June 7, 2019

What 15 studies say about how you can lose fat without losing muscle Part 2

Was 15 Studien darüber sagen, wie Du Fett abbauen kannst, ohne Muskeln zu verlieren Teil 2

After looking at some basic aspects of fat loss without accompanying muscle loss in the first part of this article, in this second part we will look at other points such as cardio training, strength training and the right protein intake.

4. can you lose body fat without cardio training?

Yes, you can lose fat without cardio. In terms of improving body composition, I consider cardio to be like the air conditioning in your car - it's nice to have, especially if you live in a country with a warm climate, but it's certainly not essential.

The only caveat I would make is that cardio can be extremely useful if you really want to get lean (and by really lean, I mean a body fat percentage that wouldn't look out of place on the cover of a fitness magazine).

For everyone else, however, it is easily possible to lose fat without spending a single minute on a treadmill, elliptical trainer or cycle ergometer.

Cardio won't make you fat, it won't kill you, and it won't do any of the other nonsense you read about, but for anyone whose definition of lean simply means losing enough weight to fit back into your favorite clothes and look good on the beach, strength training and diet alone will be perfectly sufficient.

If you want to add some cardio to your program, then I would recommend that most of this consists of cardio at a consistent low intensity. My personal favorite is 30 to 60 minutes of walking first thing in the morning. This not only burns a few extra calories, but is also a great way to clear your head for the day.

The benefit of consistent low intensity cardio is that it burns extra calories while having minimal impact on your muscle building efforts in the gym. You can't train at full intensity every day as your body also needs time to recover. This is especially true if you are over 40 and your recovery capacity is not as good as it was when you were younger.

Low-intensity activities such as walking or cycling put less strain on your body and can therefore be performed more frequently without impairing your recovery too much.

5. can I only lose fat by training with weights?

Yes, you can only lose fat by training with weights. In fact, if you want to lose fat without losing muscle, training with weights is essential. Without resistance training, you'll end up looking like a thinner version of your current self with all the flabby bits still intact.

A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (2) suggests the importance of training with weights versus cardio. In this study, two groups of overweight subjects followed the same low-calorie diet. One group performed cardio training in the form of jogging, walking or cycling four times a week, while the other group trained with weights three times a week and did no cardio training.

After three months, both groups had lost weight. The cardio group had lost 12 kilos of fat and 4.1 kilos of lean body tissue, while the group that exercised with weights had lost 14.5 kilos of fat and almost no lean tissue.

In a similar study comparing diet plus strength training, diet plus cardio and diet alone, all three groups lost about the same amount of fat (4), but the diet plus cardio and diet-only group lost about twice as much muscle mass as the group that strength trained alongside their diet.

The fact that you are strength training may therefore mean that you lose less weight - especially if you are just starting to train with weights. Take someone who is untrained and overweight and you will often find that such a person loses relatively large amounts of fat while building muscle.

This means that the weight on the scale will not drop as quickly as it otherwise would, but ultimately the amount of weight you lose is less important than where the lost weight comes from. If you lose 10 pounds of fat while gaining 3 pounds of muscle, your weight on the scale will only go down 7 pounds, but you will look much better than if you had just lost 10 pounds of fat.

How much strength training should you do?

The answer to this question depends a lot on you and how much time you have available for training. As a minimum, I would consider two training sessions with weights per week. If you are willing to work hard and push yourself, then you can lose fat without losing muscle with two full body workouts per week.

I know that two weight training sessions a week might not sound like enough, but there is plenty of scientific research to show that this is the case.

So even if you only have the time (or motivation) to go to the gym twice a week, it's still possible to lose your lifelines, tone your abs and improve your muscle definition as long as these two workouts are put together properly.

Remember that your main goal besides fat loss is to keep the muscle you have right now. And studies show that you can maintain any given component of fitness - be it muscle mass, strength or aerobic power - with significantly less work than it took to develop it.

Is there an upper limit to the amount of strength training you can do while in a calorie deficit?

Four days of strength training per week is perfectly fine. This is not to say that you can't do more. In fact, there is no good reason why you can't train with weights 5 to 6 days a week - always assuming your training program is set up correctly. For most people, however, four days of hard strength training per week is perfectly adequate in most cases.

The terms strength training and resistance training are often used as interchangeable synonyms, but they are not the same thing. The term resistance training is a catch-all term that covers a wide range of set and repetition schemes.

I've seen people in the gym doing 20 to 30 minutes of cardio followed by a few light sets of side raises and tricep kickbacks. This could still be considered resistance training if the term is interpreted generously.

However, a workout can only be called strength training if it makes you strong. The type of training that helps you maintain your muscle mass is pretty much the same type of training that you did to build that muscle mass.

However, "pretty much the same" does not mean "exactly the same" type of training, and strength training in a state of caloric deficit is different from strength training in a state of caloric surplus. While a calorie deficit is essential for fat loss, it can have a negative impact on the quality of your workouts, as well as your ability to recover from those workouts.

In other words, an exercise program that works well when you're in a calorie surplus may not work quite as well when you're in a calorie deficit. So you will need to adjust your training program to compensate for this.

I can't tell you exactly how you should change your training sessions now, as I don't know what you are currently doing during your training. And the degree of adjustments needed in your training will depend a lot on how good of shape you are in.

However, I would recommend that you reduce your training volume, where I define volume at this point as the total number of sets you perform per muscle group per week. You can do this by doing fewer exercises per muscle group or fewer sets per exercise, or by reducing your training frequency (how often you train each muscle group per week). Of course, a combination of all of these is also possible.

6. how much protein do you need to maintain your muscle mass while losing weight?

