(Source: Bruce Klemens)

Squat style and technique are pivotal to success in any strength endeavor, but the debate about them between powerlifters and weightlifters is needless and counterproductive.

For powerlifters, the requisite depth of the squat is determined solely by the judges of the federation in which they compete. Considering how many powerlifting federations are out there, this can actually get a little confusing. For the case of this analysis, let’s assume you’re competing in the IPF/USAPL. This means at least 1-2 inches below parallel. A weightlifter, on the other hand, needs to get as low as possible while maintaining a safe spinal position. This can mean anything from 3-4 inches below parallel, to literally ass-to-grass, in the case of some fortunately proportioned and very mobile athletes.

A Tale of Two Squat Depths

The style of squat used in training for the two sports also differs. A lower bar position is popular in powerlifting, and high bar or front squats are popular for the training of weightlifters. These differences arise from the demands of the sport. A low bar back squat puts the individual at a mechanical advantage compared to a high bar back squat or a front squat, which allows them to lift slightly more weight. In the context of a high-level competition, “slightly more” can make a huge difference. The high bar and front squat techniques preferred by weightlifters allow trainees to build leg strength for the competition lifts while staying in as upright a position as possible, in the interest of maximizing carryover to the snatch and clean and jerk.

But there are athletes who like to compete in both powerlifting and weightlifting. How are they to train? Bearing in mind the above, my recommendation for an athlete training for both sports would be:

• When away from any competition, use the high bar squat and front squat in training.
• When approaching a weightlifting competition, change nothing with regards to squat technique.
• When within 12 weeks of a powerlifting competition, begin to gradually lower the bar position you use in training. Not to an extreme extent, as you might see from many athletes who only powerlift, but just low enough to put you in a more advantageous position, while not making you feel so awkward and uncomfortable that your lift suffers.

One final note is the tempo in which the squat is performed. Many weightlifters have a habit of “divebombing” into the hole and riding the bounce on their way up. While this is perfectly fine in theory, the trainee must be cognizant that the bounce is derived from the stretch reflex of their muscles, and not off the connective tissue of their knees and hips. Because while the former is safe, sustainable, and wonderfully effective, the latter can set you up for both injury and missed lifts. An over-fast descent can often lead to a loss of tightness in the trunk, so when you hit the hole with all that speed, you lose your spinal position. Your bracing gets out of whack. Your bar path goes wonky. You get tipped forward. And you end up dumping the bar.

Sound familiar?

While the rebound does have enormous carryover to receiving the bar in the clean and shooting up, doing so improperly can do more harm than good. My recommendations in this regard are:

• Regardless of where you are relative to competition, always focus on descending into the hole under control. This will mean slowing down when first starting out.
• Once you’re able to do that, you can start focusing on progressively speeding up your descent while maintaining tightness.

You might not end up with quite the speed into and out of the hole you used to have, but you’ll have plenty less missed lifts to show for it. Sounds like a fair trade to me.

The post How to Train the Squat for Both Powerlifting and Weightlifting appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Cut to the present. If you really take a look around, you’ll find that most people still subscribe to the all-or-nothing, “I’m cutting x entire macronutrient/food-group out of my diet” approach to getting lean. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the hard-gainers taking “stuff as much food into my mouth as possible until I’m consumed by anguish and self-pity” approach. But then you’ll find a relatively tiny subset of folks that, thanks to the surplus of incredibly smart people in their little niche community, have figured out a better way.

I’m talking about flexible dieting, a.k.a. macro tracking or counting, a.k.a. the infamous “if it fits your macros” diet.

Flexible Dieting as the Middle Road

Despite whatever sensational headlines you might see, at its very core, all flexible dieting involves is taking all those assumptions made by every fad diet to exist ever, and making a simple attempt to approach them logically and rationally. Maybe even quantify them a little bit. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, what you get is a style of eating that is comprised of mostly whole, unprocessed foods, lean protein sources, plenty and fruits and veggies. And in the cases that your goals allow it, a healthy spattering of treats here and there.

“What’s this? You mean I won’t morph into a baby whale the second a spoon of ice cream touches my tongue?”

The majority of dieting protocols try to force a community to take a side, either for or against a way of thinking. This can be “fat is evil,” or “carbs are evil,” or “cavemen were pretty jacked, so I’m going to ignore hundreds of thousands of years of progress in agriculture and eat like one of them.” And as someone that, over the years, has subscribed to every fad diet around for at least some amount of time, I can empathize with the draw of something like this.

Taking a side invokes an emotional response that makes the motivational aspect of dieting significantly easier, starting out. Feeling like you’re part of a community of some special dieting cult reinforces that response. Even the dogmatic aspect of simply following some arbitrary rule that miraculously helps me lose a few pounds by some unknown mechanism has the advantage of freeing up space in my mind for more pressing matters. If you happen to be someone that is able to continue reaping the short-term benefits of extremism for years on end, then more power to you.

