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A few days ago, I answered a Q&A on Around Workout Nutrition While Dieting and, mentioned in an offhand way that I would talk about the issue of weight training for fat loss at some later date. Well, apparently today is that later date. Or, more accurately today and Friday since, as this is going to be long, Im going to divide it into two parts. Today, in Part 1, Im going to look at some basic concepts and look at the impact of two different types of weight training on fat loss while dieting. As usual, Ill look at the pros and cons of each and youll even get an almost practical recommendation by the end of it. In Part 2, which Ill put up on Friday, Ill address practical issues of how to put together a weight training program during dieting in terms of volumes, frequencies, scheduling, etc.
minutes rest between sets or what have you. Just your stock standard traditional type of heavy weight work. Now, as youll see, each of these two types of weight training has certain pros and cons in terms of their effects while dieting. Lets look at each. Metabolic type weight training tends to generate a higher calorie burn than traditional low rep training, the glycogen depletion that occurs increases whole body fat oxidation, and the hormonal response is actually quite similar to interval training (in The Stubborn Fat Solution, this type of training can be used to kick off the more intense Stubborn Fat Protocols 1.0 and 2.0). Of course, many find that their top end strength falls somewhat while dieting; as well, when people get very lean, joints often get a little bit wonky under heavy loads. The lighter loads used in metabolic type work can be beneficial in that regards as well. So those are the pros for this type of training: increased calorie burn, a nice hormonal response, easier on the joints, depleting muscle glycogen enhances fat oxidation. Heres the bad. As Ive mentioned repeatedly on the site, the primary stimulus for muscle growth is progressive high tension overload (e.g. adding more weight to the bar over time). Without getting into a big old technical discussion of protein synthesis and breakdown here (you can read The Protein Book if youre interested); Ill simply say here that the high tension stimulus that builds muscle is the exact same high tension stimulus that will maintain muscle mass when youre dieting. So perhaps you can guess what happens to muscle mass when you reduce weight on the bar to use higher reps and shorter rest intervals. When you remove the high tension stimulus, you remove the signal to build (or in the case of dieting, maintain) muscle mass. What do you think happens next? Right, muscles get smaller. Many natural bodybuilders have found this out the exceedingly hard way by trying to copy the pre-contest training of drug-using bodybuilders. Without the drugs (to maintain muscle mass and protein synthesis even in the face of the diet), natural bodybuilders watched their muscle mass shrink when they started training lighter with higher reps. Without the high tension stimulus of heavy training, the body simply has no reason to maintain muscle mass. And thats the bad of metabolic type weight training: while it has certain benefits that I listed above, it is an insufficient stimulus, for maintaining muscle mass (with one exception). At least if used by itself.
That exception is beginners. Complete beginners, who havent built any real muscle mass in the first place dont have to worry much about muscle loss while dieting (just about any training will maintain it). But for trained individuals beyond the beginner stage, using metabolic type weight training exclusively on a diet is a recipe for disaster. Please note the use of the word exclusively in that previous sentence. Ill come back to this in a second. I imagine you can see where this is leading: outside of any other pro or con of heavy weight training, the biggest pro of all of heavy weight training on a diet is that it best maintains muscle mass. And since thats one of the explicit goals of dieting Of course, the cons are basically the opposite of what I listed for metabolic type weight training: the calorie burn is generally lower (Id note that the calorie burn from weight training is rarely massive in the first place), you dont get much glycogen depletion, you dont get the hormonal response. But in this case, at least within the context of the primary goal of a diet (lose fat/maintain muscle), none of that matters. Put simply, if someone had to choose ONE type of weight training to perform on a diet, it would be heavy tension oriented training while letting the diet/cardio type work handle the fat loss. Ill cover loading parameters in Part 2. In fact, thats exactly what I recommended in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook: 2-3 short heavy weight workouts per week (to maintain muscle mass) while allowing the big caloric deficit of the diet generate fat loss. And it works. Alternately, you could combine 2-3 short heavy weight workouts with cardio and use a smaller dietary deficit. And that works too. What wont work (for anyone not using drugs) is to remove the heavy tension stimulus completely and move to nothing but higher reps and lighter weights. Well, not unless you define work as losing muscle mass. But, you say, why does it have to be one type of training or the other? And clearly, it doesnt. Theres no fundamental reason why both kinds of training cant be done while dieting. More accurately, theres no reason that metabolic type work cant be added in some fashion to properly performed heavy weight training. This can give the pros of each while eliminating the cons of each at the same time. So how do you do this, how do you combine the two types of training? Thats in Part 2.