If you want a simple number to aim for that doesn't involve estimating your body fat percentage, then use 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (5). For a person weighing 82 kilos, this equates to a daily protein intake of around 130 grams.

When it comes to going from 'lean' to 'very lean', it might be beneficial to consume a little more protein. For example, if you currently have a body fat percentage of 12 to 13% and you want to achieve a single-digit body fat percentage, then you should aim for about 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body fat.

Eating more protein won't do you any harm, but I don't think it will bring any significant additional benefits. Eating large amounts of protein can be both expensive and impractical, so it doesn't make much sense to eat more protein. When it comes to fat loss without accompanying muscle loss, protein plays some very important roles.

First of all, protein has a "muscle sparing" effect. If you don't eat enough protein while you're dieting, you'll end up losing muscle as well as fat (6). In addition to this, protein is also more satiating than carbohydrates or fat (7).

In one study, Italian scientists found that subjects stopped eating after consuming 50 grams of protein and 411 kcal in the form of a high-protein omelette (8). However, with a low-protein omelette containing only 25 grams of protein, they consumed 713 kcal - an increase in calorie intake of 73%.

In another study, subjects were given a lunch followed four hours later by either a high-protein, high-fat or high-carbohydrate snack (9). On the control day, when there was no snack, the subjects asked for dinner about 6 hours after lunch.

They asked for dinner 35 minutes later after the high-carbohydrate snack and 25 minutes later after the high-fat snack. On the day with the high-protein snack, however, the demand for dinner was delayed by 60 minutes.

The figure below is from a study conducted at the University of Washington, where dieters were told to eat about twice as much protein as they normally would (10). The circles at the top represent calorie intake, while the diamond-shaped symbols at the bottom represent body weight.

As you can see, consuming more protein led to a spontaneous reduction in calorie intake that persisted over the entire duration of the study. In fact, calorie intake fell by an average of 411 kcal per day.

However, there is an upper limit when it comes to the satiating effect of protein. Once you go beyond this point, simply eating more protein will not bring any further benefits. One study found that a protein intake of 1.75 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight was just as satiating as a 50% higher protein intake (2.85 grams per kilogram of body weight) (11).

To lose fat without accompanying muscle loss, you are better off splitting your protein intake into 3 to 4 smaller meals rather than eating your protein in the form of two larger meals. Spreading your protein intake evenly throughout the day is better for increasing muscle protein synthesis - a driving force behind muscle growth - than eating a smaller number of meals (12, 13).

More frequent meals (6 vs. 2) have also been shown to increase the maintenance of muscle mass during weight loss (14). Although meal frequency may not have a significant effect on your rate of weight loss, protein frequency may very well affect your ability to maintain muscle (or even build muscle) while losing fat.

7 Can I lose body fat without losing weight?

It is - at least in theory - possible to lose fat without losing weight. However, this requires that you build muscle at the same rate as you lose fat. This is not a realistic goal for most people in most cases. However, with very few exceptions, you will not build muscle nearly as fast as you lose fat.

There are numerous methods that involve cyclical changes in calorie intake that claim to get around this problem, but even with these methods, you won't replace every pound of fat with a pound of muscle. The best most people can hope for is minor muscle gains while losing much larger amounts of fat.

What you can do is split your training and diet into different cycles, some of which focus on fat loss and others on muscle growth. Over a period of months or years, it may be possible to end up at the same weight you are now, having replaced the fat you lost with muscle mass.

However, much of this depends on the amount of fat you want to lose. If you need to lose 50 pounds of fat, then building 50 pounds of muscle may prove to be out of your reach, depending on your genetic makeup. On the other hand, if you only want to lose 10 or 20 pounds of fat, then replacing that fat with muscle is a more realistic goal.

8. Why do I lose muscle even though I work out?

If you're losing muscle and fat, chances are you're not doing enough of the right type of resistance training, you're not eating enough protein, you're losing weight too quickly (i.e. your calorie deficit is too large), or a combination of these three factors.

9. how can I do cardio without losing muscle?

Performing cardio training does not make it inevitable that you will lose muscle and your muscles will get bigger and stronger if your training program includes both strength training and cardio training.

However, cardio training still has the potential to affect your progress. It can do this, for example, by reducing the quality of your training sessions, which in turn reduces the strength of the muscle-building stimulus generated by the given training session. It can also interfere with the "make me bigger" signal sent to the muscle fibers during the hours and days following the workout.

However, the degree of interference will depend on the proximity of your cardio training session to your weights training session, the type of cardio training you perform, how often you perform cardio training, how intense your cardio training is, how long your cardio training sessions are, and how well you recover from those cardio training sessions.

If you don't overdo it with volume, frequency and intensity, you don't have to worry about your cardio training slowing down your muscle growth. Some types of cardio can even aid recovery by increasing blood flow to the muscles without causing further damage.

Cycling at low to moderate intensity for 20 to 30 minutes a day after a heavy leg training session, for example, will often reduce muscle soreness and could also increase the rate at which muscle damage in the leg muscles is repaired.

There are no rules that describe exactly how much cardio you should do and when you should do it. However, I do have a few general guidelines based on scientific research on this topic that can minimize the degree to which your cardio workouts interfere with your gains (15).

Firstly, you should limit the amount of moderate to high intensity cardio you do to a maximum of 40 minutes, three days a week. Ideally, cardio should be done on a different day to your weights training. However, if you are pressed for time, you can also do your cardio training directly after your weight training. In addition to this, low intensity cardio such as cycling, swimming, rowing or walking on a treadmill should be preferred to things like running.

References:

Source: https://muscleevo.net/how-to-lose-fat-without-losing-muscle/

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