Fad Diets Aren’t Sustainable

One does not draw conclusions based on anomalous results. If you really take a look at the problem, you’ll notice that the people who are able to make sustainable, long-term dietary progress on any type of fad diet are indeed anomalies. There is a larger group of people who might be able to make many months or even a year of solid progress, but they soon end up getting sick of the restrictions, and balloon back up to their original weight.

A study conducted at Oxford University found that just over 80% of all “weight losers”, regardless of method of loss, regain the weight lost and then some within 3 to 5 years.¹ In fact, the same study identified the factors that cause this long-term relapse to be very similar to the factors that make fad diets so appealing when first starting out. Namely, the perceived need to strictly adhere to a specific regimen to ensure success, and motivation associated with a group setting.

These two things make logical sense. If your definition of progress is tied to a specific modality of any sort, say your willpower wains just a little bit on one day. You have a bite of a friend’s cookie you weren’t supposed to. All of a sudden, you’ve cheated on your diet. You’re now a failure, and you might as well just say fuck it and hit up that new ice cream buffet down the road and do this whole pathetic loser thing, right?

Group motivation is great. It’s even necessary, at particularly tough spots in any endeavor. But if you don’t have the internal knowledge and discipline to drive you through those moments when no one else is around, then when those times inevitably arrive, you will be worse for wear. As much as you’d hate to admit it, even if no one was around to see it happen, that bottle of wine and pint of Ben and Jerry’s while watching Love Actually after a hard day at work… it happened.

You know it happened. And your gut sure as hell knows it happened.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Sexy to Work

The core tenant of flexible dieting happens to be the factor identified in the above referenced study to be the most enabling factor of diet success: knowledge. That doesn’t mean you need to go out and get a degree in nutrition. Just make it to the end of this article, and you should have more than enough information to get started.

Flexible dieting is easier to sustain in the long-term, but it definitely has something of a learning curve starting out. Blindly following arbitrary rules is easy. If anything, it’s a coping mechanism that makes all the other hard parts of dieting a little easier. Moderation, on the other hand, is tough. Especially starting out. Worse, it’s not sexy. Not even a little bit. So before proceeding, be warned: Even though being flexible with your diet affords you certain luxuries (think guilt-free donuts), doing it right requires you to be more disciplined and analytical than you would be otherwise. If that doesn’t sound like an acceptable trade-off to you, then it just might not be for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Reference:

1. Byrne, S., Z. Cooper, and C. Fairburn. “Weight maintenance and relapse in obesity: a qualitative study.” International Journal of Obesity 27, no. 8 (2003): 955-962.

The post An Unbiased Argument for Flexible Dieting appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

To break it down mechanistically, carbohydrates are the primary energy source for any activity you would be doing, and often lead to better performance in training. Protein is the main substrate for building new muscle tissue. It makes logical sense to have these in your circulation at the time of training, and this can be accomplished some different ways:

• A large meal 4-6 hours before a training session could give you plenty of circulating glucose and protein, and replenish your glycogen stores enough to fuel your training.
• A shake consisting of about 25 grams of protein and 30-50 grams of carbs 1-2 hours before a session will have a similar effect. The reason for the shorter interval is because unlike normal solid-food meals, shakes consumed on an otherwise empty stomach are assimilated much faster, often within a couple of hours. An exception to this would be casein protein products. Casein has a similar digestion time to that of whole-food sources, sometimes even longer.

The Anabolic Window

The same applies post-workout. Even though it’s something of a joke these days, scientific literature has shown that an “anabolic window” exists in some capacity. However, it’s not the “chug a shake within 20 minutes of my last rep or all my precious gains will spontaneously combust” kind. It varies depending on training experience.

In a nutshell, there is a period of 1-3 days that untrained individual/beginners have improved nutrient partitioning to muscles. This could be advantageous for growth. This period is cut down to 6-24 hours for trained athletes. One can safely assume that for extremely advanced athletes (national-level/pro-card-holding strength/physique competitors) this time frame would be cut down to the range of 2-4 hours.

What About Fasted Training?

Some individuals experience better training performance when fasted. This seems to be particularly prevalent in intermittent fasters who have a large bolus of food at night before bed and train in the mornings. This would spur the logical explanation that a large meal right before bed sufficiently replenishes glycogen enough to ensure a quality training session the next morning.

Supporting this hypothesis would also be the fact that, unless you are a Crossfitter or team/field-sport athlete, most resistance training sessions are relatively undemanding as far as energy stores go. You are very unlikely to completely tap out your body’s glucose reservoirs unless you are doing some really high-volume stuff. This is one case however, where I would recommend intra-workout nutrition (e.g. electrolytes with a scoop of BCAAs mixed in), and having a little more haste with your post-workout meal. It’s safe to assume that prolonged complete fasting, along with a highly energy-intensive training session, has the potential for some significant detrimental effects if not properly accounted for.

