Ask the Guru

QUESTION: How should I go about weight training if my goal is fat loss?

ANSWER: 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. Simplistically, this just means isolation vs. compound exercises. So heavy squats were replaced with high-rep leg extensions; heavy bench presses were replaced with crossovers, etc. All this was done to etch in the cuts or burn in the striations or something mystical! Training volume and frequency are also often increased during dieting.

Steroids Help Prevent Muscle Loss

Now it’s important to note that this approach to weight training during a pre-contest cutting phase was developed during the 70’s and 80’s when anabolic steroids were becoming a critical part of contest prep. To a great degree, the drugs protected bodybuilders from the two major problems associated with the above style of training: muscle loss and overtraining. Let’s look at both. The primary driver for muscle growth is heavy tension overload. Muscle has various cellular sensors that sense the tension stimulus, and this is a huge part of what turns on muscle growth. If you remove that stimulus by switching to light weights and/or isolation movements, the muscle has no signal to maintain its size. The end result is muscle loss!

My Recommendation

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 275x8 on the flat bench during your off season, you should do your best to get that same 275x8 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-backwards! 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 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. Give it a try before your next show and let me know how it goes.

To ask Lyle McDonald a question, email us at questions@muscle-insider.com or visit his website at http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/

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