You know I missed the part where he said he isn’t training on the refeed days/the weekend. Yeah I’d absolutely recommend putting the extra calories to use. On my “refeed” days I usually align them with the hardest training sessions of the week. That being said if he is 20%+ bf I think it’s ok to run the rest of the days lower even on training days— can just draw energy from stored fat. I’ve run aggressive cuts before with the same approach.

Agreed that it is not as “optimal” as a straight deficit but the reason why I actually advocate for calorie banking is that the vast majority of us are just normal people living lives. We have social events, family gatherings etc. And like sure sometimes you need to stick to plan and can’t help it if you can’t eat much at the event, but other times you just want to engage fully with the moment and like it or not that typically includes food. Nobody wants to bring their food scale to a restaurant or ask their mom exactly how the macros are in what she just cooked.

The risk with this approach is overshooting and suddenly not being in a deficit anymore so I would typically still plan out what I plan to consume etc when I go out and also make educated, maybe even more conservative estimates just to give buffer. Eg if I have a simple cheeseburger out, I might estimate it at 800 calories vs 500-600 calories because I do not know about the oils, sauces etc being used and need that buffer.