Category Archives: Resources

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.