The 12-Month Fat Loss and Muscle Gain Blueprint for Your Best Physique in 2025 | Ep 260
Download my free Precision Fat Loss Guide with the 6 core fat loss strategies customized for your experience, goals, and lifestyle (or go to witsandweights.com/free)
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Stuck in a bulking and cutting loop without lasting results? Ready to map out 2025 for sustainable gains and fat loss? Want a proven plan to build your dream physique?
Philip (@witsandweights) delivers a powerful end-of-year gift: a complete periodization blueprint designed to help you build muscle, lose fat, and achieve sustainable fitness success. He shares the five transformative phases of the yearlong plan, from building foundational habits in body recomp to strategically timed fat loss, anabolic muscle building, and more.
Learn how to align your nutrition, training, and lifestyle with each phase to create a roadmap for lifelong progress. Whether your goal is to get lean, pack on serious muscle, or overhaul your physique, this provides the step-by-step plan to crush your goals in 2025.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
03:31 Phase 1: Body recomp and the power of building systems
06:11 The role of tracking
09:28 Phase 2: Precision fat loss strategies for sustainable progress
16:58 Phase 3: Beach-ready maintenance for recovery and celebration
20:58 Phase 4: Six months of anabolic muscle building for transformative gains
28:32 Phase 5: Mini cut for the finishing touch on your dream physique
35:49 The principles for success
40:15 Outro
Episode resources:
Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. The only food logging app that adjusts to your metabolism!
Watch this video on setting up MacroFactor for your initial recomp (maintenance) phase
Download Boostcamp to access 70+ evidence-based workouts
Your Year-Long Plan for Fat Loss and Muscle Gain in 2025
What if you could map out your entire year to strategically transform your physique? Instead of randomly bouncing between bulking and cutting, this 12-month blueprint takes the guesswork out of building muscle and losing fat. In this article, I’ll break down the exact phases from my latest podcast episode to help you make 2025 your best year yet.
This isn’t about quick fixes or trendy diets. It’s about sustainability, precision, and long-term results. Whether you’re looking to get leaner, stronger, or completely overhaul your body composition, this plan is your guide to success.
Why a Year-Long Plan Beats Short-Term Fitness Goals
Most people start the year with vague resolutions, like "lose weight" or "gain muscle," but they lack the structure to make those goals a reality. A year-long periodized approach:
Builds habits and systems for long-term sustainability.
Aligns with your body’s natural rhythms and energy needs throughout the year.
Prevents burnout by alternating between focused phases of fat loss, maintenance, and muscle building.
With this plan, you’ll not only see physical results but also develop the skills and confidence to continue improving year after year.
Phase 1: Body Recomp (January–February)
This initial 8-week phase sets the foundation for success by focusing on body recomposition and habit-building.
Goals:
Establish consistent habits: strength training, protein intake, fiber, and hydration.
Maintain calories to prime your body for fat loss or muscle building.
Track progress to build awareness without stress.
Why not start with fat loss? Without these systems in place, any progress you make will likely be temporary. Use this time to align your habits and learn how your body responds to maintenance.
Phase 2: Precision Fat Loss (March–May)
After building a solid foundation, it’s time for a targeted fat loss phase. Over these 12 weeks, aim for a weight loss rate of 0.5–0.75% of your body weight per week to maximize fat loss while retaining muscle.
Key Strategies:
Personalized Targets: Use tools like MacroFactor to determine your calorie deficit and macros.
Flexible Dieting: Build a plan that fits your lifestyle, including planned breaks or refeeds to stay consistent.
Strength Training: Maintain high-intensity training to preserve muscle mass.
Fat loss doesn’t have to feel miserable. The goal is to align your plan with your preferences and keep hunger manageable for sustainable progress.
Phase 3: Beach-Ready Maintenance (June)
This short 2-week phase acts as a transition between fat loss and muscle building.
Objectives:
Replenish glycogen stores and restore energy.
Stabilize your metabolism at maintenance calories.
Celebrate your progress and showcase the results of your hard work.
This phase also gives you a mental reset before diving into a longer muscle-building phase.
Phase 4: Anabolic Muscle Building (July–December)
The magic happens here. Spend at least six months focused on building muscle to increase your metabolic rate, improve body composition, and create a physique you can maintain for life.
Principles:
Slow and Steady Gains: Aim for a weight gain rate of 0.3–0.5% of your body weight per week to maximize muscle while minimizing fat.
Target Weak Points: Use progressive overload and prioritize muscle groups that need extra attention.
Prioritize Recovery: Optimize sleep, manage stress, and adjust training intensity to avoid burnout.
This phase is where your physique transforms. Trust the process and commit to the long-term rewards.
Phase 5: Mini-Cut Shred (January–February 2026)
Wrap up the year with a short, 6-week mini cut to shed any extra fat gained during muscle building and reveal your leaner, more muscular physique.
Approach:
Aggressive but Controlled: Target a fat loss rate of ~1% of your body weight per week.