What Not to Do
First I want to talk about how folks should absolutely not try to combine the two types of training. As I mentioned in Part 1, a common idea during fat loss dieting is that training volume and/or frequency should go UP (compared to where it was when more food was being eaten). This is, simply, idiotic. Recovery will always be impaired when calories are restricted and trying to add more and more training to an already heavy load may explain why so many people end up so severely overtrained at the end of extended diets: the combination of too much training and too few calories is a bad, bad thing. So whats the implication of this: something has to be cut back. And in this case, again assuming that someone wants to add some type of metabolic weight training to their heavy weight training, what has to be cut back is the volume and possibly frequency of heavy training. By doing this, there will be more room in the weekly training schedule for the performance of the metabolic type work without destrying the dieter. Which makes a nice transition into a discussion of maintenance training.
becomes 2 sets) and frequency (2 workouts becomes 1 workout) can be reduce by 2/3rds but ONLY if intensity (weight on the bar) is maintained. Yes, 2 heavy sets. I should mention that there is clearly a limit to this. If someone is only doing 2 work sets for an exercise, clearly they cant cut back to zero sets. Im hoping that nobody reading this would make that kind of silly assumption in the first place. Id note in this context that many athletes use a similar approach when they move from more general preparation to their competition periods. As the volume of specific event work goes up, something has to give and that something is usually general weight training. Athletes found years ago (and research backed it up later), that strength training volume and/or frequency could be cut back significantly while maintaining strength for extended periods but only if the intensity of training was maintained. The same thing applies here, just looking at muscle size as much as strength. Now, I still tend to keep training frequency a bit higher even while dieting but, at the very least, this is one place where I wouldnt get quite as worried about only having someone training a bodypart one time per week. But as you might imagine, this ends up being a pretty major cut back in overall training volume. A lower body workout with 20-24 work sets that took 1-1.5 hours to complete at full volume is going to be finished in a fraction of that time. Six to eight total work sets might be hammered out in 30-40 minutes depending on how many warmups you do and how much you dawdle between sets. Leaving time and energy to do other things. As one final comment, this is actually my approach to lifting during a diet even if metabolic work isnt being added to the training. On a diet, usually folks find that while their top end may not suffer much, their endurance and work capacity often goes down. They can get through a couple of heavy sets but then everything drops off in a big way. Id rather them just get the couple of quality heavy sets done and move on. Trying to maintain the same heavy volume they were doing prior to the diet is usually a mistake so heavy training volume goes down. Again, most of the fat loss will come from the diet and/or cardio anyhow, heavy weight training should be performed to maintain muscle mass and the same maintenance rules apply regardless of what else is being done. But the point of this article was the assumption that a trainee wants to combine metabolic type weight training with their heavy weight training so lets look at that.
Sequencing
So now we have the parameters to set up a week of training for fat loss for both heavy (low volume/high intensity) and metabolic (higher volume/lower intensity) work. How do we combine them in a weekly schedule? Fundamentally, of course, there are two basic approaches that can be taken: you can do the workouts on the same day or on different days. Yeah, duh. Some of that choice will have to be decided on individually although Id note that in my experience most people try to train too damn much on a diet in the first place. When in doubt, please err on the side of a little less training than too much. In the long-run, it will pay off.
Some of it will also depend on how you divide up the heavy weight training. Some like to move to simply 3 short heavy workouts per week. Or even two, training full body at each. With only a couple of work sets per bodypart, this is eminently doable and might take an hour start to finish. You probably wouldnt want to put metabolic work after that, they could go on two other days of training. Another option would be a more traditional split routine, if someone wanted to stick with a 4 day/week upper/lower workout, they would probably be best off combining the two types of workouts together. So go to the gym, warm up, perform your heavy work (30-40 minutes or possibly less) and then follow it up with metabolic work (done at the lower end of the volume recommendations to keep the workout length manageable). Someone with less recovery ability might do better with the 3 day/week upper/lower I described in the Training Frequency for Mass Gains article again combining the heavy and metabolic work but only being in the weight room three times per week. Of course, as I noted above, dieting is one place where I dont have as much of an issue with a once/week bodypart training frequency and this can also be done by combining the heavy and metabolic work together since each individual heavy workout is likely to be pretty short since only a couple of bodyparts are being worked. Ive tried to show some of these options below. H is heavy weight training, Met is metabolic weight training. For no particular reason, Im going to assume no weekend training sessions although folks who can train weekends can separate things out a bit more.