Use Common Sense

As long as you eat something within +/- 6 hours of when you train (which, honestly, the enormous majority of people will end up doing as a part of normal life), you’ll be more than set. If you’re an advanced athlete that really wants to stay on top of things, make sure to get in a bolus of protein and carbs after you get home from the gym.

More nutrition guidance:

Beginner’s Nutrition: Are You Overthinking Your Diet?

The post Practical Advice on Peri-Workout Nutrition appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But recently, things have started to change. The bar moves a little slower, even on your first few sets. Instead of feeling like a stud at the end of every workout, you go back home beat to hell and in desperate need of lying down for a while. And then it happens. You go in to hit your prescribed weight for the day, and miss it. So you reset your weight, as most linear periodization programs stipulate, and keep trudging forward like the trooper you are. But then it happens again. And again. Until your progress has completely stalled, and you are nowhere near the goals you set for yourself, and that the programs promised to provide.

Some people (the genetically gifted) reach the numbers they were looking for within their first few months of training. The rest of us—myself included—are forced to up the ante a little bit to continue making progress.

What Happened to My Gains?

In those first few months of training, even though the weight on the bar is going up, most of the increases in strength you experience are simply your nervous system getting used to these new movement patterns. This is why anecdotally you’ll find that more untrained trainees will have a rapid initial gain in strength, compared to those with somewhat of an athletic background. The latter group already have a baseline level of kinesthetic awareness that a sedentary individual would not, and therefore benefits less from this neural adaptation.

Now don’t get me wrong. You sure as hell do grow a decent amount of muscle in those first few months. But it would be physiologically impossible to grow muscle in proportion to how much your strength increases during this stage. But when those neurological adaptations start to reach a point of diminishing returns, muscle growth becomes the greatest determinant of future progress. Therein lies the crux of the matter.

Remember those freaks who keep making awesome progress for years on end with a linear periodization program? They are likely blessed with genetics that allow them to continue adapting to the same stimuli over a long period of time. The same rule doesn’t apply to most folks. Due to something called the repeated bouts effect, the more you are exposed to a certain stimulus, the less effect said stimulus will have on your body over time. And there is nothing more similar than a program that has you doing the same movements, in the same set and rep scheme, in the same order, in the same session-to-session frequency, day, after day, after day.

This effect applies to everything from the movements you choose, to the way your program is periodized. But it is usually the most observable with training volume. If you do the same volume over a long period of time, eventually that same volume goes from being enough to spur growth, to being just enough to maintain your current level, to being so low in relation to your strength that you regress.

Turn Up the Volume

Increasing training volume over time is the single common denominator in the transition from a novice, to intermediate, to advanced athlete. The more experienced you get, the slower progress comes, the more volume you need to employ to progress (or even maintain), and the easier it is to regress. The practical considerations of this are that you will have to:

• Make week-to-week jumps in weight instead of session-to-session
• Incorporate certain training sessions which have a slightly different stimulus to others in your repertoire (more on this later)
• Pay more diligent attention to your recovery outside of the gym

The week-to-week jumps are needed because eventually you reach a level of strength that simply does not allow you to recover enough by your next session to present a significant overload. These numbers do not look like some arbitrary strength standards you might see floating around the interwebs, but are individual to you and your body.

Introducing variance in your programming can be as complicated as hopping on a full-on Westside Conjugate routine, with rotating movements week-to-week along with high-frequency, max-effort attempts (not recommended). Or you could just switch up the set and rep schemes on some of your normal scheduled training days. Below is a simple example of how to modify your average 5×5 routine to introduce a little more variety:

Normal “Starting Strength” style template:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

• Squat: 5×5
• Bench press: 5×5
• Deadlift 1×5

Modified Template

Monday (high-volume day)

• Squat: 5×8
• Bench press: 5×8
• Deadlift: 2×8

Wednesday (speed day)

• Pause squat: 3×5
• Overhead press: 3×5
• Power clean: 1×5

Friday

• Work up to 5RM Squat
• Work up to 5RM Bench Press
• Work up to 5RM Deadlift

The latter of the two, if conducted properly and over an extended period of time, has the potential to carry you well into your advanced phases of training. It can also be easily adapted to different goals:

• Want to put a little emphasis on size? Raise the prescribed rep ranges by 2-3 reps in every instance, and feel free to add some isolation movements after you’ve completed your main strength work each day.
• Want to peak for a powerlifting meet? Starting about 12 weeks out, drop prescribed rep-ranges by 2-3 reps in every instance, and implement a quick taper the week before the meet.
• Want to be a better CrossFitter? Replace the deadlift and bench press with the snatch and clean and jerk, respectively. For the Olympic lifts, decrease the rep-ranges by 2-3 for both, and increase the set recommendations by 2-3 as well.

With that, I hope I have armed you with the knowledge and insights needed to finally stop leaving the gym dejected, and get back to crushing PRs!