Strategic Cardio: Add light cardio sessions to support your calorie deficit without compromising recovery.
Sustainability: Keep protein intake high and focus on retaining muscle while dropping fat.
This final phase sharpens your results and sets you up for another year of success.
Why This Blueprint Works
This 12-month plan combines evidence-based principles with real-world flexibility. It’s not just about achieving a better physique—it’s about learning how your body responds to different phases of training and nutrition. With this knowledge, you’ll be empowered to make adjustments and sustain your results for years to come.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you're tired of jumping from one fitness phase to another without a real plan, bulking for a few months, cutting for a few weeks, never quite getting the results you want, this episode is for you. What if I told you there's a strategic way to plan your entire year to finally achieve that physique you've been chasing? Today, I'm sharing my complete periodization blueprint for 2025 or any 12-month period that will help you build muscle and lose fat more effectively than random approaches. Whether you're looking to get leaner or add serious muscle, or completely transform your physique, this episode will give you the exact roadmap to make 2025 your best year yet. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today is my end of year gift to you as we head into a new year, 2025, a strategic periodized plan for building your best physique over a 12-month period. Now, how about, instead of jumping straight into a diet or even an intentionally designed but aggressive fat loss phase in January, like everyone else, what if you took a more calculated approach, one that will make future fat loss even easier, that works with your body's natural rhythms and the seasons, builds lasting habits and systems and creates sustainable results. That's exactly what you're getting today, and if that's not what you're looking for, this is not the episode for you. And to get a head start on the fat loss phase which, if you follow my plan, will start in about eight weeks from the start of this plan, I've created something pretty unique. It is my new Precision Fat Loss Guide that acts as a decoder ring where you pick and choose your goals, lifestyle and personal tendencies to pick the best of among six core fat loss strategies. To get your free copy of the Precision Fat Loss Guide and get a head start on that, click the link in my show notes or go to winstonweightscom and click free stuff. All right, let's start building the mental muscles so we can have better physical muscle and, overall, better lean physique over the next 12 months.
Philip Pape: 2:18
What we're going to cover today is five phases to map out for the next 12 months. The first phase is going to be body recomp, and this is January to February. Now again, if you're starting this in the middle of the year or some other time, it's fine. This is just hypothetical. January through February body recomp. Phase two is going to be precision fat loss. So that'll be March through May. And then phase three is your beach ready maintenance and that is in June, followed by an anabolic muscle building phase from July all the way to December. And then and I know I'm cheating a little bit we're going to do a mini cut shred January to February, the following year. Now it's a little bit more than 12 months, but the reason I'm doing that is most of you are going to want to build muscle all the way through the holidays. You can obviously cut that phase a little bit shorter if you need to or want to to fit in the shred earlier, but most people aren't going to care. You want to go all the way through, say, christmas, the New Year's, and that's what it's going to look like. A lot of this is flexible. We're going to dive into each phase and understand how they work together to create a solid physique and really give you a strategy that you can then rinse and repeat for the rest of your life.
Philip Pape: 3:29
If you want Phase one body recomp this is an eight-week phase Now. It can be six, it can be 12. With my clients it ranges from six to 10 usually. So an eight-week phase to create the foundation of your habits, while also improving your body composition. Now I know what you're thinking. Why aren't we just starting with fat loss right away? I got to lose the weight. I got to lose the fat A super common request.
Philip Pape: 3:56
Here's the thing Without the system, without the habits in place, any progress you make later will be temporary. It's going to go back to the way it was before. You're going to repeat the cycle that you've repeated in the past over and over again. We don't want to do that. So the philosophy here is simple Start where you are, not where you think you should be, and then focus on fundamentals. Focus on those habits, not little hacks and extreme approaches, just the fundamentals. For some of you, that's going to be quite a bit of behavior change over that eight weeks, and for others it's going to be much smaller. Regardless, we're going to take a tiny habits approach to get there and you're going to start where you're at. Consistency is going to carry you through forever. It's going to beat perfection all or nothing any day of the week, and it'll give you the power that you need to do this yourself. So we're talking about nailing the basics protein at every meal, hitting your fiber intake, staying hydrated, things that sound boring and not exciting at all. Training, training consistently, three, four days a week, whatever makes sense. These, however, are the bedrock of body recomposition and then, ultimately, body composition in general.
Philip Pape: 5:07
Second, we are going to take advantage of your potential for recomp while setting these things up. So, unless you're going to jump right into a muscle building phase which is your right and an option you can just skip this and the fat loss phase and go right into muscle building. I know a lot of you are looking to shed some excess fat first, get a little bit leaner and then build muscle. So that's what we're talking about. So we want to take advantage of your potential to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, initially without trying to diet, without trying to build muscle, but while setting up these systems, because at maintenance calories, eating the same amount of calories that you burn, so the scale weight doesn't change beginners and intermediates can actually burn fat and build muscle at the same time. Now, if you're super advanced, it's going to take a lot longer to do that, but in this case you are primed for it, even advanced lifters. They can tighten up and improve some definition through very meticulous consistency, but we're going for body recomp and we're going for building systems.
