@JasonFerruggia is it possible to cut bodyfat and still increase strength for intermediates and what are realistic expectations thanks.
— Ross Armstrong (@rossypotamus) January 6, 2014
Ross,
Absolutely. There are two ways to gain strength. One is to increase the size of the muscle. The other is to increase the neural drive to the muscle (neural improvements).
When you’re dieting for fat loss you obviously won’t be increasing the size of the muscle. So you’ll have to focus on neural strength gains, which is really what you should be doing anyway.
Plenty of people regularly make impressive strength gains and even hit PR’s while leaning out.
Bodyweight exercises will all improve as you lose body fat. Many lifts will go up, others will remain stagnant but shouldn’t go down.
There are two exceptions, however.
If you have a large waist and you cut, lets say six inches off of it, your squat weight will most likely go down. That’s simply because your foundation will no longer be as big/wide. But a lot of that has to do with how you squat. If you’re squatting high bar, Olympic style and going straight down you won’t notice as much of a decrease as you would squatting the way a geared powerlifter squats.
Your bench press will also suffer because the range of motion will increase. When you lose fat on your back and chest the bar will now have to travel through a greater range of motion.
But I wouldn’t worry about either of those. Focus on getting lean and don’t pre-load any excuses into your head. You CAN get stronger while losing fat.
Train heavy (but with submaximal weights) in the range of 3-6 reps and be sure to really maximize tension from head to toe during the performance of each set. Contrary to what most people would think, you may actually need to slightly increase your rest periods when dieting. That’s because calories will be low so you may find yourself more fatigued than normal. If you find that starts happening simply give yourself a bit more rest between sets. That way you will be sure not to sacrifice any strength.
@JasonFerruggia got a question, though. I hit each muscle twice a week, do I need to hit them all heavy or do heavy/moderate weights?
— Adam Bornflores (@ADAMxBORNFLORES) January 7, 2014
Adam,
Back around 1930 Mark Berry started using the Heavy/Light/ Medium system (or Heavy/Medium/Light, depending on how you want to look at it) and Bill Starr popularized it a few decades later. That’s when almost everyone always did full body workouts and didn’t split things up too much. That system has always worked incredibly well. If you split your training into upper and lower body workouts a heavy/moderate day, like you mentioned, is a great option that’s been used by many successful lifters. So on the heavy upper body day you might focus on sets of 3-5 reps and on the second upper body day of the week you’d use lighter weights and an average of eight reps per set (or as high as ten, in some cases). This is a great way to compress longer periodization schemes into one week and helps prevent you from burning out. I use it in my Renegade Strong program.
@JasonFerruggia What’s your gym playlist at the moment? Everything I’ve got from you so far is hip-hop gold.
— Joel Snape (@JoelSnape) January 8, 2014
Joel,
As I guess you might know, music is a huge passion of mine and it’s always playing in my house.
Since you mentioned hip-hop I will stick with that for what is currently on high rotation on my training mix.
RA the Rugged Man made one of the greatest and most underrated hip hop albums of 2013. I always have some La Coka Nostra, PE and some Beasties in the mix. I’ve also been on a pretty serious Nas kick lately.
Anyway, here’s a look at my current training mix:
Got a question that requires more than 140 characters to answer? Holler at me on Twitter with the hashtag #AskJay and I will do my best to answer it here.
