The verdict
You are a well-built man carrying too much fat over the top of genuine muscle. At 196 cm and 97.1 kg with a measured 18 to 20 percent body fat, you hold roughly 78.7 kg of lean mass and 18.4 kg of fat. Seven years of training have done real work: your FFMI sits at 20.5 against a normalized population figure of 19.5, and your frame has already built 89 percent of its muscular ceiling. That is the central fact of your case. You are not underbuilt. You are under-revealed. The muscle exists. The problem is that a soft waist and a smooth fat layer are sitting between it and the mirror.
Your frame is classed narrow, with a frame ratio of 0.181 against a norm of 0.242, driven by a 15.2 cm wrist and 20.3 cm ankle. This matters for expectation-setting. Narrow-framed men do not achieve their look through sheer circumference; they achieve it through the shoulder-to-waist contrast and through leanness. Your bony clavicular width is your best structural asset, and it is being wasted. Your current shoulder-to-waist ratio is 1.35, which is where most untrained men sit. The target is the Adonis figure of 1.618. You do not close that gap primarily by building shoulders, though that comes later. You close it by shrinking the waist. The denominator is doing all the damage here.
The ceiling itself: your frame supports an FFMI of 23 and a lean mass ceiling of 88.4 kg. That leaves 9.7 kg of lean mass theoretically available, of which the realistically attainable share is 97 percent, roughly 9.4 kg. Read that carefully. You have built 89 percent of your ceiling already, and of the 11 percent that remains, nearly all of it is reachable. Those two numbers describe different things and neither cancels the other. There is still meaningful muscle to add over the coming years. But that is not this phase's job.
This phase is a cut, and the reasoning is not negotiable. At 18 to 20 percent you sit at the very edge of the recomposition gate, and the waist is the single feature suppressing your ratio and hiding everything you have earned. The get-lean-first rule applies. Your TDEE is 2996 kcal. Your target is 2496 kcal, a 500 kcal deficit, held clear of both the 1500 kcal floor and the 25 percent deficit cap. Protein floor is 205 g. The timeline is 14 weeks to bring you into the 9 to 11 percent band. At that point the muscle you already own becomes visible, the under-pec line sharpens, arm separation appears without a single additional set, and the waist reduction pulls your ratio up toward target on its own. The projection above shows what your existing structure looks like once the fat layer comes off. Nothing in it requires new muscle. It requires the removal of 18.4 kg of fat down to a fraction of that.
One note on perception. You estimated yourself at 17 percent against a measured 19. That two-point gap is small and honest, but it runs the wrong way: you believe you are leaner than you are. That is precisely the error that stalls a man who is already 89 percent built, because it makes the fat feel like a smaller problem than it is.
The one lever: the waist. Everything you want is downstream of getting lean. Hold the deficit, hit the protein, and let 14 weeks do their work.
Section one of eleven, in full. Scroll to finish it. Ten more sections follow in the report.