Philip Pape: 6:06
The third benefit, I guess, of this phase is we are going to track. We're going to track all the things we want to track, but we're going to make it as low stress as possible. And you might say, well, that's kind of contraindicated, because tracking itself is stressful. Well, no, it doesn't have to be. And if anything, the way I like to track allows you to free up decision-making and free up emotional responses the rest of your week and the rest of the month and give you the confidence to know what to do when you go into fat loss. And all of that actually reduces your chronic stress. It gives you confidence, which is going to reduce your stress and that's going to increase your metabolism. So we love that, and I personally love Macrofactor as an app to track food and weight, because it also then gives you your metabolic rate, your expenditure, your metabolism. It's the only app that does that in real time, dynamically, based on your real data, and all you've got to do is put in your weight and food daily. Yes, daily, because daily is shown to have the best results for people and gives you the most confidence and precision. And we're not going to obsess over what happens every day in terms of our scale weight, but we're going to track it. Think of this as a calibration phase, where you're just aligning everything so that the next few phases there's almost no way you can go off track because you've got everything set up really well for success. So that's phase one.
Philip Pape: 7:29
So phase one you're going to spend eight weeks at maintenance, going for body recomp, without trying to diet, without trying to gain, and what you're going to do during that time is going to highly vary based on your context, but I'll give you my big low-hanging fruit list. Number one you're going to highly vary based on your context, but I'll give you my big low-hanging fruit list. Number one you're going to be strength training using an effective program of progressive overload. Now, that's outside the scope of this podcast to get into all the details on that. I have other episodes that talk about that but you've definitely got to be training so that we can build muscle and then hold on to that muscle during fat loss.
Philip Pape: 8:02
Number two we already talked about tracking your food. Along with that tracking, you're then going to understand your macros. We need sufficient protein, we need sufficient carbs, we need sufficient calories and you're going to eat to that level of maintenance and if it seems like a lot of food, that's okay. We want to slowly get there so that we're fully energized and well-fed and recovered before we go into fat loss. Number three is going to be being active and moving right, getting your steps in. For you, that might be going from 4,000 a day to 6,000. Another person might be six to eight or eight to 10. I would try to add 2,000 steps a day at first, make it sustainable and then get even more than that to aim between eight and 10,000. And then, finally, we have things like sleep and stress. Now, this is a huge topic. We thousand. And then finally, we have things like sleep and stress.
Philip Pape: 8:47
Now, this is a huge topic. We're not going to cover it all today, but the idea is, if this is a red flag for you, whether it's because of unavoidable stress in your life or because of things that are fully within your control, we need to do little things like taking a break between our meetings and taking a breath and calming down and finding time to ourselves, finding time for play, those sorts of things that will help manage our stress. So all of that is getting normalized and calibrated during this first phase and that is why we don't want to be doing fat loss initially. So if you want to know more about that, send me a message. I'll send you one of the previous episodes where we've talked about setting up for maintenance. I have a few of them and it depends on what exactly you're looking for and I'll give that to you.
Philip Pape: 9:28
All right, so phase two after that, first eight weeks. Now we're into March. This is the fat loss phase. This is the moment you've been waiting for and I'm gonna default this to a 12-week phase. But, as I mentioned earlier, if you download my guide, you'll see that there are six different approaches. You could take different durations, different rates, different philosophies based on your situation, but we're going to just talk in generalities here. Okay, so let's assume 12 weeks. I find that 12 weeks is enough to get a decent amount of fat loss, but not so long that it becomes a little bit of a grind and you get tired of it mentally and physically. So we're going to drop fat strategically and the only way to do that is to drop scale weight while holding onto that valuable muscle mass.
Philip Pape: 10:12
And here's the key philosophy most people miss. Fat loss doesn't need to feel like punishment. It doesn't need to feel miserable. I won't say that it is a walk in the park and that it's like going to Disney World other than Disney World in the summer or in the holidays, but it doesn't feel, it's not going to feel like that, but it also shouldn't be miserable. So we want to build a plan that aligns with your lifestyle. That just says okay, let me acknowledge what's happening. Do I love to go out to eat? Do I have travel coming up? Do I like to eat these specific foods? Do I love carbs? Do I like to shift my calories around, based on the day, whatever it is, and build a plan that goes with it. And we're going to focus on three core areas.
Philip Pape: 10:56
So I'm going to touch in more detail here on things that I just alluded to in the first phase so that you have those details. So first is the rate of loss. Using macro factor, for example, you could just plug in the rate of loss you want per week and it'll give you the targets. If you're doing it by hand, you're going to just have to do some math, and what we're targeting here for most people is around 0.5 to 0.75% of your body weight per week over 12 weeks. So you can do the math for yourself and you can realize, okay, that might be 10, 15, 20 pounds, depending on your body weight.
