Maingaining Is a Waste of Time (New Study)

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:18 Does maingaining work?

01:16 Maingaining vs Cutting

03:16 MH Physique App

03:41 Recommendations

04:16 Misconceptions

05:15 Outro

Transcript

What is the best way to recomp, and is it even possible to begin with for trained lifters to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time? We finally have a study comparing a maingaining approach, basically a 0% deficit, being in energy maintenance, versus a 10% target deficit – cutting.

The first major finding is that after 10 weeks, the maingaining approach actually worked as advertised. They lost fat and gain muscle, or at least they gained a kilo of lean mass and they lost 1.4 kilos of fat mass. So this study confirms that positive body recomposition in trained lifters, using a maingaining approach, with a targeted 0% energy deficit, is actually viable. It can work.

I remember that about 11 years ago I wrote an article that positive body recomposition is in fact possible even in trained lifters, and at the time it was deemed absolute madness. It’s one of my more popular and controversial articles, but there is actually a ton of research showing that it is possible. Now it does get a lot more likely in less trained individuals and overweight individuals, and in this study, also, the body fat percentage of many of the lifters ranged in the 20s… Now, there were some women in the group as well, so that pulls up the average a lot, but there are multiple other studies as well showing the positive body recomposition can happen in trained lifters, sometimes even in contest competitors and elite level athletes.

So far, these results may seem like vindication of the maingaining approach. However, the group targeting a 10% energy deficit actually made substantially better gains. They also gained a kilo of fat free mass, and there were no significant differences between the groups in the one rep max gains in the squat or the bench press or total load progressions. The only real difference between the groups was that the group with a 10% energy deficit lost fat about twice as fast. They lost 2.9 kilos of fat, and in contrast to 1.4 kilos in the group targeting 0% deficit.

Now, astute viewers might realize that the figures I just gave you are actually not compatible with a 0% and a 10% energy deficit. So based on the metabolizable energy density of fat mass and lean mass, I back-calculated the actual energy deficits, rather than the prescribed energy deficits, because there’s always a difference between what you tell people to do and what they actually end up doing, and based on this the actual energy deficits were 16% or 375 calories per day as a deficit versus a 6% or 147 calories in the 0% deficit group. So both groups were actually in an energy deficit.

Now, realistically, most people that are trying a maingaining approach do end up in either an energy surplus or an energy deficit, so I think this is realistically one of the outcomes you can expect. And one of the general lessons from this, based on this study, as well as all other studies on the optimal energy deficit and energy surplus for cutting and bulking, respectively, is that maingaining or being very close to a maintenance energy intake is something that’s viable up to a certain point. But if you are in true energy maintenance, especially for advanced lifters, my experience very strongly is that very little happens and it’s much more time efficient, which is exactly what this study found basically twice as time efficient, to be in an actual energy deficit if your primary goal is to lose fat and to be an energy surplus, potentially, to gain lean mass.

Actually, I have a study on this coming up that’s currently under peer review, so I’ll discuss that on my channel later. But especially for cutting, it’s much more time efficient to actually be in a target energy deficit. The method that I teach my students in my PT course, and also the method that my app uses, is to tailor the target’s energy deficit to your body fat percentage and level of advancement. Basically, the less risk of muscle loss that you have, the more aggressive you can be with your deficit. So overweight lifters, obese lifters, they can be very aggressive and very lean, very muscular lifters such as people in contest prep need to be very conservative. Setting the optimal energy deficit or energy surplus this way is actually one of the most important variables in any program. It has a substantial effect on your rate of progression.

By the way, I’ve seen two very prevalent misconceptions about this study on social media. The first is that this study invalidates the calories in calories out model. It absolutely does not. One study had a lower energy intake, resulting in a greater energy deficit and they lost more fat. This is entirely consistent with energy balance.

The second misconception is that this study was evidence in favor of high protein intakes. Both the groups I discussed had a high protein intake, and there was in fact, a control group with a lower protein intake. But this control group also systematically differed from the intervention groups that I discussed in this video, in that they didn’t have supervision with their training or their nutrition, and they also didn’t have any dietary advice regarding meal frequency, even fatty acid balance. So this was simply a group with a completely different structure and just supervision alone in the gym with nutrition has been shown to make people track their macros more accurately, give more effort in the gym, etc. So this study doesn’t tell us anything about protein intake. This was decidedly a study about energy balance.

If you’re interested to see what the optimal energy deficit is for you based on your specifics, you can click on the link in the description to get a free trial of my app. You can fill in all your data and it will tell you exactly based on all the evidence, what your target, energy surplus or deficit should be. If you’re interested in learning all the science, you can also do my PT course to learn the full methodology in detail. And if you want to keep watching more of my free content, check out one of the videos popping up on the screen right here.