The objective with any maintenance phase is to maintain all of the hard earned results you just accomplished through either a muscle gain phase or a fat loss phase. You may ask, how should you set up your maintenance phase for success and why should you do one after your fat loss or muscle gain diets?
Setting up your maintenance diet:
The goal of the maintenance diet is to hold steady with your current weight. This means you can set the weight change goal to 0 pounds. The app does allow for you to set it to have you gain some or lose some weight but setting it to the weight you reached is likely fine for most people. Naturally you may find that in a maintenance phase your weight goes up and in some cases may go down. With time it should balance out and hold steady.
Maintenance length:
After you have set up your goal you can set up your duration. The duration is generally best to be around 2/3 of the length of your diet that you previously finished. This means if your muscle gain or fat loss diet were around 12 weeks in length, doing at least 8 weeks of maintenance is recommended. Beyond this, you can also theoretically do a maintenance indefinitely if you do not wish to do a fat loss or muscle gain diet anytime soon.
Why complete a maintenance:
You may be wondering how important or necessary a maintenance phase following a diet is, and it may seem less intuitive following a muscle gain diet. It is, however, important following both. Completing a maintenance following a fat loss diet supports improvements in metabolic, physical, and psychological parameters. It also helps to ensure that you gain some experience holding your new weight following all the changes you have had during your fat loss phase. This tends to be the hardest part in the long term success of a diet for individuals.
Following a muscle gain phase, a maintenance phase can help to consolidate the gains you have made during your muscle gain diet. Like following a fat loss phase, you can also have improvements in psychological parameters and better health improvements too. While it may be tempting to jump right into a fat loss phase following your gaining phase, there are likely advantages doing at least a brief maintenance first.