Philip Pape: 11:34
Some people can go a little more aggressive, some people less. And again, if you download my precision fat loss guide, it has all of these prescribed out and written out and all of that. And I see people trying to rush it. So if I say a half to 1%, they're like I'm going to go 1%. So I usually say a half to 0.75% to kind of constrain that and really leaning more toward the half percent. And when you take half percent of your body weight times 12 weeks, it gives you a certain fat loss. I would just say, whatever that number is, be happy with it. Don't try to target a specific number, because after you build muscle later on we're going to do another small fat loss phase anyway and the building of muscle is going to help you be leaner, regardless of the scale weight anyway. So we want to get like some fat loss here, some decent fat loss, but it's not all of it. So quote, unquote, right, and in fact, the slower you go, the more easy it's going to be to preserve that muscle and to keep your hunger totally manageable, making it seem like, oh, it's not so bad, I'm getting through this very consistently, no big deal, as opposed to oh my God, I have to binge those donuts right now. So that's one core area of fat loss.
Philip Pape: 12:42
The second core area is implementing any sort of breaks or refeeds or permission to yourself to go ahead and eat more calories and eat up to maintenance when you need to. Now it's better that those are planned in than just happen randomly, because when they happen randomly, that is the opposite of consistency. But when you plan them in, when you say, look, every day, every week, I have two days of the week where I know I'm just going to want to eat more, you might not even know what those days are. So you're going to plan your calories to suggest five kind of normal or low-ish days and two higher days, and that's what your plan is going to be predicated on, whether that's like one maintenance calorie day every week, one a month, a whole week every month, whatever. Those are all in my Precision Fat Loss Guide.
Philip Pape: 13:28
Again, if you go into there, we're not talking about cheat days, we're talking about psychological resets. Some people call them hedonic deviations, where you give yourself a planned day of deviating up to so you can eat more food. You might call it a strategic metabolic boost. Whatever you want to call it, you're not going to increase your metabolism artificially higher doing this, but you are going to slow down and stop any metabolic adaptation for a moment before it continues back. But it's more for the mental break and sustainability.
Philip Pape: 14:02
And then the third core tenet here of the fat loss phase and this is probably the most crucial, to be honest is we are training to retain muscle. Your resistance training intensity stays high and intensity means a combination of things, but it primarily means you are training hard, close to failure, using progressive overload, still using your compound lifts and your accessories and all the same stuff. You don't completely change your training program. Most people can actually continue with exactly what they were doing in the fat loss and what they'll find is the first few weeks, maybe even the first few months, they can still make progress, especially if this is the first time you're doing it. You might actually build muscle and strength even while in fat loss, because remember, you've only spent a couple months in the recomp phase. You're still in that newbie gains phase. If you're an intermediate lifter, however, you may not gain strength or muscle, but you should easily be able to hold on to the muscle, and so your lifts will either slightly go up or maybe they'll pause. But remember that you're also losing weight. So your relative strength is holding or potentially going up, if that makes sense, and then you're holding on to the muscle. You're eating plenty of protein, all that good stuff, all right. So your progress in the gym become your indicators for muscle retention, as well as your body measurements to an extent. But remember, you're losing fat at the same time, so take that with a grain of salt, all right.
Philip Pape: 15:25
So we had phase one eight weeks of body recomp, building your habits. Phase two 12 weeks. You got two months, then three months, 12 weeks of fat loss, with a lot of flexibility on how to do that. And again, the actual calories and macros are going to depend on your metabolism and your rate of loss. So go, download Macrofactor. I'll include the link in the show notes. I'll include a video showing you how to set it up for maintenance initially, and then you'll be golden on that. You'll get the right targets for your metabolism. If you use MyFitnessPower chronometer, you're not going to get those targets, you are going to have to guess at them and you're going to be off. You're going to be off and you're going to get frustrated. Okay, so that's phase two. Phase three is beach ready maintenance.
Philip Pape: 16:09
Now, this is just a very short blip. This is a couple weeks. You know, maybe I would say two weeks, but it could be one to three, but let's say two weeks. This is like a little victory lap. Okay, you've achieved your fat loss. You're celebrating. Now You're bringing the calories back up. We're going to replenish that glycogen. We're going to replenish your energy stores. We're going to showcase what you've accomplished so far. And by showcase I don't necessarily mean you have to go on the beach and show off your abs. I mean you're just expressing physically with your physique, even if it's to yourself in the mirror, it doesn't matter that you've worked hard to this point to lose some fat and reveal some of that muscle. And the philosophy is to enjoy the benefits of your hard work and celebrate that win, while priming your body for the most magical phase of your entire life coming up, which is going to be muscle building. But before we get there, let's talk about this short beach ready maintenance phase.
