There are 2 key considerations that we’ll be delving into, which are of course nutrition and training! I’m also going to share the 3 most common mistakes that I see folks making in regards to losing fat while maintaining muscle mass!
Let’s start with the nutrition piece…as you well know, in order to lose fat we must be in a calorie deficit, meaning we must expend more energy than we take in and a super simple way to think about this is via a budget…
So let’s say that you make $5000 per month but you only spend $4000 and so you have a surplus of $1000 monthly to put into your savings account. Now, just sub out money for calories in this equation and this would be an example of gaining body fat because you’re taking in more calories than you are expending.
Now, if you make $5000 per month and you spend $5000 per month, you’re going to break even or maintain your current weight and then lastly…if you make $5000 per month and you spend $6000 per month, you’re making less than you are spending or eating fewer calories than you are burning and therefore you will lose fat.
When you are spending more than you are making, you need to dip into your savings account in order to make up the difference and in this case your savings account is your stored body fat.
We have to give our body a reason to burn stored energy aka our savings and that reason is eating fewer calories than we burn, that is fat loss in a nutshell.
The other nutritional consideration that we need to stay aware of in the context of maintaining muscle is our protein intake and I would recommend getting roughly 1 gram of protein per pound of your bodyweight or 1 gram of protein per pound of your ideal or target bodyweight and then…
Feel free to fill in the remainder of your calorie intake via carbohydrates and fat depending on your personal preferences…also, I would recommend getting as many of your food sources (protein, carbs and fat) from single ingredient whole foods.
Okay, so that is big picture nutrition boxed off, now let’s delve into the training aspect…
In order to maintain your current level of muscle mass, it is crucial that you continue to lift equally as heavy as you are now and this brings us to our first mistake…
So many folks decide that they want to lose fat and so they think, ‘well I better lift lighter weight for more reps, right!?’ Wrong…that is a recipe to lose muscle because you built that muscle with specific amounts of resistance to begin with and so of course applying less resistance is going to cause muscle loss.
Just like the body needs a reason to burn stored body fat, which is a calorie deficit…the body also needs a reason to maintain muscle mass and so if we remove that reason by lifting lighter weights, of course we’re going to lose muscle because we’re literally telling the body, ‘I no longer need the muscle required to lift those heavier loads, I only need the amount of muscle required to lift lighter loads.’
The second mistake that I see folks making in regards to losing fat and maintaining muscle is actually just an inaccurate assessment of their body composition, for example…
For men when they’re losing fat, they often believe that they are also losing muscle because we accumulate body fat literally everywhere and so men tend to look at their chest, arms and shoulders and notice that these areas are getting visually smaller despite sustaining an adequate level of training i.e. they’re lifting the same weights and the harsh truth is that what they thought was muscle mass was actually just body fat.
The first time that I got reasonably lean I experienced this, it was sobering to say the least, I thought that I was carrying a lot more muscle than I actually was because once I stripped some of that bodyfat off, I was performing equally as well if not better in the gym, but my muscles didn’t appear to be as big without all of that fat layering over them.
For women when they’re losing fat, they often believe that they’re losing muscle in their legs and glutes specifically and again, we accumulate body fat everywhere and so a lot of women will find that their legs look kinda skinny and their bum begins to flatten out as they get leaner and leaner and if you’ve noticed this and your maintenance level training box is ticked, meaning you continue to lift equally as heavy for the same number of reps in the gym, that was body fat not muscle.
Now the ironic thing is, is that if you continue to get leaner and reach say that 10 to 15% body fat for men and maybe 16-20% for women, you often then begin to look more muscular again…it’s sort of that middle ground body fat percentage that’s a bit of a no man’s land in the sense that you’re not quite lean enough to look lean, but you’ve also lost enough fat that it appears as though you don’t have a ton of muscle either.
If you’re man and you’re finding that you actually have less muscle than you thought (just like I did) no sweat, you can just train with more weight and/or more volume and build those muscles up…and if you’re a women and you’re finding that your legs and butt aren’t quite what you thought that they were, no problem because you can squat, lunge, deadlift, hip thrust etc. with more weight and/or more volume and build your lower body up!
That brings us to our third mistake, which is reducing calories so aggressively that your performance goes to sh*t or in other words, you’re unable to maintain your gym performance and therefore muscle loss occurs not because you’re not eating enough protein, but because you dropped your calories so low that you simply don’t have the energy required to lift as heavy, as often, with as much volume as necessary etc.
Like we chatted about in the nutrition portion, we need a calorie deficit to lose fat, however we don’t want that deficit to be so severe that it impacts our ability to maintain an adequate level of performance via our training.
Truth be told, this third mistake isn’t nearly as common as the first 2 just because when folks reduce their calories that aggressively, they tend to just feel terrible and therefore it’s very difficult to adhere to, so they then just increase their calories to something more moderate in terms of their calorie deficit and everything just sorts itself out!
So to sum things up…
Nutrition…create an appropriate calorie deficit that allows you to lose fat while simultaneously maintaining your resistance training performance…also be sure to eat enough protein.
Training…continue to lift equally as heavy, don’t start lifting lighter for more reps because that will result in muscle loss regardless of your nutritional approach.
Also assessment wise, if you are maintaining your training performance (which you should be) you are not losing muscle, you are losing fat and the reality is, is that ya might have less muscle than ya thought that you did…but it’s all good because you can just build more :)