Option 1
Option 2
Option 4
Option 5: UD2
Lower H + Met Full Body Upper H + H Met Met Lower H + Met Upper H + Met
Legs/Abs + Met Full Body Tension Back/Bis + Met Full Body Power
Lower H +
Chest/Delts/Tris H + Depletion
Met
Met Depletion
Upper H + Met Full Body Upper H + H Met Met Lower H + Met Lower H + Met
Legs/Abs + Met Full Body Tension Back/Bis + Met Full Body Power
Options 1 and 2 are folks who can recover from 4 days/week in the weight room, which they do depends on how much they like or dislike full body workouts. Option 3 is for folks who cant and need more total days of recovery. Option 4 would be just one of a zillion different ways to use a traditional bodybuilding split routine. One problem that does arise with this type of thing is that metabolic weight training tends to be full body in nature and this doesnt always synch well with split routines. If metabolic work on Monday for legs leaves you too exhausted to go heavy on Wednesday on the heavy leg day, this wont be a good option. Finally, since no Internet article is complete without an appropriate product plug, Option 5 is the weekly schedule for my Ultimate Diet 2.0. In that book, rather than referring to it as metabolic work, I called the high rep/short rest period work depletion work since the primary goal was glycogen depletion to set up the cycle. That diet also used two different types of heavy training noted as Tension (heavy sets of 6-8) and Power (sets of 3-6). Id note that it also incorporates a massive carb-load on Friday and eating at maintenance or slightly above on Saturday and Sunday. But its a very specific diet (for advanced dieters looking to get extremely lean while maintaining or even gaining muscle mass) and that schedule wouldnt be an appropriate training schedule outside of the specifics of the diet set up. Id note that the above chart doesnt even begin to exhaust the possibilities. Im sure some reading this are wondering about doing heavy work three days/week and metabolic work on the alternate three days per week. Wellcan it be done? Maybe. Should it be done? For most I would tend to say not. What about two heavy days and three metabolic days per week with two days off? That would be at least more workable. Three heavy days and two metabolic days on the in-
between days? Again more workable. Just watch out for feelings of malaise, fatigue, inflammation, and the rest that tends to signal that youre overtraining. And of course the above doesnt deal with other aspects of training. What about cardio? What about intervals? What about skills work for athletes who do more than just lift weights to get jacked? Well, that would have to be the topic for another article. Id only note that there is simply a limit to how much high intensity work can be performed under any circumstances, and that amount tends to go down when folks are dieting. I find that too many people, in their quest for EXTREME results have a tendency to try and throw together every different type of high-intensity training without paying attention to the overall loading or the interaction of the different components. And they pay the price. Simply, if you want to bring in one high intensity modality, something else has to be dropped out to compensate. But thats another topic for another day to cover in any kind of detail.
Summing Up
So thats that, a look at weight training for fat loss. As I noted in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1, there are both pros and cons to the different types of weight training while dieting for fat loss. Assuming that maintenance of muscle mass is the goal, some form of heavy weight training must be kept in the program. In fact, if only one kind of weight training were to be performed, thats what Id pick (with the possible exception of complete beginners). However, the volume and frequency can (and generally, should) be brought down when maintenance is the goal. Recovery always goes down on a diet (unless youre taking drugs) and that means that training must be reduced to avoid killing the dieter. So long as intensity (in this case, weight on the bar) is maintained, volume and frequency can be reduced by up to 2/3rds each without significant loss of strength or muscle mass. Basically, from the standpoint of strength and muscle maintenance, its far better to get 2 high quality sets than 6 half-assed ones. If desired, that will allow other types of training, in this specific case metabolic work, to be added to the training program. Sequencing will depend on the individual, how well or poorly they recover and the specifics of the diet but hopefully Ive given enough information for folks to set things up for themselves.