Philip Pape: 17:03
The idea is, I don't like going from fat loss straight to a gain, because that transition is so drastic that both psychologically and physiologically it can cause a lot of second guessing and like misinterpretation of the data. I'd rather you kind of bottom out, then go to maintenance and then go to muscle building and in that couple of week period what you're ending and then go to muscle building and in that couple week period, what you're ending up doing is refilling the glycogen in your muscles and it's going to make your physique look pop a little bit because you're kind of dehydrated and, I'll say, gaunt, almost from having dieted. Now we're going to refill that and you might find, hey, I'm actually pretty darn happy where I'm at and you could stay there for a while. You could stay there for weeks, months, years if you wanted to. I don't recommend it. I recommend going to the next phase and building a ton of muscle, which we're going to talk about, but you could so during this two week maintenance phase. It's a very important phase even though it's short. First, what we're going to do is we're effectively refilling everything without spilling over.
Philip Pape: 18:03
The biggest fear people have is oh, I'm going to gain all this weight back and I'm going to binge on all the foods I've been avoiding. Well, first of all, you haven't been avoiding foods, right, you've simply been scaling things down and being strategic about eating your protein and high satiety foods, like fiber containing foods, like fruits and vegetables. Right, you've been doing that while still having some carbs in your diet. Well, what happens now is the carbs are going to get ramped way up, the protein is going to stay roughly the same, the fats are going to scale up a little bit and the carbs are going to scale up a lot. Okay, and again, we're not getting into the actual numbers of all the macros. I've got guides for that and you can reach out for that. We could talk about your specific plan or just download Macrofactor and it'll give it to you, but the carbs are going to ramp way up and I do not like reverse dieting.
Philip Pape: 18:50
So if you hear people talk about reverse dieting reverse dieting is a way to guess your way up to your maintenance I don't want to guess and I don't have to guess because we've been tracking your metabolism Again. If you're using Macrofactor or if you're doing it by hand on a spreadsheet, you know how many calories you're burning over the last week. So if you're in a 500 calorie deficit, you just have to increase. Add 500 calories back in and now you're at your true dynamic maintenance right now. Now those maintenance calories are going to be lower than they were when you started the fat loss phase.
Philip Pape: 19:24
But why wait to get there? Let's just recover. You're not going to gain weight because it's your maintenance right. And so we're going to increase our targets right to our maintenance, knowing that it's going to climb back to a more recovered, stable level and then probably continue climbing when we go into muscle building. So why wait? Let's recover. And so your protein's still going to be around your normal target of 0.7 to one gram per pound. You're going to see improved muscle definition as your glycogen stores fill, as your cortisol levels drop, your hormones get back to normal.
Philip Pape: 19:53
Right and again, if, depending on your experience in the past and how many times you've cut in bulk in the past, this is like your photo shoot phase, even if you're not taking pictures, right. So, but if you haven't ever built muscle, you're probably not there yet, and I get it. You're like well, I'm not quite happy with my physique, it's okay, we're just getting started. And then the third thing during this phase is learning that there is a sustainable level where you can fine tune your social eating skills, your mindfulness, your level of indulgence, because you have more calories to work with. You're no longer dieting, and so now you understand what it's like to diet. Now you're going to get back to something that feels really solid in terms of energy and food, and you'll want to come to grips with that and see what it feels like, because that's where you would live for the rest of your life if you didn't go out, gone to the next phase and build muscle. Right, and for many people that'll be amazing. Right, you've gotten leaner, you've learned how to eat for fullness, for protein, fiber, and now you can kind of sustain that and it feels great.
Philip Pape: 20:57
But now let's go to phase four, and this is my favorite phase of all, and for some of you, I'm going to skip you right to this. First, instead of fat loss because you only have five or 10 pounds to lose, I don't care about that, and by I I mean you shouldn't care about it either, because gaining five, 10, 15 pounds of muscle is going to serve you much more than just losing five or 10 pounds of fat. If you have to lose 20, 30 or more, that's a different story, okay, and I have an episode I did a long time ago called what should you do first? Uh, but anyway, you could follow this plan, whoever you are listening, and it's going to work for you. So phase four is the anabolic muscle building phase. Now we are into July, because we had two months for recomp, we had three months for fat loss and then we had a couple of weeks for maintenance, and so now we're pushing at just about the middle of the year. So now I usually recommend building muscle for six months minimum. So that's why this is going to take a full six months. Now you can cut back on that a little bit to squeeze in a fat loss phase to like fit the exact 12 months, okay, but it doesn't really matter, because a few weeks here or there is not gonna make a difference. I would just get as much as you can out of the muscle building phase, and so think 24, 26 weeks, right around there. Six months, and this is where the magic happens.
