The age-old challenge, training to our highest standard whilst not taking on board too many calories.
An impossible task? Maybe, maybe not!
We often tend to look at the items together from a weight loss perspective, then separately when looking at performance.
When did we last think about improving our performance and tailoring our calorie intake to match?
This could be through cycling our calories, increasing weight moved with the same calorie intake or spending some time to work out our baseline and then linking our calories to that.
Now, just to put it out there we can’t out train excess or less optimum foods, we can however allow ourselves time to dial it in.
Lets make up a quick example, Person A wants to decrease body fat:
Ideally we would like to make their diet as clean as possible, we also want to include a good volume of resistance work to increase the use of their muscles.
The off the shelf method is to cut calories, and start working out 3-5 times a week, then find out the hard way that we need calories to repair our muscles, which with the cut in calories becomes harder as the week goes on leading to the inevitable wall or the weekend!
Before I head down the rabbit hole, fitness and calorie trackers are awesome, I use both personally and if you can find the sweet spot with them, they can be a real boost to progress.
More often than not, we will take the headline figures – tell a calorie tracker you want to lose 2kg and it’ll ask how long (lbs or kg per week) then give you a calorie figure to hit.
Person A hasn’t recorded their calories, so how much of a drop is this?
They immediately drop their calories and want to workout 3 times a week, we end up back at the off the shelf method.
Using a slightly different approach, we could record our calories, then drop 100 from the average across the week, this would have us eating slightly less but not dropping by a large figure.
Monitoring this over the next 3-4 weeks, we can see how much of an impact it has had:
• Losing bodyfat = keep going,
• Staying the same, then we can drop another 50-100 off.
This will allow us to balance the energy we require with being in a calorie deficit that suits the workout profile we have.
This also gives us much more room for manoeuvre, dropping from 1800 to 1200 gives us the shock, but reduces the longevity and sustainability of the change.
1800 to 1700 to 1600 and so on, drops us down in stages and allows us to get the maximum from each step.
Bonus is, at the same time we can sustain the resistance training and help retain and even build muscle.
In the majority of cases we will find that we can balance the calorie drop with the increase in workout intensity, it’s not unusual to have to put a few calories back in…
So lots to ponder on there, it can be a bit of a minefield with competing advertising and social posts, if it sounds too good to be true, normally is and remember athletes got in phenomenal shape before shakes, supplements and various diets even existed – food for thought!
Speak to a Member of Team SF to find out how to get the best balance for you on
info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.