Got to build that motor, too:

Conditioning That Won’t Kill Your Gains

The post Novice Lifters: What to Do About Your First Plateau appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If you and I are anything alike, then the second you hear words like ‘meditation’ and ‘mindfulness’, your BS alarms go off. I used to be the same way. Until recently, the subjects of meditation and mindfulness have been dominated by a lot of meaningless ‘self-help’ methodologies that do very little good for anyone. They have been presented as a magic fix for whatever internal struggles you might be facing. Proponents have often promised far more than they can give without backing it up with any amount of evidence, while also amassing fanatical, cult-like followings, which instantly make me wary.

Thankfully, in the past few years, a great deal of research on the subject has accumulated. Today, many pragmatic and practical minds both inside and outside the strength community endorse the benefits of a regular mental practice. For those of us that spend so much time and effort to optimize our physical function (be it for strength, endurance, general fitness, etc.), doesn’t it make sense that our mind would deserve equal attention?

Before I get any deeper into this subject, there are a few things I want to get out of the way. A mindfulness practice isn’t some magic voodoo blessing that’ll automatically fix all the problems inside your head and improve your quality of life a hundred-fold. What it will do is provide you an internal framework to better organize your thoughts and reduce any extraneous noise that might get in the way of you doing the things that you really care about.

Once you get the habit of meditation down long enough, there’s no limit to how far you can take it. [Photo credit: Pixabay]

Meditation and Mindfulness, Defined

Now let’s get into the specifics. We’ll start with defining what these terms actually mean:

• Meditation: Meditation is a practice where an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content.¹
• Mindfulness: Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.²

For all practical purposes, these terms can be considered as interchangeable, with the former referring to the actual practice, and the latter referring to the general concept. One thing you might have noticed is that there was nothing in the above definitions about ‘clearing’ or ‘emptying’ the mind. A mental practice allows you acknowledge your thoughts as they come, and practice the skill of letting them go if they’re not doing you any good. The last thing we need is more empty minds walking around, especially considering how plentiful they seem to be already.

Evidence for Meditation

It’s always best to take an evidence-based approach to the things you choose to invest your time into. That means taking a look at the research on the topic. Trust me, I don’t enjoy it either, but being able to make more informed decisions is well worth the trouble. So without further ado, let’s get deep into some nerd shit:

A randomized trial³ exposed 66 participants to a three-day (25 minute/day) mindfulness practice. The study concluded that, “brief mindfulness meditation training buffers self-reported psychological stress reactivity.”

A smaller-sample study⁴ concluded that “performance in a distributed-attention task reinforces the view that meditation practice can have a lasting and generalizable impact on human cognition.” In other words, a meditative practice has a chance of helping you get more stuff done in less time.

If that wasn’t enough for you, there has even been evidence that a consistent mindfulness practice induces structural changes in the brain, “[providing] a means for improving self-regulation and perhaps reducing or preventing various mental disorders.”⁴

On top of all that, it even has proven possible use-cases for creativity,⁵ focus,⁶ treatment of anxiety,⁷ and maintaining better relationships.⁸

Up Your Mental Game

Now I know there are some of you out there thinking, “I don’t care about all this hippy stuff, I just want to get jacked and strong as heck”. Well, having your mental game in check will only enhance your ability to push it harder in training, not let struggles in your personal life effect your workouts, and deal with the mental stresses of competition.

Nothing is without some costs, but in the case of meditation they are very low. The most common one is time. It will take at least a few weeks of daily practice (in most cases you won’t need more than 10min/day) to form the habit, and another few weeks to begin noticing any tangible benefits. So if you’re not comfortable ‘wasting’ a little time up front, it might not be for you. But the up front cost is well worth the benefits you’ll get down the line.

Incorporate Mindfulness Into Your Life

There are countless ways you can incorporate a mindfulness practice into your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve you sitting cross-legged in a corner for hours on end. For some people, it could be as simple as practicing non-judgement in their daily life. Or being ‘in the zone’ when practicing your sport. But for most people it’s going to involve at least a little bit of sitting down. Maybe staying still for a bit. Horrifying, I know, but it’ll be worth it.

There are countless ‘schools’ of meditation, ranging from a simple 10-minute-a-day practice, to 10-day-long retreats where you speak to no one, acknowledge no one, and spend the entire time trying to focus on your breath. We’ll be focusing a little bit more of the former in this piece.

The most widely-practiced form of mediation is something called Transcendental Meditation (TM). In a nutshell, it involves you being assigned a special mantra which you will repeat to yourself throughout the course of each session. What the mantra provides is an ‘object’ for you to use to focus your thoughts on. While you’re focusing on your mantra, if you’re randomly assaulted by the irrational worry that you left the stove on even though you know for a fact that it’s turned off, you would practice removing that unnecessary thought from your mind and re-focusing on the mantra.

