Okay, I'm going to show you what 12 percent body fat looks like on a man because a lot of men actually get this assumption awfully wrong.
As you can see, this does not mean that you are shredded. You're not going to be stepping onto a bodybuilding stage any time soon at this level of conditioning. Instead, you're simply lean. You're defined. You're looking pretty athletic. Here you can see I am pretty darned lean but not shredded. You've lost a good chunk of your body fat. And what this essentially means is that the muscle definition you do have becomes a lot more apparent.
Every man out there knows we need to be in a calorie deficit in order to drive weight loss. However, how we actually do this is imperative. We need a strategy that doesn't actually tank performance. We need one that's big enough to drive fat loss but that's not so much of a deficit where you actually start losing muscle tissue. We are training to preserve muscle tissue as we descend down the scale. The reason why this is so important is because if you lose weight during a dieting phase your body composition will not improve. Body composition is the balance between muscle tissue and fat tissue. So if we lose muscle tissue, our body composition will not improve.
Training in the gym is the most important factor we have to nail as we navigate this phase because training is going to be the stimulus that allows our muscle tissue to stick around. Not an easy task! This is not what I'm promising at all! But if you navigate the process accurately in your execution, you can absolutely get there!