Right I'm done with this deficit.
Started the second week in Feb @ 74kg. Weighed in yesterday at 65.8kg. I haven't completely gotten rid of everything I wanted to but I'll end at 50kg and I'm starting to lose some strength.
So now I want to start building muscle up again. To lose the fat I was on about 1800kcals a day. I had a few cheat weekends in that time but on the most part was pretty strict. What would you guys advise upping my kcals to? I was thinking 2500 but when I started lifting again I was on around 2600 and put on quite a bit of fat.
Also looking at my routine...I can only get to the gym 2 days a week at the moment. From the end of October I am aiming to get an extra day in a week but this is what I'm doing for now:
Monday:
Squats
BB bench
Standing OHP
Machine flies
Machine Lateral raises
Rope tricep pull downs
Thursday
Deadlifts
Bent of BB rows from the ground
Pull ups
Cable close grip rows
Straight arm pull downs
Maybe a bicep exercise if there's time.
(Everything is 3x8 except for deadlift which is 3x5)
I'm trying to cover all the main compound exercises then isolate with machines (although I could do more free weight isolation stuff). Is there anything else you guys would recommend for a 2 day split?
Thanks in advance!
It's hard to give a number without knowing your activity levels over your waking hours. Whatever your maintenance requirements were before, they'll be a bit less now because there's less of you. I'd just start with something conservative for a week or two (as you'll have an initial weight spike the reverse of how you get the initial drop when you diet) and then work from there, taking into account you only ever need to be in a small surplus to build new tissue, so weight gain should trickle up over time in conjunction with your working weights in the gym going up over time too.
Routine-wise if you can only do x2 a week I'd alter that slightly,
A = squat, bench, some sort of RDL/good morning/hamstring curl, pull-ups or some other vertical pull
B = deadlift, OHP, something quaddy that's easy on the back, rows
Then do some antagonistic supersets after each for bis/tris or pecs/side delts or whatever. What you could do as well, is on Friday or Saturday perform some bodyweight stuff to get some extra work in, using something like Myo-Reps (a rest-pause technique) to make it short but effective until such time as you can do x3 a week.