Other forms of meditation have you take the mantra that TM is so fond of, and replace it with your breath. That simple action of bringing your focus back from distraction is all there is to it! No matter what the methodology, the bulk of the benefit comes from simply practicing the skill of bringing yourself back to focus. This lets you analyze and make intelligent decisions based on each thought that enters your mind, instead of letting it get you all flustered and mess with your groove.

Find the Time for Meditation

In the simplest sense, all meditation involves is being still for a period of time while trying to maintain your focus on a single object; be that your breath, a mantra, or just something in your field of view. While you’re there, if unwanted thoughts enter your mind, you simply acknowledge them for what they are, and kindly escort them out of your mind, bringing your focus back to the ‘object.’

When you start out, you’ll naturally be doing a lot of escorting. But as you get better, you’ll get past the initial stage, and will eventually be able to sit in silence and maintain a quiet, calm focus for an extended period of time. Once you can maintain such a state for an hour or so, you’re likely beyond the point that either myself or anyone else on the internet can be of service to you, and are better off finding a full-time mindfulness practitioner or center to take your practice to the next level.

On the subject of time, start as low as two minutes if you have to. The biggest mistake many people make when trying to get into meditation is trying to do too much too soon, burning out, and then not touching the subject again for months. For most, a simple progression is best. Start with two minutes and add one minute per week until you reach 10-minute sessions. And if you’re reading this and saying “I don’t even have two minutes to waste on this,” then you’re likely to benefit from a mindfulness practice more than anyone else.

Guided Mediation Tools

If you’re looking for help getting started with meditation and mindfulness but aren’t ready to seek out a teacher, I suggest trying some guided meditation tools. Headspace and Calm are two apps with both free and paid options that make it easy to introduce yourself to the habit of meditating with a little guidance. They ease you into the practice and give you subtle instructions to guide you through it.

I hope you’ve been armed with everything you need to take better control of your mind, and finally get that thing under control. Meditation is a scientifically proven way of enhancing your mental performance. Doing so will have benefits that trickle into every aspect of your life, the same way physical training does. Once you get the habit down long enough to perceive the benefits, there’s no limit to how far you can take it.

More on mindset:

Make the Switch to Better Habits and Mindset

References:

1. Lutz, Antoine, Heleen A. Slagter, John D. Dunne, and Richard J. Davidson. “Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 4 (2008): 163-69. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.01.005.

2. Bloom, Paul. “Mindfulness Definition.” Greater Good. Accessed October 04, 2016.

3. Creswell, J. David, Laura E. Pacilio, Emily K. Lindsay, and Kirk Warren Brown. “Brief Mindfulness Meditation Training Alters Psychological and Neuroendocrine Responses to Social Evaluative Stress.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 44 (2014): 1-12. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.02.007.

4. Colzato, Lorenza S., Ayca Ozturk, and Bernhard Hommel. “Meditate to Create: The Impact of Focused-Attention and Open-Monitoring Training on Convergent and Divergent Thinking.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116.

5. Ostafin, Brian D., and Kyle T. Kassman. “Stepping out of History: Mindfulness Improves Insight Problem Solving.” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 2 (2012): 1031-036. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2012.02.014.

6. Levy, David M., Jacob O. Wobbrock, Alfred W. Kaszniak, and Marilyn Ostergren. “The effects of mindfulness meditation training on multitasking in a high-stress information environment.” In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2012, pp. 45-52. Canadian Information Processing Society, 2012.

7. Roemer, Lizabeth, Sarah K. Williston, Elizabeth H. Eustis, and Susan M. Orsillo. “Mindfulness and Acceptance-Based Behavioral Therapies for Anxiety Disorders.” Current Psychiatry Reports 15, no. 11 (2013). doi:10.1007/s11920-013-0410-3.

8. Barnes, Sean, Kirk Warren Brown, Elizabeth Krusemark, W. Keith Campbell, and Ronald D. Rogge. “The Role of Mindfulness in Romantic Relationship Satisfaction and Responses to Relationship Stress.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 33, no. 4 (2007): 482-500. doi:10.1111/j.1752-0606.2007.00033.x.

The post Meditation for Meatheads appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Luckily, there is an extent of reliable information as to why this is the case and plenty of countermeasures to make up for the inherent fat loss setbacks of being a woman.

The Setbacks

Women, in general, are smaller humans than men. This is due to a combination of things like average height, skeletal structure, hormonal potential for lean mass, and fat distribution. And in most situations you might not mind. But think of it this way: A car with a smaller engine uses less fuel, uses and puts out less energy, and let’s off less cumulative heat in the process. The same applies for people. Let’s examine three inherent roadblocks women face when trying to lose fat:

• Smaller Total Body Size. Since women are generally smaller, they are usually forced to diet on extremely low calories to reach their body fat goals. While seemingly unfair, it makes sense. You wouldn’t expect a 6’2’’ 200lb man to eat the same as a 5’1’’ 110lb woman who both want to achieve a visible set of abs, right? This smaller engine gives off a hell of a lot less heat than a bigger one. For some women, this means the ‘thermic effect of food’ (i.e., the energy you take to digest and use the food you eat) is also less in women than on average.

