Category Archives: General Fitness Knowledge

First off, it’s important to realize that most of your fat loss success is going to come from your diet and/or cardio. Weight training, at best, tends to contribute minimally to fat loss. Although, depending on what is done, it can help. The traditional approach to lifting during a cutting phase has been to drop the weight and move to higher reps. As well, there’s often been a shift to so-called ‘cutting’ movements away from ‘bulking’ movements.

So the tip I have for weight training while cutting is to always keep training heavy. For example, during your chest workouts, if you were using 100kg x 8 on the flat bench during your off-season, you should do your best to get that same 100kg x 8 while dieting. Strength always tends to fall a bit, but do your best to keep the numbers up. That brings us to the overtraining issue. The idea of training more often and for a longer duration while on a diet is completely ass-backward! If there’s a time when recovery is reduced, it’s when calories are cut. High-intensity training while dieting just burns bodybuilders out. The volume you’re using should be cut by roughly 2/3rds during a diet. For example, if you’re doing 6 heavy sets for the chest, you can cut that to 2 heavy sets. Also, if you’re training chest twice a week, you can cut that to once a week. Higher reps can still be beneficial during a diet, but only when they’re done in addition to the heavy work. Higher reps burn more calories, deplete muscle glycogen (enhancing fat oxidation), and have a hormonal response that tends to help mobilize fat. But by themselves, high reps may cause muscle loss. But if high reps are done in addition to lower reps (either afterwards or on different days), you can get the best of both worlds! For example, on a heavy chest day, you might do your 2 heavy sets and then follow it up with higher reps (think 3-4 sets of 15-20 reps) for the same muscle groups.

 

The primary issue here is this: the body appears to be sensing what researchers are calling energy availability, basic energy in (from food) versus energy out (via energy expenditure). If Energy Availability (EA) goes too low, the body will adapt rapidly. Some research has shown that many of the issues that often occur in women in terms of hormones or menstrual cycle dysfunction occur at a threshold of energy availability (and aren’t actually related to body fat percentage as used to be thought).

In that sense, pretty much all activity can potentially be a problem if that activity results in energy availability to the body that is too low. Of course, the activities you’re listing aren’t really big calorie-burners, a walk with a stroller probably only burns a few hundred calories per hour. But done for extended periods it will contribute.

In addition to hormonal issues, often the combination of big caloric deficits and excessive activity (either too much activity, too hard of activity, or the combination) can cause some real weirdness with water retention that masks fat loss.

This is more common with more formal ‘cardiovascular’ activities than just activities of daily living. This is just due to the potential for increases in hormones like cortisol; this is especially an issue as the intensity of activity increases. Clearly, this isn’t an issue for a leisurely walk but it becomes more of one for more formal cardio activities.

This isn’t really stopping fat loss mind you, but it does drive people crazy because it makes it appear that the diet is not working. I’d note that this isn’t an issue for everyone, certain physiologies (and especially psychologies) seem relatively more prone to problems with water retention than others. This is why some people can get away with massive amounts of activity and not have issues and others can’t.

In this current social media era, most of us have a fitness idol that we look up to, and almost all of these idols tend to look shredded all year round. In today’s article, we will briefly explain to you how they did it and is it achievable for you.

As a role of a fitness influencer, their goal is to influence you to be healthy and fit and at the same time, probably trying to sell you their workout programs or supplements. That being said, they will usually post pictures of their physique on all of their social media platforms, and almost all the time they will be looking shredded and well-conditioned. We, the general public will tend to believe that’s how they look like year-round, but that’s not the case due to the following factors down below.

Feeling constantly hungry. No surprises here, to be able to achieve the shredded condition, you need to constantly be in a caloric deficit.

Unusual hormones production

For men, being too shredded can lead to natural testosterone suppression, while for women, they
will tend to miss their periods.

Mood swings

You will tend to have mood swings every now and then, mostly due to constantly feeling tired.

However, in some cases, some individuals are genetically gifted to be able to shred and will not face these side effects as mentioned above. So in conclusion, the best way is to be the best version of yourself and find out if you are one of those genetically gifted individuals, if once you noticed that your body fat is low and you start getting these side effects, slowly bump up your calories back bit by bit until you are able to feel comfortable while being lean.

