of this. He started at 97 kilos. We cut him 15 kilos over 17 weeks down to 82. His lifts went up the entire time. Then we pushed him back into a surplus — he built back up to 87.5 kilos over 13 weeks. Way more muscle, way less fat than where he started. He's still on the program at 60 weeks and looks completely different to the bloke who walked in.

When Does Bulking Make Sense?

There is a time to bulk. But it's only when you're already lean.

If you can see decent ab definition, your face is lean, and you genuinely don't have much fat to lose — then yeah, go straight into a surplus and start building.

Pedro is a great example. He came in at 76 kilos, already lean. We went straight into a bulk. He pushed all the way up to 95 kilos, then cut back down to 82 kilos lean. Completely jacked. But this wasn't a quick process — this was over 1.5-2 years with multiple bulk and cut cycles. Pedro could afford to bulk because he was starting from a lean base.

Jace is another one. He came in looking lean-ish, but he still had about 15 kilos to lose before he was actually lean. So we cut him down to 80 kilos first. Then he built back up. Then cut back to 80 kilos again — and this time he was absolutely peeled. Same weight, completely different body. But only because he got lean first.

The difference between Pedro and most blokes asking "should I bulk?" is that Pedro was actually lean enough to justify it. Most blokes who think they should bulk are carrying 15+ kilos of fat they don't know about.

The Bottom Line

If you're reading this and you're not lean — cut first.

Let the scale go where it needs to go. Don't freak out when the number drops more than you expected. That's just the fat you didn't realise was there.

The body fat has to come off eventually. You can either deal with it now and get lean in a few months, or you can try to recomp for years and barely notice a difference. Or worse — you bulk on top of it, gain another 10 kilos of fat, and dig yourself into an even deeper hole.

• Not lean? Cut first. Build muscle on the way down.
• Already lean? Go into a surplus and build.
• Want to recomp? You'll be waiting 3-5 years for what a cut could give you in months.

It's not complicated. Get lean, then build. That's the order. Every time.