HOW SHOULD I GO ABOUT WEIGHT TRAINING IF MY GOAL IS FAT LOSS?

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.