How to Cut for Bodybuilding | Cutting Diet Plan & Top Tips

There are two main periods in a bodybuilding cycle. One where you try to put on as much quality muscle as possible, which is often referred to as bulking or the off-season. The second period is when you try to get as lean as possible, in what’s known as the cutting cycle or competition season. This article will go through how to set your diet- and training plan for a bodybuilding cut.

Bodybuilders are among the leanest athletes in sport when it comes to competition time. Men often sit well below 10% body fat and women can drop down close to 12%, if not a little lower in some cases. To get this lean requires a commitment to embrace the bodybuilding lifestyle, but there are definitely ways to make the process a little easier if done correctly.

How to cut for bodybuilding

To lose weight and body fat, you need to create a calorie deficit. This means you need to be burning off more energy than you take in.

Now, before you can create an energy deficit you need to work out how much you’re eating on average throughout the week. A simple way to do this is to try to track your daily food intake, along with your daily weight, and see what the average is for the week.

This could be as simple as downloading a food tracker app, recording what you eat each day and taking the average for the week. At the same time, you should weigh yourself each morning and look at your average over the week. This will give you an estimate of your weight, as it’s normal to fluctuate on a daily basis.

Next, you need to create a calorie deficit. To lose approximately 1lb of fat, you need a 3500K/Cal deficit throughout the week (for example 500 K/Cal less each day, as 500X7=3500K/Cal.) To lose 2lbs (approximately 1kg) a week, simply double the daily calorie deficit.² It’s okay to lose fat a bit quicker in the initial stages when body fat is on the higher end. As you start to get leaner, the rate should slow down, as you don’t want to lose hard-earned muscle.

There are 3 main ways to lose body fat:

• Diet
• Training
• Cardio

The diet that you follow will make the biggest difference to your fat loss. Training and general activity levels will contribute slightly to energy expenditure. Lastly, cardio can be added in a systematic way to help increase energy expenditure.³

So, the two sides of the energy balance equation are energy intake (how much you eat and energy expenditure, how much activity and exercise you get in) and a combination of less food and more exercise. These work in tandem to get you bodybuilding-lean.

Cutting diet plan

Almost any diet can contribute towards your cutting phase if you have a large enough calorie deficit in place. Whilst there are no foods that will make you fat on their own (all foods contain calories), there are some foods that become more important during a cut and will make the process a lot easier. To get bodybuilding-lean requires extreme dedication and sacrifice.

As mentioned above, calculating and sticking to a calorie deficit is the first step when starting your cut. Decide on the rate of weight loss you want — usually, 0.5 to 1kg per week is a good place to begin. This means you will need to be on a daily deficit of 500-1000Kcal. ²

So, what could this look like if you weigh 90kg and were eating 3000K/Cal per day on average and wanted to lose 1kg of fat per week? You need to create a daily deficit of 1000Kcal per day.

This would leave you with 2000K/Cal worth of food per day.

The next step will be to look at your macro-nutrients. There are 3 macro-nutrients — protein, carbs and fats.

Protein: This is arguably the key macro-nutrient. Protein is responsible for maintaining lean muscle mass when cutting, aiding recovery from training. It also has the added benefit of keeping you full for longer. This is because it often takes a while to chew and digest solid proteins, which helps curb hunger hormones.

Protein also has a high thermic effect of food, meaning it takes a high amount of energy to be broken down, which is great during a cutting phase. A protein target of 2-2.4g per kilogram of bodyweight each day will be good for most people on a bodybuilding cut. ³

Let’s keep with our example of weighing 90kg. We have 2000 Kcal per day and our protein target is 2.0g/kg. This gives us 180g of protein to eat each day. 1g of protein has 4Kcal, so this protein comes up to 720Kcal.

Fats: These are a key component for your health and are an essential part of your diet. That means that you have to get in dietary fats on a daily basis. Without fats, many metabolic processes would shut down. Fats are responsible for producing powerful muscle hormones like testosterone and for absorbing many vitamins and nutrients. ⁴

Daily fat targets are usually set as a percentage of daily calories. The recommended amount of fat can be anywhere from 20% to 30% of your daily calories. Towards the end of the cut, fat intake might drop below this recommended amount for a small time because calories often get so low and protein needs to be kept high to maintain muscle. The shorter this period is, the better for your health.

Looking at our example above, we can take 20% of 2000Kcal and this gives us 400Kcal a day coming from fat. To calculate how many grams of fat we need, we divide the 400 by 9, as each gram of fat has 9 calories. So in this example, we have 44g of fat in our diet plan.

Carbohydrates: They are the primary fuel source for bodybuilding training. Many people falsely believe that you need to drop carbs to get lean. If carbs are dropped too low, training intensity will go down, which could lead to muscle being lost. Most of our fruit and veg is in the form of carbs, so they play an important role for energy, health, recovery and immune function.⁷

Back to our 90kg, 2000 Kcal example:

We currently have 180g of protein (720 Kcal) and 44g of fats (400 Kcal). To work out carbs needed, we take our starting calories minus the calories from protein and fat we already have planned in.

2000-720-400=880Kcal. To get the amount of carbs you will need divide 880 by 4 as each gram of carbs has 4 kcals. So this leaves us with 220g of carbs per day. Our calorie and macro split looks like 2000K/Cal; 180g protein; 44g fat and 220g carbs per day.