Philip Pape: 22:16
The philosophy is simple but profound, and I talked about this in detail on my last Monday episode, so if you didn't catch that. Go check that out. I talk all about gaining to build muscle and how that makes you leaner and how that prevents you from getting fatter. It's so profound. Building muscle takes time, it takes patience, it takes trading the instant gratification you might've gotten in a fat loss phase for the long-term reward of having that extra lean tissue on your body at a higher scale weight, at a leaner, lower body fat percentage. I mean it's so incredible. Having gone through it myself and gone through several muscle building phases and not having done that till I was in my late 30s and early 40s I'm 44 now. It has only taken me three years or so to build a decent amount of muscle to the point where I'm just walking around quite a bit heavier than I used to and way leaner than I was, and I still have a long way to go, which is very empowering and exciting for me because it gives me a drive to want to keep doing this and chances are you're in that boat as well, if not even in a better position, where it's early on right.
Philip Pape: 23:24
So this is profound and it's amazing and we're going to focus on three elements here during this muscle building phase. The first is slow and steady gains, going at the right rate so that we build a ton of muscle and just a little bit of fat. And I say it that way because you're not going to avoid fat gain altogether, but you can definitely avoid gaining too much fat. How much do I mean? I mean, if you're a beginner, you could probably gain, say, two-thirds to three-quarters of the weight as muscle. How does it sound to gain 10 pounds? And the response is kind of a little bit of freaking out. I get it. I get it, cause that's, as a percentage of your body weight, seems like a lot. But what have I said? Eight of those pounds is muscle. Kind of changes the equation, doesn't it? Because now, yeah, you gain 10 pounds, but seven or eight pounds is muscle, so very little of that is fat. Your body fat percentage just went down, even potentially, before you even cut some of that fat back off. I mean, it's amazing.
Philip Pape: 24:26
So slow and stay is what we want and again, we are going to aim for a rate around for most of you 0.3 to almost 0.5% of your body weight a week Men, women, any age, okay, Because we all have the same propensity to gain muscle. Even if you're 70, you can gain muscle at a decent clip if you've never done this before, believe it or not. So, 0.3 to 0.5% of your body weight a week. Again, if you use macro factor, you just plug in the number and it gives you the targets. Now is faster, better, yes, up to a point Beyond that 0.4 or 0.5%. Now you're flirting with. All you're adding is fat territory, but don't let that scare you from pushing it a little bit, especially if it's your first time, because the fat comes off easy. The muscle is the one that's harder to put on, so why not give yourself the best shot? So that's the first thing. Is that slow and steady rate.
Philip Pape: 25:20
Secondly, we are going to prioritize the weak points during muscle building. What I mean by that is you really want a solid, effective program of progression, so you're taking the most advantage of that anabolic environment. Anabolic meaning growth. You've got lots of calories coming in, protein, carbs, hopefully. You're sleeping well and you're keeping stress manageable, and now you're training hard, three, four or five days a week.
Philip Pape: 25:47
What are you training for? How are you training? How are you progressing? Are you building strength? Are you building muscle? Are you peaking?
Philip Pape: 25:53
There's lots of ways to slice this, and so I like an app called boost camp. It's a workout app. It's a free app if you use it. Use my code wits and weights all one word, please, just to support me. But if you go in that app, you can get free programs that are evidence-based by expert trainers and, honestly, any one of those. If you pick, like you know, four days a week I'm focused on strength and muscle building it's going to spit out a bunch of great programs. So you've got to have the tracking of progression of your strength and muscle. So strength is shown through the numbers going up and muscles shown through your physique being developed. Now you're going to be getting some fat too, so your waist might go up, but we also want to see our biceps going up and our thighs going up right and our chest going up and any other body part that you really care about that you're training. So it's prioritizing and I said prioritize weak points, and what I mean by that is the points that have the most opportunity for growth. You really want to go all in for that and the things that you really want to grow. All right.
Philip Pape: 26:56
The third thing here is recovery becomes paramount, even though this is the irony even though you have a ton of calories coming in and that helps with recovery. You're also training hard. You are training hard. So getting that sleep, managing the stress, getting deloads if that's part of your plan or at least doing resets and such in your training program, keeping yourself fresh, watching for injury, like really making the most of it, so you can continue it and get the six months of pure straight training for muscle. Now things will come up in your life. We're not talking about that. If that happens, there's ways to deal with it. You could take little breaks here and there, not a big deal, but really you want to just keep growing, growing, growing and have a blocked approach to get there. Okay.
Philip Pape: 27:40
And then, once you've done that so now you've gone from like January to December you know you've gained 10, 15, 20 pounds on the scale, a significant portion of which is muscle. You're bigger. You probably have a little bit of extra fat, maybe too much fat, maybe you're like ah, you know I'm getting a little uncomfortable here, that's cool Now. And you've gone through the holidays. You've gone through Thanksgiving, christmas, all that. You've had fun, you've had plenty of calories. Your metabolism has probably ramped way up over that time. Now it's time to do a little mini cut to just shred some of that fat off, okay, and just kind of gently come in at a sustainable spot that is heavier, where you were before. We did the muscle, but you've got more muscle and less fat. So you are leaner, your metabolism is higher, you're able to eat more food and now that's your new set point. It's a beautiful place to be in.
