Maintenance Phase: What Is It?

Have you already accomplished all of your fitness goals? 

Well, it may be time to transition into a complete maintenance phase.

Maybe you've built as much muscle as you wanted to build. Perhaps you've lost as much fat as you wanted to lose. Your body is as lean, muscular, strong and awesome as you’ve always hoped it would be. Your long-term goals have all been reached. Well done! So now what?
We hate to be the bearer of bad news but this doesn't suddenly mean you can stop working out or stop eating well.

If you stop working out, you will gradually lose all of the muscle (and strength) you’ve gained. And if you were working out for the specific purpose of burning calories to cause fat loss, and you stop doing that exercise without adjusting your diet to compensate, then you can expect to gain body fat as well.

And if you stop eating mindfully (which we’ll define as no longer eating the total amount of calories and macronutrients needed for your goal or at least the maintenance of that goal), then you can also expect to lose muscle and/or gain body fat.

Whatever you did to get the results you got, you’re going to have to keep doing some version of that to maintain them.

In terms of your diet, it needs to be set to maintenance. This mean no more surplus because you have no interest in building additional muscle (or gaining additional weight), and no more deficit because you have no interest in getting any leaner (or losing additional weight). To ensure neither of these things happen, all it takes is setting your calorie intake to maintenance (i.e. the amount of calories needed to maintain your current weight) and eating that amount from this point on.

You can track and maintain your macros in The Bod App.

In terms of weight training adjustments, the biggest change is simply that instead of continuing to push yourself for progression and getting stronger on every exercise as often as possible, your new goal is to just maintain your current levels of strength on every exercise. 

Specifically, volume and frequency can be reduced if needed or preferred. This is because the amount of volume/frequency required for maintenance is less than the amount of volume/frequency that is ideal for progression.

And what about cardio? 

Let’s say you were doing a certain amount of cardio to reach your weight loss goals and now those goals have been met. How much cardio do you need to do to maintain them? Enough to put you at your maintenance level. 

So if maintenance for you is 2500 calories per day, and you want to eat 3000 calories per day, you’d need to do 500 calories worth of cardio to get yourself to the 2500 you need to be at. Or, you could just as easily eat 2500 calories per day and do no cardio whatsoever.

In terms of other fitness related goals, that’s completely up to you. Why not challenge yourself physically in new ways, such as joining our The Reset 6-week challenge in The Bod app?

Or, you can just sit back, relax and enjoy a life of maintaining the goals you worked your butt off to successfully reach.