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When it comes to changing your body composition, whether through bulking or cutting, the importance of mastering your maintenance macros first is often overlooked. Many people rush into a calorie surplus or deficit without truly understanding how their body responds to its current intake. This can lead to frustration, stalled progress, or even unwanted fat gain or muscle loss.

Taking the time to accurately find and follow your maintenance macros is one of the smartest steps you can take before entering a bulking or cutting phase.

Maintenance macros refer to the amount of macronutrients — protein, carbohydrates, and fats — your body needs to maintain its current weight. These numbers are based on your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which factors in your resting metabolic rate and your physical activity level.

Tracking maintenance macros allows you to stabilize your weight, optimize performance, and better understand your body’s true calorie needs. Without this foundation, any adjustments you make when bulking or cutting can be inaccurate and counterproductive.

By eating at maintenance for two to four weeks, you gather valuable data on how your body responds to a stable intake. This helps eliminate guesswork when you later adjust calories up for bulking or down for cutting.

Many online calculators can estimate maintenance needs, but they are only rough starting points. Individual factors like metabolism, muscle mass, and daily activity vary widely. Tracking actual intake and body weight trends gives you the most accurate information for personalized adjustments.

If you miscalculate your maintenance level and start bulking too aggressively, you risk adding more fat than muscle. If you cut calories too harshly without understanding your real baseline, you could lose lean mass and slow your metabolism.

Knowing your maintenance intake ensures that any calorie surplus or deficit is based on real, measured needs rather than estimates, leading to more efficient and targeted results.

Periods of stable eating at maintenance support metabolic flexibility and hormonal function. For example, dieting too frequently without maintenance phases can negatively impact hormones like leptin, ghrelin, and thyroid hormones, all of which regulate hunger and energy balance.

Starting from a strong, healthy baseline allows your body to respond better to the demands of a surplus or deficit.

When you fuel your body properly at maintenance, you often experience better training sessions, faster recovery, and improved strength gains. This sets the stage for a more successful bulk or cut, where performance in the gym directly impacts your muscle retention or growth.

Use a calculator as a starting point to estimate your TDEE.

2. Track your intake carefully for at least two weeks without trying to lose or gain weight.

3. Monitor your weight daily and look at the trend. Fluctuations are normal, but if your weight is stable across two weeks, you have found your maintenance.

4. Adjust if necessary. If your weight is creeping up or down significantly, modify your intake slightly and repeat the process.

Once you have confirmed your maintenance macros, you can confidently increase calories by a small surplus (usually 5 to 15 percent) for bulking or decrease them by a modest deficit (typically 15 to 25 percent) for cutting.

Mastering your maintenance macros is not just a preliminary step — it is a critical foundation for any physique goal. It teaches you discipline, self-awareness, and precision, all of which pay dividends when you transition into more aggressive phases like bulking or cutting.

Taking the time to understand your maintenance intake now will save you months of frustration later. It is a simple but powerful strategy that separates those who guess from those who achieve lasting, high-quality results.