Finished my 12 week cut, what’s next?
My before and after: https://imgur.com/a/MbnUuzN
For some context, in early April I finished my bulk weighing 82KG, my bulk lasted for around a year but at the end especially I gained a lot of fat, mostly because I started increasing my calories way too fast week by week. In April I decided to get into a cut because while I was getting stronger and progressive overloading week by week, I didn’t liked the way I looked and I was way too fat. When I started it I decreased my calories immediately to the cut ones, without going into a maintenance first, my bulking calorie intake was around 3300 and I dropped them to 2200. This sudden drop caused me to feel like shit for my entire first week, my performance in the gym dropped immediately, I felt tired and I felt hungry. Second week I started to adapt and felt better, still I kept losing strength mainly on compounds exercices like bench or squats, but considering how big the calorie drop was it makes sense. With the cut progressing I had to drop the calories and increasing the steps at some point, ending it with 1800 calories daily and 14k steps.
My performance in the gym kept stalling or just dropping which became worse these last few weeks, apart from that I also started to experience the very bad effects of a cut (especially this last week) which includes, in my case, bad sleep (waking up way to many times to pee and waking up earlier than I want to) feeling tired and unmotivated to workout, getting strong cravings and pushing less and less in the gym. I wanted to push this cut at least for another week since the week that comes after I go on a 3 week vacation where I won’t be able to workout or do my usual diet, but I honestly just can’t be bothered considering, considering my metabolic stress and cortisol even if I push for another week I probably won’t lose that much if any fat. My plan is, for this remaining week, go into a 2500 calorie maintenance (mainly to try and see if my performance at the gym gets better before I go in vacation) and then on the 3 week vacation try and eat my maintenance calories or a slight surplus (this taking into consideration I probably will be doing 20k+ steps daily, so at least i’ll be moving a lot) and when I get back eat maintenance for 2 or 3 weeks just so I can get back some strength, and after that go into a deficit again
Now with a little bit of insight I do believe my cut was pretty agressive and I also dropped in performance on a lot of exercices but I plan to recover from it in my maintenance. My final weight is 69,8KG, I lost around 1KG per week. Im posting this mainly to see if im headed in the right direction with my plan for the future and also to hear your opinions and tips, I know I still have to lose some fat to get to 13% BF (which is my goal) but I plan to achieve that in my second cut, and after that do a clean bulk so I don’t gain that fat ever again like I did.