The Lifting Guide – Part 3: Training programming for fat loss

One question I get asked pretty often is:

How to design a training program for fat loss?

My usual answer is: You don’t need to do a special training program to lose fat; What you really need to do is to sort out your diet and to create a calorie deficit!

Even though this is the most important thing you have to address, there are a few tweaks you can do for your training that will help you lose fat faster.

First of all, let’s agree on what you want to achieve by training and dieting at the same time. It’s most likely

• Losing fat
• Not losing muscle (or even building muscle, which is a bigger challenge, but not unrealistic with a well-designed training program especially for beginners to lifting)

In order to lose fat you need to burn more energy than you consume, it’s a no-brainer. However, the biggest problem I see among my clients is that they don’t move enough to burn sufficient energy to see weight loss, even if they eat a low-calorie diet.

To be honest, the same applies to me! I sit most of the day in front of my computer and my energy expenditure by the end of the day is around 1200 kcal. Where should I cut calories from if I want to lose weight? There isn’t anything to cut from. For this reason, the most important thing in such cases is to increase the energy expenditure by moving more. You can do it by choosing to walk or cycle into to work if possible or to take short walks in the morning, your lunch break or in the evenings or even by increasing your energy expenditure during your workouts. And here the workout design comes into place.

If you don’t move enough throughout the day, you will need to move more during your workout. The things you can do are:

• Increasing your repetition range to 8-15 repetitions, in the case that you trained in a low rep range targeting strength gains before
• Decreasing your rest periods: Don’t wait 5 min to recover between the sets. If you use lighter weights and higher rep ranges, 2-3 minutes should be enough
• Move while you are resting: In the rest periods between sets I usually walk around in the gym to get more movement in and burn more calories
• Pair-set- exercises: Instead of completing all sets of one exercise and then going to the next, you can pair set two exercises, which will save time and keep you moving throughout your session. This in turn burns more calories.

How to do it: Do the first exercise, then rest for about one minute while walking to the equipment you need to perform the second exercise. Do a set of the second exercise, then rest of a minute while returning to the place where you have done the first exercise. Do a set of the first exercise, and start all over again.

Tip: Sometimes, depending on the gym I train in, I try to structure the exercises in a way so that I need to walk for some time when I transition between exercises. I would choose a piece of equipment that is located on one side of the gym for exercise one and the equipment that is located on the other side of the gym for exercise 2.

But what about HIIT?

Aren’t we supposed to burn lots of energy in a short time and get the super high after-burn effect that will make us burn fat for hours after the workout? 

Without going into details I can say just one thing: If it sounds too good to be true, it is most likely not true or not as significant as we want it to be!

The same applies to HIIT. It’s not only that the afterburn effect is not as high as we want or need it to be, but it is also my experience that HIIT is highly taxing and makes it difficult to recover from (especially for women). Due to the effort that is put into HIIT, the general exhaustion level increases and strength training  - the training we really need during fat loss to maintain the muscle mass! - suffers. 

Also, don’t forget, the day has 24 hours and you have to put in constant effort in working on your weight loss goal. You can’t expect that 15 min HIIT a day is enough to create an energy deficit that is high enough if you sit on your ass 99% of the time you are awake!

I hope this article has shed some light on the sad fat loss reality, which we often don’t want to hear and has inspired you to increase your daily movement, if fat loss is your goal.

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The Lifting Guide – Part 2: Your sets – the difference between progress and failure

Do you really know how many sets you should be doing in order to make your muscle grow?

If you aren’t sure and have doubts about the training volume you should be using, then this article is exactly for you.

The number of sets for each muscle group per week or per training session depends on your training stage.

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Beginner: If you are a beginner to resistance training than you will see results with as little as < 3 sets per training session per muscle group, if you train twice a week (< 6 sets per week). 

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Intermediate: If you are a novice or an intermediate lifter, then doing less than 5 sets per muscle group per week is not likely going to give you any gains. In this case, 5-9 sets are definitely better and more than 10 sets per muscle group per week seems to be the best.

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Advanced: It seems that advanced lifters and athletes in particular should do even more sets per muscle group, per week.

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But is there a cap? How much is too much?

Even though the evidence is lacking, it seems like doing 9 sets per muscle group per training session is too much. There seem to be an upper limit of what gives you more gains.

Dankel, S.J., Mattocks, K.T., Jessee, M.B. et al. Sports Med (2017). doi:10.1007/s40279-016-0640-8

If you were to ask me about how I design training programs, I would tell you that I usually use 10-20 sets per muscle group, per week for intermediate lifters and for advanced lifters 20-45 sets per muscle group, per week, depending on their training history and the ability to recover.

Well, after clarifying how many reps and sets you should do, one question remains:

How much weight should I use?

I think the answer to this question is the simplest one:

• If you can do more than 15 reps with this particular weight, it’s too light (unless you are one of the slow-twitch dominant muscle fiber outliers).
• If your form breaks down, you decrease your range of motion (e.g. do a quarter squat) and your exercise execution looks as ugly as hell, then the weight is too heavy.

 

I hope this article can help you with making sure that your training volume is high enough for gains!

