Hey Ladies and Gents.
one thing i have noticed recently on this forum when it comes to dieting, is everyone seems to be battling with dropping massive body fat, even though their calories are super low.
One thing I have noticed in the last couple years of coaching is alot of people think that super low calories or massive deficit in their calorie reduction is going to make them loose body fat faster, and yes you may loose weight faster, but body fat no.
what happens when you go super low in calories is your body goes into a deficit so low that it battles to maintain normal bodily functions and starts thinking it is going through a famine, now when this happens the body wants to prepare for the famine by holding on to stored energy sources which comes from body fat. so if there is a lack of calories the body is inclined to burn through muscle to reduce the amount of calories needed daily and to store body fat for a long period of time during this famine.
Now the point of bodybuilding is building muscle, not sacrificing it. And like i said, this happens when your calories are too low that the body will battle to metabolize body fat for energy. i mean lets looks at the majority of people trying to loose weight, they train their asses off, cardio their asses off, diet their asses off and still have a load of body fat that isnt dropping but alot of the time they start to shrink and loose weight but not body fat.
you need to be able to maintain a healthy number of calories in your daily diet to support and maintain your muscle mass, and normal bodily functions, and then try and added in physical activity to BURN THROUGH calories.
so when drawing up your diet rather start your calories HIGH and then pull them down, rather than starting low and then stalling quite quickly. you always want to start a cutting phase by having cardio low (3x a week) and training low (3-5x a week) and calories high.
so lets use an example here. so John is coming off an maintenance/growth phase, training 4x a week, doing no cardio and is 100kgs and eating 3400 calories. the first thing john should do is add in cardio 3x a week at 20-30minutes to increase calorie expenditure. START WITH 1 THING. after a week or two john has seen a drop of a kg but feels this is a little slow, so then he should cut back on calories, cutting back on 250 calories is a perfect start. After 2 weeks he is down another 1 kg for example, so now he feels this is a little slow again, so he can now do 1 of 3 things. 1 increase training volume, 2 increase cardio or 3 cut back calories. But what happens alot of the time is people do all 3. now that can result in additional 600-800 caloires defecit in their daily calorie intake. and then when it stalls out they do the same again, and again and again. eventually you dont know if it is the training, the cardio or the diet that is contributing to things working.
eventually John is training 7 days a week, doing 2 hours of cardio and dieting on 2000 calories just to make his weight go down. This is not ideal and unless you are making a weight category for a show, not recommended for any one.
John would have gotten results keeping his weight training at 4 days a week, lifting hard and heavy maintaining his strength, decreasing his calories to 2700 calories and doing 45mins of cardio 5x a week, but we all want those results very quickly so we go for the extreme deficit so fast that we stall out fat burning and start sacrificing muscle mass.
if John is lazy and doesnt want to do cardio then by all means increase weight training to 5 days a week and drop calories slowely over weeks so that his weight training doesnt suffer. if you are starting to get weaker and you are starting to battle to get the same amounts of sets in, you are probably going to low in your calories or over cooking the cardio.
obviously adding in anabolics will help to maintain muscle mass, but you can still loose muscle mass on anabolics even on low calories. remember the most anabolic compound in the world is food, and the best fat burner in the world is food. it is just the quantities that are needed to do that may differ. And i have seen guys still loose muscle mass even on tren masteron test prop and anavar because they are over doing the cardio and diet and training.
I see this a lot with female clients that come to me, they all are eating such low calories that i need to push their calories up for the first 2 weeks to get their metabolic rate working again, and the response is all the same, I AM GOING TO GET FAT EATING THIS MUCH FOOD. and hey presto after the first week their performance in the gym is up, they don't feel like they are dragging ass, their hunger suddenly spikes and then they are down 1.5kgs at the end of 2 weeks eating more food than they have ever done before.
remember eating is not the devil when you are eating enough for the metabolism to work, and utilize body fat for energy. Like i said i have seen guys that are 80kgs on this forum battling to loose body fat because their calorie deficit is way too low from over cardio, under dieting and over pushing the weights.
hope this helps a few of you trying to get into Beach Body Classic shape.
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