HOW TO: LOSE FAT WITHOUT LOSING MUSCLE, CAN IT BE DONE?
Losing fat, in a nutshell, is quite simple, and I use that term loosely because it takes time and the correct diciplin.
To learn about this, Read my article Losing Fat Without Exercise, this covers the basics about calorie deficits and correct macronutrient usage essential to weight loss)
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But losing fat whilst maintaining hard earned muscle is one of the biggest questions any aspiring bodybuilder wants to know the answer to.
How is is possible to cut calories down yet still keep muscle mass?
It’s true that when in a calorie deficit that the body instantly starts canabalising muscle as a way to reduce energy consumption from the body. Over time you may find yourself looking smaller or even right back to where you started from! So how do we avoid that?
It basically comes down to a few different key components:
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Eating enough Protein: Ok, so the first point is pretty straight forward: eating enough protein ensures that your hard earned muscle isnt directly canabalised by your body, a smaller physique is less energy consuming! Protein is needed to build muscle and maintain it but it’s also used an an energy source, so it’s critital that your protein intake is alot higher when on a calorie deficit than it is on a normal bulking program. Aim for 1g – 1.5g of protein per pound of bodyweight when on a calorie deficit to ensure your body is getting adequate amino acids to sustain muscle mass.
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Maintaining Strength and Altering Training Volumn and/or Frequency: Maintaining your strength is what will keep your muscles from deflating down to nothing, however when your body has less calories to use as energy you will experience a drop in strength, so lifting that 90kg on the bench press or doing a perfect squat with 120kg will become next to impossible. This is what we want to avoid, and we can do that simply by altering the volumn and/or frequency of our workouts. NOT THE WEIGHT. By doing fewer reps, fewer sets or fewer exercises, we can maintain our strength levels without burning ourselves out due to less calories available for energy.​
Calorie Cycling: Now we’re going to look at calories closer. You’ll be needing to control a calorie deficit more in depth than a general cutting diet in order to maintain muscle effectively. We do this by Calorie Cycling (Also known as Carb Cycling due to controlling of carbohydrate intake).
What it refers to is eating more calories on certain days (typically training days) and less calories on other days (typically rest days). This is done primarily by manipulating carbs and/or fat, as protein is something we want to keep high every day… especially when our goal is to lose fat, NOT muscle.
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Now, with a more simple and straight forward fat loss diet, you’d consume about the same amount of calories and nutrients every day and be in a similar sized deficit each day of the week.​
But with calorie cycling, you’d be in a larger deficit on certain days, but then a smaller deficit (or possibly even NO deficit at all) on the other days. However, at the end of the week, the total amount of calories consumed would still be the same. It’s just the method of getting there (eating less on certain days, more on others) is different.
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The theoretical purpose for doing this is to improve everything from recovery to calorie partitioning by providing our bodies with more calories/nutrients when it’s most likely to need and benefit from them (training days), and less calories/nutrients when it isn’t (rest days). This would then potentially allow us to, among other things, better maintain muscle and strength while we lose fat.
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Does it actually work? Well, this is something I’ve been experimenting with a lot over the last few years, and I’ve become a HUGE fan of it. Not just for maintaining muscle while losing fat (which I’ve found it works great for), but also for diet adherence, controlling your appetite, and keeping you happy and satisfied. And on the other side of the goal spectrum, I like it equally well for gaining muscle without gaining excess fat!
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Change steady state cardio for HiiT: Steady state cardio such as steady paced running for extended periods is quite a popular form of getting cardiovascular exercise and while it has it’s place, it takes a lot of dicipline and prolonged effort for a much longer period of time at around 45min roughly per day than most would prefer to adhere to. What’s overlooked by alot of people looking to cut fat from their physique is forms of cardio that are much quicker to do and twice if not more effective!
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Now unless you really are in a rush to shed fat, even HiiT isn’t necessary as most of this style of cardio can be achieved from doing a good resistance training routine. I would normally change my routine from linear to circuit or just keep my rest intervals to the absolute minimum between sets to keep my heart rate high. While cardio is still a useful tool for some fat burning, the fact that it’s not generally needed to lose fat really puts it in a position to just forget it completely.
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To Summarize:
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Eating enough Protein to stop your muscles being cannabalised by your body!
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Maintaining Strength by Altering Training Volumn and/or Frequency to keep muscle size and strength intact.
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Calorie Cycling is the critical key to fat loss. The lower and higher deficit days encourage the body to break down stored fat for energy.
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Replace standard cardio with HiiT or just dont do any.
I normally encourage others to completely knock cardio away anyway, I rarely do any myself and when I do it’s normally in the form of HiiT (High Intensity Interval Training)
You would have spurts of intense exercise coupled with lower intensity intervals (say sprinting for 30 seconds with all your energy) followed by resting states of lower energy (jogging for 60 seconds)
Repeating this cycle for around 15-20min is almost twice as effective as steady state cardio, it can even promote muscle hypertrophy in some instances and keeps your body from going into a catabolic state which will start to canabalise muscle to save energy consumption.
