http://www.thinkmuscle.com/articles/haycock/cardio-and-precontest-dieting.htm
Two reasons so many people fail to accomplish their goals is that they either don’t have a plan, or start out at the wrong place and burn out before they’ve really begun. Turning your body into a fat burning machine takes a lot of hard work and planning, and if you start out at the wrong place, achieving your body composition goals will prove to be extremely difficult if not impossible. The above article by Bryan Haycock was written about ten years ago. I don’t know if his philosophy has changed much since the article was written, but the advice here can help you start out at the right place in your fat loss efforts, so you can avoid burning out, plateuing, or worse, cause metabolic damage to your body that may take weeks, months, and even years to recover from.
“Two things generally are required to get lean enough to compete in bodybuilding or fitness. One, you must cut your calories, and two, you must increase your cardio. Now there are some who might argue that you don’t have to do both but I have seldom seen someone really ripped who doesn’t use both.” I’m not a big fan of lowering calories excessively. Combine this with increasing your cardio time and intensity; you’re heading for failure. Bryan states “The biggest mistake I see with both novice and experienced competitors is the introduction of both high volume cardio and very low calories at the same time. In essence, they go from off season mass building to marathon running semi-starvation virtually overnight. This creates a tremendous burden on the system. This burden ultimately leads to significant losses of both size and strength.” I couldn’t agree with Bryan more on this. Unfortunately lowering calories and increasing cardio time and intensity is very common amongst gym goers. This practice is one of the reasons why we see such a low success rate with people trying to lose fat. Even worse is that most fitness magazines and books recommend lowering calories and increasing cardio at the same time. Lowering calories excessively comes with a host of problems such as reduced energy levels which at the very least will result in less workout intense workout, loss of strength, and possibly missing more workouts. This is ‘detraining”, meaning your getting worse, not better. Lowering calories excessively will also decrease your body’s anabolic hormones and increase your catabolic hormones, resulting in less lean muscle tissue, which will make you weaker and result in a lower metabolic rate.
What’s the solution to where to begin if you want to start losing fat? Bryan suggests to add cardio (if you haven’t already) before the diet. I agree with this. Anytime you ask your body to do more work in the gym you need to make sure you’re properly nourished, otherwise your chances of experiencing muscle loss, weakness, and burning out increase. By increasing calories and cardio (hopefully resistance training too) you will be able to do more work in the gym, get in better shape, and set the stage for when you can no longer add time and / or intensity to cardio, you maintain it, and then reduce your calories (preferably carbohydrates). Bryan suggests increasing cardio and the calories for at least the first two weeks, and I would be looking more at three to four weeks for best results long term. You may not be losing weight on the scale this way, but my experience is that the muscle to fat ratio is better, so although your scale shows the same weight, you’re most likely carrying more muscle and less fat. after two to four weeks of eating more and increasing your cardio activity level, you’re ready to lower calories and carbs, and intensify your resistance training program.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at workoutsolutionscoach@gmail.com