• Intramuscular Versus Subcutaneous Fat Loss. Women tend to store a higher proportion of fat in the intramuscular compartment than men. So when it comes to your fat-loss progress, you might not see the type of visual effects you would expect or hope.

• High Metabolic/Hormonal Adaptability (leptin, ghrelin, thyroid, etc.). Women are shown to have a higher rate of metabolic adaptiveness when compared to men. At first, this sounds like a pretty good thing, right? Meh, not so much. As you get deeper into your diet your hormones, which regulate your hunger, fat storage, water balance, and a host of other factors, will adapt much faster to the reduced intake, causing you to hit plateaus both faster and more often. In addition, female sex hormones, progesterone in particular, can wreak havoc on things like water retention and fat deposition throughout the course of the monthly menstrual cycle.

The information presented so far has seemed like nothing but a doom and gloom about the female metabolism. But there is a silver lining. Many of the things making women less optimized for high-degrees of fat loss are also what makes their metabolism ‘healthier’ than male counterparts. When you consider that getting super lean may not completely healthy thing for everyone, especially if you are already within a healthy body fat range, it starts to make sense.

Give yourself time to achieve your fat-loss goals.

The Strategies

The followoing strategies can help you tackle your fat-loss efforts while taking into account the specific roadblocks faced by women: 

• More frequent re-feed days. Re-feed days are when after a period of being in a calorie deficit, you raise your calories, usually up to around maintenance. Re-feed days are not cheat days; they are a controlled part of your diet where you manipulate your macronutrient intake to reserve the down-regulation of certain fat loss enabling hormones during a long diet. For most people, it’s best to incorporate them when you hit your first weight loss plateau on a once-per-week basis. Some things to keep in mind when implementing re-feed days are to try and get the bulk of your ‘extra’ calories from carbohydrates, and limit your fat intake to less than 50g.

• Longer re-feed days or “diet breaks.” Like a re-feed, a diet break is a more prolonged period of time, usually up to a couple of weeks, where you ‘take a break’ from being in a constant calorie deficit, and take your calories up to maintenance. This has an amplified effect of the metabolic ‘reset’ of a re-feed helps. This is not an opportunity for you to binge for a couple of weeks and come back to your diet like nothing happened. It’s simply a strategic move on your part to make the process easier on yourself in the long run.

• More LISS (Lower Intensity Steady State) cardio. The lower you take your calories, the more hormonal and metabolic down-regulation you’ll experience. An easy way to combat this is good ol’ lower intensity steady state cardio. Yes, I know this has no functional place in your training. And yes, I know it’s boring as heck. But it helps you stay in a calorie deficit without lowering your calories to dangerously low levels. And I’m all for that.

• More training volume. Another one-up that women have over men when it comes to training is an increased specific work capacity and volume tolerance. Women are usually capable of performing more sets and reps in a given intensity range than men. And that’s exactly what you should do. Unless you have a coach construct a program just for you, chances are your current program was designed for a male athlete. So go ahead and add in a few more working sets here and there. This will both help you retain more strength and muscle as you cut, and contribute to your calorie deficit to help you continue to lose fat.

• Stay active. This one is more psychological and physiological. Plain and simple…dieting sucks. You get tired. You get lethargic. And all you can think about is your next meal. This is a slippery slope that can put you on the fast track to obsessive behavior about food, along with a non-existent social and family life. So during your diet, make time to get out of the house and do things you enjoy. This will not only increase your general activity level (combating the metabolic slow-down that comes with a long diet), but also give you a proper mental break.

• Track weight progress daily and average the weekly results. Remember those nasty progesterone-induced fluctuations in water weight I mentioned earlier? Well, they can stress you out if you only track your weight on random days across the month. Weighing yourself daily and tracking progress based on your weekly averages takes a psychological load off of getting freaked out not knowing why even though you look leaner in the mirror, you weigh five pounds more than you did last week.

Give Yourself Time

While these tips make your diet easier to stick to, more effective, and more sustainable, most of them actually have the potential to add time to how long you need to diet. And this is not inherently a bad thing. One of the biggest mistakes people make when adjusting eating habits is to not give themselves enough time to diet down, which leads to the application of some less-than-sustainable diet practices. And while this might get you lean for a few days, the rebound won’t be pretty. Give yourself enough time to reach your goal, whatever it is, and don’t get too worked up about it in the first place. It is just a diet after all.

Think you’re too busy to workout? Think again:

3 Fat Loss Workouts for When You’re in a Time Crunch

The post Fat Loss Considerations for Females appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If you’re here, it’s most likely because you have a life, a job, a family, and interests, passions, and commitments outside of the gym. But you still want to make a commitment to your health, and of course, look freaking awesome with your clothes off. And you want to do it in as little time as possible. Because you’ve got other stuff to do.