Philip Pape: 28:30
What does this look like? I'm going to suggest a six-week mini cut. It's a really nice, super sustainable in and out. Get it over with finishing touch on a year of hard work. So six weeks isn't that long, it really isn't. And if you went through a 12-week fat loss phase, this is going to be comparable, but it's going to be a little different. It's going to be a little more aggressive, and the reason it's more aggressive is that it's short and we're going to reveal your physique. We're going to get out. You have the metabolic capacity and the muscle mass now to do kind of a quick fat loss phase and just get out, and that's what we're going to do.
Philip Pape: 29:05
So first we're going to talk about the rate of loss. We want something more aggressive here, so I'm going to actually push for that 1% of body weight a week and I would use that as an anchor point. If that's still too aggressive for you, because the calories that it brings you to go lower, and if you're like a bigger dude who you know has tons of muscle and a super high metabolism, you might be able to go 1.2, 1.3%, at least for three or four of the six weeks and have no ill precautions no, no ill repercussions and not lose any muscle mass. Okay, so it's really variable. Going to depend, um, and I do mention that in the fat loss guide as well and we're gonna keep protein high. We're gonna do all the same things. Okay, protein in this case might be even higher. So, like, if you've been at a decent amount of protein, maybe this is the one point in your whole plan for the 12 months where you just jack it up just a little bit. All right, depends on the amount of calories you have to play with, the amount of calories you have to play with, all right. So that's the rate of loss up to that 1% of weight a week.
Philip Pape: 30:08
Second is this is where I the only time I actually suggest you might want to add some cardio in, deliberately right, other than other reasons for health, heart health and whatnot, because you enjoy it actually just to ramp up that metabolism a tiny bit, knowing you're doing it in a short duration so you're not going to adapt to it too much. And so I would add like one or two at least zone two sessions. It doesn't have to be hit, it could just be, you know, kind of a get your heart rate going too fast to have a conversation. Level of exertion on a bike or pushing a prowler around or walking really fast or going on an up incline or wearing a rucksack, any, any of those things apply Other than running, I mean, unless you love to run different situation and that's going to support your deficit. You're not going to overload your recovery in that short period.
Philip Pape: 30:54
Doing it like that, I would mix up the forms of cardio that will make you even less efficient, which means burning more calories, and just give that a shot. Just add that in as a little extra jolt for your calorie burn. And then the final thing is you know we're not chasing perfection, we're not chasing an end point. We're not chasing this is going to be the be all end all physique. All we're doing is taking some of the fat gain that you added in the building phase and reduce it, without going to an extreme but still flirting with what it's like to push and to go a bit aggressively. If this is not for you, what you can do instead during this phase is just do another normal fat loss phase at a slower rate and then make the duration be as long as you need it to be. What's going to happen here is you're going to have gone through every aspect of periodization for nutrition, for gaining, for losing and you'll know what your body feels like and what it takes to do each of those, and from that you can assess hey, this was harder here, but this was easier here.
Philip Pape: 31:58
I really like this. I don't like this. Use those subjective feelings, to be honest, to tell yourself is this the right way to do it for me? Next time I do a fat loss phase, I'm going to go slower, or I'm going to put more breaks in, or I'm going to go more aggressively. Some people love to go super aggressive for like four weeks and they're done right. Or muscle building Heck, I really love that. All the food I get to train hard, I'm going to muscle gain for the next two years. It gives you all this flexibility and awareness and knowledge. It's so amazing and that's why I love having a plan right, because the physical transformation is just a side bonus of all of this. Believe it or not, it is a side bonus.
Jenny: 32:39
Hi, my name is Jenny and I just wanted to say a big thank you to Philip Pape of Wits and Weights for offering his free 50-minute nutritional assessment. During that time he gave me really good tools on how I can further my health and fitness goals. He asked really great questions and stayed true to his offer of no sales pitch. I have since applied these things and gotten really close to my health goals and my weight goals, and now I'm able to flip over and work on my strength and my muscle conditioning using a lot of the things he offers in his podcasts, and I just am very grateful for his positive inspiration and encouragement for all of our health. Thank you, philip.
Philip Pape: 33:25
The first time it happened for me, where I could see some muscle definition, feel a bit lean, feel a little bit more confident in a t-shirt, it was fantastic. But the short-term feeling of that sort of normalizes right, it wears off, then you get used to it. Then you're like okay, that is me now, that's my new identity, now what's next? I think the long lasting benefit here is how each of these phases teaches you something. Each of them builds upon each other. They're interconnected in a way that teaches you how your body ebbs and flows, how you can adjust the way you live to what you want with the year and the season and not ever make it feel like too much of a slog or a sacrifice, even though there are trade-offs. And if you kind of think about each phase right, the initial body comp phase, it's not just about hitting protein or setting up this habit, it's really skills. It's an overall system. If you can do that, you can then make a little change to then go into fat loss. If you can't do that, in other words, if the body recomp phase that we started with where you're at maintenance, is not sustainable, that's a great feedback to tell you that fat loss wouldn't be sustainable. So you're not going to go to fat loss until you've got that figured out. So if it takes you 10, 12, or more weeks to do it, so be it. If you need help, if you need help, if you need a coach, that's the kind of thing that I provide is support and accelerating that process to get you to that, you know. So you don't have to be frustrated. So that's the first phase. And then you think of after the fat loss phase, when you go into maintenance I think we talked about it again it's not just like, okay, I'm going to hold steady. It's now preparing for that mental shift, preparing your body, preparing your mind for the next phase, for the productive muscle building phase, the most productive of your life. To be honest, if you've never done it before, it will change your life. It will change your life.
