Ultimate cutting workout program

This helps you attack fat at all angles while maintaining muscle. You will be training semi-heavy here, at least in the beginning. Now, that may not be what you had in mind for a cutting workout. Remember, your goal is to get shredded while maintaining muscle mass. The last thing you want is to lose muscle and get skinny! Many lack upper chest development , and as you drop more body fat that will become even more evident. So starting out with heavy incline bench press will help you ensure your chest is looking awesome as you get more ripped.

If you want to learn more about upper chest training, once you finish this workout read my post: Upper Chest Workout: How to Build a Bodybuilder Chest. As I mentioned before, you can perform your cardio after the weights or you can do it at another time during the day ex: cardio AM, weights PM, or vice versa. If your schedule allows, you may find it best to split these sessions up. As we all know, cardio can be boring. For example, if you did the elliptical yesterday, do the recumbent bike today.

However, you may notice that your legs may respond better to higher reps. Your legs, specifically quads, may take a different approach than upper body due to the different muscle fiber types.

Today is all about pumping more blood into your muscles , getting that pump, and also jacking up your heart rate to burn more fat. You can choose any cardio machine but just a simple walk will do the trick as well.

Feel free to use a different method to change things up. With your prior cardio sessions earlier this week you probably needed some upbeat music to get you through it. But for these longer, moderate sessions, this is a great time to listen to a Podcast and soak in good information.

This workout is all about bringing out those details in your back muscles. And that can be frustrating but I have some additional info that may help you… After you finish reading this post, go check out my blog post: How to Make Your Back Muscles Stand Out. Your final workout of the week will be your second leg day. And this leg workout will be similar to Wednesdays but without the heavy squats. Like I mentioned earlier, you have to take a different approach to build your legs than you do with upper body.

Give your body a little break. You may decide to spend most of the day relaxing. These things are okay. In other words, I still encourage you to do something active that day. This means you are performing movements like squats, deadlifts , overhead presses and other big lifts. Big lifts like these work more muscles in less time — pushing your metabolism further than specific bodybuilding workouts where you train specific muscles each workout.

If you are looking for a complete cutting workout plan to help you achieve your goal, make sure that the program is clear on its efforts with compound lifts. Everyone gets very excited over HIIT workouts. Yes, to a certain extent, these workouts can have very positive impacts on your weight and performance in the gym. The biggest difficulty with these workouts is actually maintaining consistency.

Since many HIIT workouts are constantly changing you will never be truly certain that the workouts you are doing are actually helping you to grow stronger or if the strength workouts you are already doing are the main variable here. Low impact cardio is the easiest and most effective way any beginner can track their performance from day one.

They put far less stress on the joints great for beginners and they are easy to monitor without having to hire a trainer saving you money. I recommend low-impact cardio to almost all of my clients.

Cycling, incline walking, stair climbing — all great exercises for building strength in the body while improving your metabolic function without putting excessive stress on the joints. In terms of pure caloric value, whenever you are trying to lose weight, the foods that contain the least amount of calories and the most amount of fiber will always help you to feel satisfied without excessive weight gain.

This means you are eating foods like fruit and vegetables. At least half your plate at every meal should consist of fruit and vegetables. They are high in fiber, low in calories and full of micronutrients that help to maintain normal body function and promote metabolic enhancing effects. This is the hardest part for most people. Understandably, pre-packaged foods are super convenient, but if you can eliminate all processed foods from your diet you will see drastic changes.

Cutting requires you to have the most natural and clean diet possible. This maintenance phase is essential. Midway through April, you can start your cutting cycle, which will run for weeks with you finish the final weeks of the cut just as you enter into the summer season!

You cannot cut weight forever, nor should you. In an ideal world, you can allow for a long, slow cutting phase, one that can be done without drastic measures so that the highest amounts of muscle mass can be preserved. If you are thinking you can bulk for 12 weeks and cut body fat in 4, you will most likely run yourself into the ground and lose more muscle in the process than if you took weeks. As Dr. If you are weeks into a cutting phase, and still feel like you want to cut more, it may be a smart idea to take weeks and increase calories slightly so that your body is forced to kick up the metabolism.

Going more than this time period assuming you bulked for just as long can actually make your body more resilient to losing body fat not good for cutting which will leave you feeling run down, not losing fat, hungry, and probably losing muscle.

So, start with a moderately aggressive cutting phase lasting weeks assuming you were bulking for that long as well. A good aiming point for the cutting phase is to lose 0.

Any more and you may actually be losing too much weight, too fast, which can result in losing both muscle and fat. Remember, the more time you have to cut weight, the more muscle you can typically preserve. Often, increased frequency number of training sessions a week can help lifters burn more calories, keep metabolism high, and enhance recovery from said training sessions. I suggest most lifters choose a day workout split when cutting.

My go-to splits are either a 4-day upper, lower, upper, lower split or a 5-day split that has a lifter training most muscle groups at least twice per week. Adding some low-intensity cardio can also be incorporated in the split if you need to burn a few more calories, however, cardio IS not necessary for some people although burning even calories from minutes of walking after a workout can make a huge difference in being able to eat calories more per day and still lose fat.

Preserving muscle mass is key during a cutting phase. Compound movements , ones that stress high amounts of muscle tissue are often used as pillars in any strength training program, with the cutting programs being no different. As you can see in the sample program below, the movements used during the cutting phase may mirror those used during the bulking phase.

It is important to remember that unlike the bulking phase, recovery may be slightly inhibited due to the stress of being in a caloric deficit. Therefore, individuals must be sure to listen to their bodies and not push too hard so that they can still focus on lifting heavy ish , doing the movements with proper technique, and not add too much stress to an already metabolically stressful event cutting.

Check out our article on using Squats For Weight Loss. Despite what many novices and even some strength coaches believe , lifting heavy is still an essential part to cutting. Lifting heavy, relatively speaking, is ideal for preserving strength and muscle mass during the cutting phase. While this is better than not lifting, this can lead to some muscle loss.