This article will give you an honest and practical framework on how to structure and plan an effective training program using as little equipment as possible, in as little time as possible. This article will not give you a gimmicky “2-minute fat blasting booty detox magic secret workout” that promises unrealistically large results for an unrealistically small amount of work. This is still going to be hard work.

If you plan intelligently, and work effectively and efficiently, there is no reason that you cannot make significant progress with relatively minimal time and equipment.

You don’t need fancy equipment to get fit. [Photo credit: Shutterstock]

Getting Started

What you will need:

• 15 minutes a day on average
• A pull up bar

You might be thinking, “I thought you said no equipment?” While you can make decent progress without a pull up bar, the benefits of purchasing one greatly outweigh the cost. If you’ve got a door in your house (going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty sure you do), and enough money to buy a latte, you’ve got everything you need to get yourself a decent door-attaching pull up bar.

Just because 15 minutes a day is the minimum recommendation doesn’t mean that you won’t benefit from a little more time. If you can manage, 30 minutes a day is plenty to get optimal results for most people in most situations. Note how I said “on average.” This means that you can spread this time across your week as you like, so it could be as often as 7-minute workouts every day of the week, or two 50-minute workouts per week. It’s completely up to you and your schedule.

Figure Out Your Goals

First, you have to establish what you want to achieve from your training. Correct me if I’m wrong, but generally you want to:

1. Lose fat and gain muscle, giving you the look commonly referred to as “toned.”
2. Feel and move better in your day-to-day life.

Now let’s break down those two goals. To lose fat and gain muscle you need to follow a properly regimented training program that gives you balanced and progressive muscular development while taking up as little of your time as possible, along with a complementary nutrition plan.

To feel and move better, you need to do two things. First, develop a decent amount of cardiovascular capacity, enough that you can walk a few flights of stairs without feeling like you got run over by a truck, or more importantly, enough to have the energy to play with your kids or catch a pickup game of basketball with the boys. Second, claim and maintain basic positions that are pivotal to your joint and connective tissue health in the long-term. This involves a little bit of mobility work (i.e., stretching)

Looks like the basics are all settled. Now we can get into the nitty gritty.

The Importance of Progression and Movement Selection

This is one of the most fundamental things you need to grasp before getting started. No matter what sort of program you choose, you must focus on progression over time. If you don’t have that sorted, you are inevitably doomed to hit a plateau in your progress. So, how do we measure progress?

• Increasing volume and intensity over time. This means increasing your sets, reps, and/or load for your movements over the course of your training.
• Better movement quality/technique over time. Moving better, smoother, and with less pain. This could be something as simple as squatting a little deeper than you did the previous workout.
• Improved workload density. More work in less time. That’s all there is to it. This is a much better tool to measure your cardiovascular conditioning rather than your strength.

You understand that it’s important to progress on your “primary movements,” but what the hell should your primary movements be?

The goal is to base your program off of compound movements, which use minimal equipment, and will lead to balanced development in your body over time. The primary movements include a squat, press, and pull. You would then supplement your training with isolation movements to work on specific muscles that you’d like to give more attention to, like the arms, calves, or abs.

Points of Performance

Training with mainly bodyweight movements presents an issue when it comes to progressing over time: If you’re doing everything right, you will very quickly outgrow the basic starting points for each movement pattern. To combat this, here are some practical pointers to help you continue to make your movements more difficult as you progress over time.

Squats: Once a normal squat gets too easy, progress to more difficult unilateral movements. Here are the best ones in order of increasing difficulty:

• Lunges
• Cossack squats
• Bulgarian split squats
• Pistol squats

If you get to the point when you’re such a stud that pistols are too easy, you’re probably ready to get a small set of weights to hold in front or at your sides while you perform the movement.

Presses: The first step is to progressively increase the incline of your pushup. If you keep this up over a long period of time you’ll end up doing handstand pushups. And if you are dedicated and become strong enough that handstand pushups are a cake-walk you can go back to horizontal pushups, but with one hand this time.

Yup, that’s right, you’re practically Rocky.

Intensity, Volume, and Frequency

Manipulating the following three variables is the most powerful tool at your disposal for controlling your results:

• Intensity, in its purest sense, refers to how ‘heavy’ each movement is compared to your maximal output for said movement
• Volume is the amount of work you do for each movement. The balance of volume and intensity dictate how many sets and reps you do for each movement.
• Frequency is simply how often you do each movement.

Due to the nature of the bodyweight movements in this plan, it makes little sense to focus on the lower rep ranges (i.e., below 5). A solid home workout plan should keep rep ranges in the moderate (8-12) to high (15+) range. Just make sure that you don’t let your reps/set go anywhere above 25. Although hypertrophy is possible around this rep range, it’s definitely not optimal. On top of that, more reps equate to more time spent training, and we want to make the absolute most of our time.

