: Where do I begin? cut/bulk first? or body recomp? Alright there are so much information all over the net, and everyone has different opinions. I'm so confused at this point and I don't know how to begin. I'm 27 now, and

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

Firstly, congratulations - dropping from 97kg to 71kg is a huge accomplishment!

Now, at your height, weight and BF%, I would definitely not recommend trying to cut further fat. 15.5% is a very low body fat level, and would hardly be visible if you had more muscle. If you do an image search for people of similar body fat levels, you'll get a good idea of what you might look like with the same fat percentage, but more muscle. Whereas if you keep cutting fat without having any muscle underneath it, you'll only end up looking like you have an eating disorder.

To get stronger, I recommend finding a strength training or powerlifting coach who can teach you to squat, deadlift, and press. I go into some detail about that in a previous answer: How long would it take for a skinny man to get fit and 6 pack?

As for losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, yes, it is possible for beginners, and yes, you definitely are a beginner. Using Mark Rippetoe's guidelines, a novice or beginner is a trainee who is capable of making strength gains every workout, an intermediate is a trainee who is only capable of making strength gains from week to week, and an advanced trainee is one who is only capable of making strength gains on, at best, a month to month basis. "Making strength gains" pretty much just means being able to add more weight to the bar. You would typically be a novice/beginner for about the first 3 months of powerlifting training, although you'd very likely find that you could only continue making gains without a caloric surplus for the beginning of that, with the amount of time this lasts being longer if you have a higher starting body fat level. (A complete novice will initially get stronger with just about any kind of exercise, but as you become more and more experienced, it becomes harder and harder to continue gaining muscle.)

If you're concerned about the possibility of re-gaining fat, just be conservative with your caloric surplus. Only increase your food intake when you fail to keep getting stronger, and make small jumps, of maybe 100kcal/day. So you might start training 3 days per week with a 500kcal surplus over your previous daily energy expenditure, under the assumption that most of that surplus would be burned up by the increased level of exercise, and the rest will go to building muscle. (If you're already exercising a lot and would be replacing that with the strength training, then you might not need such a big initial increase.) Then whenever your strength training progress stalls, or you struggle to complete your sets, you would increase your daily intake by 100kcal, while also ensuring that you're getting enough protein.

After 3-6 months of that, you could have gained as much as 10kg of muscle. That would be an appropriate time to reassess how you feel about your body composition, and decide whether you want to shift focus from gaining muscle to losing fat.