That's a weird disparity in your squat and deadlift. I maxed out on 5RM on deadlifts at 195 before I tweaked my back, but my squat was 182.5kg x5. I'm sure if you focused on squat you could get it much higher without too much trouble.

I've been doing 3x5 squats @ 140kg three days a week, followed by bench variations, curls, shoulder press, flys, skullcrushers on different days. I might add in bent over rows and deadlifts again once I'm confident my back is doing fine. I also do steady-state cardio on those days. Then, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I do pulldowns and rows, followed by a bunch of HIIT cardio. I've been trying to keep the diet in check but it's been rough with how often my friends want to eat out or go out for drinks. I'm still down about 5kg bodyweight since about 6 weeks ago, so progress is being made.

I think the one flaw with macro tracking is that it doesn't really take into account body type. If I were to follow my macros exactly, I should be eating around 300g of carbs a day. I have the body type that just explodes whenever I eat carbs, so I limit mine significantly and replace them with more protein and fat.

Back pain is killing me, i hurt myself during a training session 2 years ago. Glad to see a topic like this here anyway.

A fairly large deadlify/squat disparity seems to be pretty common from what I've seen. I can deadlift almost a plate over what I can squat and it's been that way for a long time. Going on madcow (and squating 3 times per week) definitely helped but the gap is still pretty big. Squats in general are a weak point for me, get much passed 350 or so and I just feel like I'm dying. We've been doing more work on front squats and good mornings lately so hopefully that helps.

Overall, 5/3/1 is going pretty well so far (made basically no progress on the last round of madcow and it was a big waste of time). I'm basically where I was before my last big injury with the exception of bench press (which is still coming along steadily). While strength is my primary goal, it seems where I'm making the most goal is muscle size. Slowly losing weight too, and I'm hoping that doesn't have too much of an effect on my strength progress.

Hmm, yeah, I'm sure it really comes down to training volume. I've never deadlifted anywhere near as often as I've squatted so that might have a lot to do with it.

If you're ever looking for positive reinforcement for training, weight loss, etc., I strongly recommend never, ever living in Korea. Conversation at dinner with coworkers, after I declined to eat some more empty fried carbs put in front of me: "Sorry, I'm trying to watch what I eat." "Oh, you're dieting?" "Yep. I've lost 8kg so far." "Oh...really? We didn't notice at all. Maybe you're fake dieting where you just say it but you're not actually doing anything." Cool. Thanks.

Also, I was wondering what supplements you guys take. I had just been taking protein powder for the longest time but recently started taking creatine. Thinking of maybe adding leucine next.

Only protein powder for now. I was also taking creatine while I was making gainz, but it did cause my bodyweight to shoot up a noticeable amount, so I've just recently tapered off it during this cut.

I'm sure you've figured it out in the two months since you posted that, but weight gain due to creatine ingestion is not really weight gain; It's just excess water weight due to creatine causing your muscles to fill with water. Once you go off it, that water weight goes away.