Philip Pape: 35:16
So every one of these phases has a purpose beyond the obvious. I want you to lean into that and really get deep with it, right, really sit with it and think about it and plan it out, write it down on paper and ask yourself what you're trying to gain here, what you're trying to accomplish, because it's not about the result. The process itself is everything. The result will come easily when the process is nailed down right. And it's this compound effect and it makes the whole journey just so more powerful, so much more than some of the parts, and that's why I wanted to share this with you today.
Philip Pape: 35:48
So, as we wrap up, let's just focus on the overarching principles that make this kind of blueprint work for you. First, sustainability is a non-negotiable. Each phase is designed to be challenging because it has to change you physically and mentally, push you, but never overwhelming. The phrase I've used before is expanding your comfort zone, but never far exceeding it. The second principle is to celebrate that process. Again, do celebrate the results as they come as well, but those are going to be fleeting and few and far in between the process, whether it's, you know, you've nailed a habit that before was a struggle. You know, I go to sleep every night by 9.30, every night. Now I am so proud of that, right, oh, I get 8,000 steps every day. Sometimes it's 10 or 12, but every day I get my 8,000. And maybe it's not every day, maybe it's, you know, three days out of the week. I get my 10,000, whatever that goal is for you. And, yes, even physical changes, seeing the definition slowly morph over time, correlated with objective measures like your body circumference measurements.
Philip Pape: 36:56
Hitting PRs is always fun because you're going to be training and growing a lot, especially during your muscle building phase. Every single session is a win. Even if you don't PR every lift, you know you might have some setbacks. You're going to have a lot of them in every single session because you were constantly growing and getting stronger and building muscle, and so all of the success is cumulative and the wins come fast and furious if you look for them, if you accept them in.
Philip Pape: 37:20
And then the last principle here is I want you to balance the science. You know the here's what you need to do, here's what works according to the evidence which I say all the time and anything you hear on this podcast or any other podcast. I want you to balance that with your intuition and your biofeedback, so important. With your intuition even if that's your feelings, I don't care. Like you know, know yourself with your intuition and with your biofeedback. So biofeedback is a little more objective tracked measures of your stress, your hunger, your digestion, your sleep, your libido and a few others that you might want to track. I want you to balance the two and then let that data because that is your whole data set, that is your evidence Let that inform your decisions right, and always be listening to your body so that you are mentally engaged, and then the consistency comes from that engagement, because then you'll be able to, you know, pivot and jink Is that the word jink From Battlestar Galactica? I forget the word Ships do in space. All right.
Philip Pape: 38:22
So now, as you enjoy the holidays or the end of your celebrations, I want you to come up with your plan for the next 12 months based on this episode. That is your action. If you don't do that, you've missed a massive opportunity. And if you do that, you're going to have questions. And when you have questions, I want you to send me a message on Instagram at witsandweights or you don't use that platform, or prefer Facebook, join our Facebook group it's totally free and ask it there and ask other people who are on the same journey.
Philip Pape: 38:53
Now, in a few weeks from now, exactly six episodes from now, episode 266 on January 6th. I'll be breaking down the six. Get a theme here. Six. I'll be breaking down the six. Get a theme here. Six I'll be breaking down the six core fat loss strategies from the Precision Fat Loss Guide that I mentioned several times earlier. So go download it and there you can pick the exact strategy for your fat loss phase, which again starts around month three of the 12-month plan.
Philip Pape: 39:20
I'm gonna be breaking that down in episode 266 on January 6th, but I want you to click the link in the show notes and download the guide now, get a head start on creating your plan.
Philip Pape: 39:30
I mean, in my opinion, what I put together there is unlike anything out there because it gives you different comparison tables based on your experience, your body comp goals, your lifestyle and your tendencies. On your experience, your body comp goals, your lifestyle and your tendencies. Like, each one has a table that says, of the six strategies, which ones are check marks, which ones are X's for you for that, and at the end of it you'll know oh, this one strategy is what's left, that's best for me, or maybe these two strategies? I can pick one, all right. And then, of course, you have to implement it, and that's part of what we talked about today with phase Two.
Philip Pape: 40:06
So to get your free copy of the precision fat loss guide, click the link at the top of the show notes, or go to wits and weightscom and click free stuff and you'll find it in there All right. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember your dream physique isn't built in a day, but it is built with a plan. This is phil Pape and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