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In part 3 of this series I will address the question of how to design a training program for fat loss. Stay tuned!

The Lifting Guide – Part 1: Choose the rep range that makes your muscle grow the most

Have you ever asked yourself one of the following questions?

• Am I doing sufficient sets?
• Am I using the right weight?
• Am I working in the right rep range?
• Which workout should I use for fat loss?

Finding the right training program for personal goals is challenging. The high abundance on lifting programs on the internet and hundreds of different opinions doesn’t make it any easier.

For this reason, I decided to address these frequently asked questions and make it as easy as possible for you to decide which program is best for you. In this article I will give you useful tips on how many sets and reps you should be doing depending on your training stage, your genetics and your goal.

 

Let’s start with the rep range

The repetition range you should work in depends on three factors:

• Your goal
• Your muscle fiber composition (that is determined by your genetics and your sports background)
• The muscle group you train

There are two types of muscle fibers in your muscle; slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers.

Slow twitch muscle fibers respond to high rep ranges (higher than 8 reps) using lighter weight and fast twitch respond to higher weights and low rep ranges (less than 8 reps) or fast, powerful reps using lighter weight.

• If you are an endurance athlete wanting to enhance your performance, you will need to focus on slow twitch and high rep ranges.
• If you want to improve your strength and power, you will need to focus on fast twitch muscle fibers using low reps with heavy weights or fast movement.
• If you are a bodybuilder whose goal is to increase muscle size (ie, you want to look really BIG), you will need to focus on both, fast and slow twitch muscle fibers, to get the maximum growth in the entire muscle.

However, this is not the end of the story. Now your genetics comes into the game. Muscles aren’t equally divided into 50% slow twitch and 50% fast twitch muscle fibers. The muscle fiber composition doesn’t only vary from muscle group to muscle group (ie, is different for quads than lats) but also is individual-dependent. Every person has a different muscle fiber composition depending on the sports background and the individual genetics. Yes! Your genetics do really play a role, as I’ve written previously in my post “Your Best Training Plan Is In Your Genes”.

The inter-individual differences can be hugely pronounced, especially for quads. Whereas some individuals can have only 5% of their quads consisting of slow-twitch muscle fibers, others can have as much as 90% slow-twitch muscle fibers in their quads and only 10% fast-twitch.

Thus, it is a no-brainer that if a person whose quads consist of 90% slow-twitch muscle fibers trains with very heavy weights in low rep ranges, this type of training will optimally train only 10% of this person’s quads. In fact there was a research study that showed that matching training type to the individual genetics leads to highest improvements, in both endurance ability and power. As power is closely related to strength, it is very likely that the same would apply to power as well.

And yes, you got it right. In contrast to the widely-accepted rule I stated above that one needs to lift heavy weights to gain strength and power, this seems to not apply to individuals with endurance-type genetics (people whose muscle consist mostly out of slow-twitch muscle fibers).

But how do I know what type of genetics I have?

This is how it works:

Take 80% of your 1 repetition maximum (1 RM) for the exercise that targets the muscle group(s) you want to test. Thereby this muscle group should be the limiting factor of your performance (the reason why you can’t do more reps when you miss a lift). Squat and bench press would be good candidates. Deadlifts in contrast not that much, as you always risk getting a lower back fatigue and subsequent injury if you go all out on deadlifts. Mostly, it is the lower back and not the legs that is the limiting factor for deadlifts.

After you warm up, do as many reps as possible (without killing yourself…please ask someone to spot and adjust the safety bars to the right height).

• If you do less than 8 reps, then the muscle group you targeted is fast-twitch dominant and it makes sense for you to choose a program with low reps and high intensity.

• If you do much more than 8 reps, then a program that implements high reps makes sense for you.

• If you do about 8 reps, then your muscle fiber types are mixed and you should try to implement both, high and low reps.

From my experience, most lifters can do between 8 and 13 reps, thus, they have a mixed fiber type and it makes sense for them to train in both rep ranges, high and low rep range. However, I have seen a few exceptions to this rule; male lifters who could squat only 3-5 reps at 80% or on the other side of the spectrum, female athletes who could squat more than 20 reps at 80% 1RM. Obviously, for these lifters most of the squat training should happen in the low rep range using heavy weight or in the higher rep range, respectively.

Nevertheless, even if the lifters who are slow twitch fiber dominant have to train mostly in a high rep range for strength (1RM) gains, it is crucial to include some heavy, low rep sets into the training routine too to get a feeling of heavy weight. Otherwise it is easy to freak out if suddenly you feel much more weight on your shoulders than your are used to. To go one step further, some powerlifters even include exercises like just unracking heavy weight without moving it (e.g. benching or squatting) just to get their bodies used to the heavy load. Then even the personal maximum won’t appear that heavy any more when testing 1RM, which give a lifter a huge psychological benefit.

To cut the long rep-range-you-need-to-train-in short:

Test your muscle fiber composition using the 80% test and work in the rep range(s) that target the majority of your muscle fibers. For most people, except outliers of course, it makes sense to implement sets with 3 to 15 reps into their training routine.

The issue with reps should be clear by now.

But how many sets should I do?

This question will be answered in part 2 of this series, stay tuned…

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