I just finished a relatively long cut from 194 to 168 lbs and thought I might as well post about it, especially since I had 2 DEXA scans done so have some hard data to compare which might be interesting to people.
Basically, I over-bulked over the winter even though I really should know better at this point, and ended up at 194 lbs at the beginning of April. This is the heaviest I had been in years and I was definitely getting fat-ish.
I started cutting gradually at first just by reducing calories and got a DEXA scan in May, really just out of curiosity. The results – that I was carrying 43 lbs of bodyfat, 22.7% - surprised me, but also served to motivate me to get a lot leaner, as quickly as possible. So that’s what I did.
Summary of DEXA results: in 12 weeks I went from 189 lbs 22.7% bodyfat to 168 lbs at 10.2%. The most surprising factor to me was that I actually gained 4.4 lbs of LBM in this time. I was not expecting that at all, first because I was in a big caloric deficit, and also because I had been training hard trying to maximize muscle growth in the previous 9 months… so figured I had kind of “maxed out” potential. Apparently I was wrong, though I should point out that of the 4.4. lbs, 3.7 lbs was in the legs. Which I guess is plausible, since I hadn’t been training legs that hard in the previous few months and started doing high reps squats (10+ reps) for the first time in a long time during the cut.
Before and after pics below.