Ok guys it is a brand new week and I am totally excited for the week ahead of me. I have been logging my foods on fitday regularly and starting to get into a nice groove with some of my workouts.
Not too much changes in my training program, I always train first and foremost for strength and then add my volume and conditioning in as I go. Obviously if your goal is to get into low single digit bodyfat levels than your strength may suffer slightly torwards the very end however if you plan it right you can hold on to most of your strength. Really depends how lean you are trying to get. The is an inverse relationship with the amount of work/volume you can do when training for pure strength and vice versa.
What’s interesting is a program designed training for maximum strength gains can accompanied by a lower carbohydrate diet since your are really using your central nervous system when training for low reps and the glycolytic systems are not needed as much therefore the carbohydrate intake is not as important.
When training for muscle size you need to add volume to your training program in the terms of more sets, higher rep schemes, going ot failure, etc. This involves more glycogen therefore your tap into the system that requires carbohydrates to perform at its best. This does not mean you should scrap the heavy lifts but what it means is you need to add some extra sets/volume to your main lift. If you max lifts start to suffer than you have too much volume and intensity and you need to find a balance between them.
Since we are adding volume which in turn taps into our glycolytic system than your carbohydrate intake must be increased in order to make the muscle size gains that you are looking for in a higher volume training program. This is one of the mistakes that most guys make when planning out their training and nutrition program.
To put it very simply, if your main objective is to get bigger sized muscles than your caloric intake must be in a surplus from what your body needs to take in. So if your body requires 2000kcal. and you want to put on muscle size than you are going to need to take in more than 2000kcal in order for that to take place. If you are looking to get lean and lose some bodyfat than you need a deficit in your caloric intake and therefore it would be less than 2000 kcal per day. Usually a good way to determine how many less calories to take in would be a 10-15% decrease in calories. This will give your body the amount of calories it needs to run efficiently yet put you in a deficit to use fat stores as energy.
If you do not know how to find out your caloric intake or your BMR than find a coach to do this for you and go from there.
Mike’s Plan for the Week:
What I plan on doing for this week is to keep my calories right where they are which is 2400 calories per day with a breakdown of 40% protein, 40% carbs, and 20% fat. The change that I will make this week is to increase my volume in my workouts. So I will add another round of my barbell comlex in on one day, increase the run that I am performing on another day, add a 20 minute airdyne bike session at the end of one of my workouts. The slight changes that I make will cause just enough change in my body to cause some more fat loss.
Keeping my calories the same and adding more exercise which requires me to burn more calories will have my body doing more work with the same amount of food therefore use fat stores to burn for fuel. This will cause fat loss. Each week from here on I will slightly change my calorie intake and my exercise program to cause my body to utilize my fat stores to burn as fuel. It’s that simple. It just has to be planned and followed.
Stay focused on your goals and if you don’t have goals than focus on getting some!
Mike