Structure your training to work each major movement pattern at least twice a week. That can mean dedicating each day to a movement pattern, and training 6 days a week, or doing all three movement patterns in a single workout and training twice a week.

Here are some recommendations to get you started with rest intervals, rep temp, and training to failure:

Rest intervals: For most people in most cases, around 60-90 seconds between sets and 1-2 minutes between movements will give you plenty of time to recover, and allow you to get a lot of stimulus without taking up too much time.

Rep tempo: As long as you’re controlling both the eccentric and concentric part of each movement, and are not feeling any pain or discomfort at any point, you’ve got nothing else to worry about.

Training to Failure: Because you are working with bodyweight, low-risk, low-fatigue movements, going to failure on your final set will definitely go a long way in maximizing your progress. Keep an eye out for the common signs of over-reaching just in case it does start to catch up with you after a while.

Cardiovascular Conditioning

Since you’re on a time crunch, you need the maximum bang-for-your-buck when it comes to conditioning. And that’s where the Tabata protocol comes in. This thing is HIIT (high-intensity interval training) on cocaine.

In a nutshell, the Tabata protocol is 20 seconds of ‘work’, followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated 8 times. Sounds easy right. Trust me, you have never been more wrong. For a more in-depth look, check out the original experiment.

There are some important things to keep in mind when doing Tabata:

You can’t use the Tabata protocol with any movement. Ideally, it should be a low-skill, low-load exercise, which causes more cardiovascular fatigue than muscular fatigue. Some ideal candidates would be running, squats, jump squats, stair sprints, and burpees.

Do not try and use Tabata to build strength. It was designed specifically to improve cardiovascular conditioning in the shortest time possible, and this is precisely how it should be used. Perform the protocol at least two times a week, and a maximum of five. The latter is due to the relatively large recovery deficit that such an intense protocol creates.

Mobility Work

The bare minimums to claim and maintain your body’s vital movements and positions are simple:

• Squat bottom position
• Dead hang from a pull up bar

Supported heavily by movement specialists Ido Portal and Kelly Starrett, the simple act of sitting in the bottom of a bodyweight squat for a few minutes can do wonders for your body over time. Don’t worry too much about keeping a perfectly upright torso, but allow yourself to settle into a comfortable and sustainable position. Focus mainly on getting below parallel with your heels on the ground.?

The benefits of hanging from a pull up bar range from strengthening of connective tissue in your shoulder girdle to spinal decompression. When doing so, let your scapula spread at the bottom. Focus on not grabbing the bar too tightly, causing most of the tension to be borne by your hands, but use the hands as hooks, and let yourself hang in a free and relaxed manner.

Apart from these two drills, the use of a lacrosse ball to work out any particular pain points you might have is immensely helpful. And anything beyond that, will of course require some more specialized care.

An Aside on Proper Nutrition

No matter how on-point your training might be, if you don’t have your diet inline to meet your goals then all of it will likely go to waste. For the majority of folks, a flexible dieting approach, in which you count your macros on a day-to-day basis, will give you the best results, with the least restriction to the rest of your life.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when planning your nutrition:

• Always prioritize meeting your calorie goal.
• To lose weight, the single most important factor that needs to be achieved is a calorie deficit (i.e.,. eating less than your maintenance calories consistently over time)
• To gain weight, the single most important factor that needs to be achieved is a calorie surplus (i.e.,. eating more than your maintenance calories consistently over time)
• After that, make sure you get in adequate amount of protein and fat: at least 0.8 grams/lb of lean mass for protein, and at least 0.3 grams/lb of lean mass for fats.

How comfortable are you in the bottom of your squat?

Squat Therapy: 4 Drills for a Better Squat

Beginner Basic Bodyweight Strength Program

It would be just plain rude of me to dump all that information on you without offering a well-constructed program. So on that note, here’s a template based on a 3 day per week cycle.

Day 1

• Pull up (underhand grip): 2 sets of 10-12 reps
• Push up: 2 sets of 10-12 reps
• Bodyweight/goblet squat: 2 sets of 10-12 reps
• Hollow-body hold: 2 sets of 30 seconds

Day 2

• Pull up (neutral grip): 2 sets of 8-10 reps
• Bench dips: 2 sets of 8-10 reps
• Backward-stepping lunge: 2 sets of 8-10 reps
• Plank: 2 sets of 60 seconds

Day 3

• Pull up (overhand grip): 2 sets of 5-8 reps
• Incline push ups: 2 sets of 5-8 reps
• Jump squats: 2 sets of 5-8 reps
• Lying leg raises: 2 sets of 5-8 reps

Avoid adding resistance or moving to a more difficult movement before you are able to perform all the prescribed reps on the upper limit of the stated rep range. Try to get at least one day of rest between training days. And remember, never compromise technique.

Check out this list of fun workouts and simple exercises to do when stuck at home.

The post Train at Home on a Time Crunch appeared first on Breaking Muscle.