Overview
Diet recommendations can be very straightforward or get very complex very quickly. This is a predominantly training oriented self coaching guide, but we do need enough detail with nutrition to get started.
Frankly, diets are a fully solved equation (more so than training,), and it’d be foolish to pretend there is anything new or revolutionary here. Instead, the focus is on providing a practical and conceptual lens of looking at things, that hopefully simplifies some of the complexity.
To that end, first I propose a conceptual split between diet quality (eating relatively healthy foods) and diet strategy (eating more or less amounts of food). It’s a useful distinction to treat diet quality as part of your continuous improvement on recovery, whereas a diet strategy is an intentional, time-based event.
Indeed there are four distinct diet strategies I propose. Think of these as gears on a car; you’re always going to have one ‘gear’ running at any point in time.
Four diet strategies
- Gaintain
- Clean bulk
- Cut #1
- Cut #2
Gaintain
This is your default ‘gear’. The gaintain strategy is the only one of the four that can be run indefinitely. As you can see, this is our flexible, autoregulated default plan. Your diet should respond to your training. In other words, this is a sustainable and indefinite micro-bulk or micro-cut approach.
Clean bulk
The clean bulk strategy is exactly how it sounds – a standard bulk as opposed to gaintaining or dirty bulking. This is our bread and butter approach for efficient and effective results.
Cut #1
This is our label for one of two cutting strategies.