To answer this question, I have to first explain briefly to you about calories. Calories in the foods we eat provide energy in the form of heat so that our bodies can function. This means that we need to eat a certain amount of calories just to sustain life. But if we take in too many calories, then we risk gaining weight. There are a lot of ways to maintain a lean and fit body, the most common way is to be in a caloric deficit, in other words, means eating lesser calories than you burn.

The reason why do some people have lesser calories during their rest days is because they felt like they are not burning sufficient calories throughout the day. One simple hack is to maintain a slight deficit throughout the week, so how do you do that you might be wondering? It’s pretty simple, from your current maintenance calories, just decrease 10% - 20% from your daily calories. Therefore you wouldn’t need to manipulate your calories every time when it’s your rest day.

So in conclusion, this is just an easier way to maintain your fat & weight loss progress. But if you prefer to cut your calories during your rest day, it isn’t wrong as well. Everybody has their choices on which is more convenient and comfortable for them.

Weight Lifting is like in any other sports, whereby you burn calories while training and also helps with your overall physical health.

What makes weight lifting far more beneficial to us is that we can look physically great and stay healthy at the same time. This is because doing weight training, stimulates our muscles to grow stronger and bigger and at the same time we burn some calories as well.

Besides that, we are also able to maintain our muscle mass while mixing up weight lifting with cardio sessions. It has been proven that too much cardio won't only burn your body fats, but muscle mass as well.

Here’s some examples between weight lifting and cardio only.



Basically, the more we do weight lifting, the more it stimulates our muscles we grow, we are able to have a higher intake of foods. Due to our body burning more calories as our muscles get bigger and stronger. This is also one of the reasons why when you see bodybuilders can eat so many calories/foods and still looking fit and great.

MYTH vs REALITY

Throughout the years, the general public had a misconception whereby if a woman does weight lifting, they will grow their muscles and turned into She-Hulk (A super muscular female cartoon character from Marvel). But this is obviously not true.

Women in general, do not have the same hormones as men. The main muscle-building hormone in the human body is Testosterone, where both men and women have it in their body, but men have a far higher amount of testosterone in their body than in women. The amount of testosterone in women is usually 4 to 5 times lower than the average man.

So does it mean that women can’t grow muscles even if she trains? The answer would be no, because even though women have a low amount of testosterone in their body, it is sufficient for muscle growth, with the proper training and nutrition of course. This however is dependent on each individual's genetics and hormones. There will be some women that can build muscles easier the others.

In conclusion, women can do weight training as men do, it is just that the rate of muscle growth is not as fast and massive as men.

Throughout the years, it has been thought to the general weight lifters that to gain more muscle one must bulk up in order to put on a massive size and muscle mass, but is this true? In today’s article, we’ll be sharing some facts and my opinion on why it's a waste of time and money to bulk up. In order to gain weight, we need to be on a caloric surplus, but people tend to go overboard by increasing a ton of calories, and hopefully, it will enable us to gain muscle.



Fact number 1, weight gain does not mean muscle gain, most of us thought that by increasing in weight means muscle gain, but high chances of it is water retention and fat gain instead of muscle. Due to the fact that we do not gain muscle as fast as we think. We generally gain around 0.2kg to 0.45kg per year of muscle with the right nutrition and workout plan. If you just starting to train for a year then you can gain even more than that. You will notice that your muscle gain is much slower as the years go by, this is because our body has adapted to the same workout routine and the same amount of calories that we did throughout the year.

Secondly, the general public would think that using mass gainer to bulk is a good idea, but in our opinion, it’s a waste of money. There is 3 reason why we say its a waste of money, Firstly, mass gainer usually contains around 14-15 servings per bag, and in the nutritional recommendation, they will normally recommend you to take 1-2 serving per day, which is rather expensive to buy a bag of mass gainer every 2 weeks. Secondly, mass gainers usually give you a massive caloric surplus, from 800 calories up to 1600 calories in some brands. This will obviously cause a lot of fat gains when you have a very high surplus of calories in a short period of time. And lastly, no matter what kind of mass gainer it is, you will still need to add it with water to consume it, this will make you full for a short period of time but will make you hungry within an hour or so. This will cause you to eat even more and therefore increasing your calorie surplus even more, which later on you will notice a lot of fat gains and water retention.

In conclusion, the best way to bulk up is to gain little by little. Instead of a massive surplus, have a 100 - 200 caloric surplus, from there you can observe how your body react and make changes
before it too late.