5 mistakes that will ruin your body composition
More muscle and less fat = improved body composition. Everyone wants it and yet not many achieve it. Those who don't achieve it fail to see the bigger picture and focus on small, inconsistent things while making some big fat mistakes. Are you one of these people?
Mistake 1 - Exercising too infrequently
If you want to look like someone who moves a lot of weights, then you need to move a lot of weights.
The more often you get your body to adapt to stress, the faster it will change. Sure, two to three workouts a week can maintain and sometimes even increase your strength levels, but from a body composition perspective, this will limit your ability to build muscle and reduce fat.
This doesn't mean you should suddenly start working out every day of the week. As with most things, you need to increase your training frequency slowly. This will give your body time to adapt to the workload without causing unwanted side effects such as overuse injuries. Just add a single extra training day to your program for a month. After a month, you can add another training day to your program, and so on. I think you know where I'm going with this.
These don't have to be grueling workouts. It can be an arm day or a day where you focus on a weak muscle group for half an hour. But this will make a huge difference in the rate at which your body composition changes.
Bottom line: If you do more training with weights while eating according to your goals, your body will respond to the stimulus. This means more muscle and less fat.
Mistake 2 - Too much cardio
You need some type of cardio training, but probably not as much as you think. If you need a lot of cardio, then something is wrong with your diet.
Cardio - whether it's consistent intensity cardio or interval training - is important for body recomposition. Doing cardio in moderation compared to your weight training is far better for body recomposition than overdoing it with cardio.
Remember that your function will create your form. The more cardio you do at a consistent intensity, the more your body will adapt to these demands. Over time, you will likely look like someone who does a lot of cardio at a consistent intensity. Interval training tends to be more anaerobic and can be done in short bursts that increase your metabolic rate for quite some time beyond the duration of the training session, which is not the case with steady-state cardio.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages. But unless your goal is to look like a jogger, you should limit steady-state cardio to a few 30-minute workouts per week. Make sure you work hardest on your diet to get leaner. A few weeks of multiple cardio workouts at a consistent intensity can get you out of a rut. But more often than not, you need to adjust your diet instead. If you have to do tons of cardio to stay lean, then your diet sucks. Item.
Mistake 3 - Disregarding the importance of sleep
A lack of sleep will make you fatter and even lead to muscle loss - and that's regardless of diet.
When did not getting enough sleep become something to brag about? "Hey, I only sleep 5 hours a night!" Congratulations. How many times can you hit yourself in the balls with a hammer before a workout? Getting too little sleep won't make you harder, but will certainly affect your efforts in the weight room. While you may be able to "function well" on a few hours of sleep, it will still work against your body composition goals.
In one study, the group of subjects who slept 8.5 hours per night lost more fat than a group who slept only 5.5 hours per night. In addition, the group that slept less lost significantly more muscle (60%!) than the group that got a full 8.5 hours of sleep. Both groups ate about the same amount of calories per day. This is just one more reason that body composition is more complicated than simply "calories in vs. calories out".
Where do you think your recovery really comes from? Babies tend to do two things after they are born - eat and sleep a lot. Why? Because the body needs a tremendous amount of rest in order to grow. So if you're not getting an adequate amount of sleep, when are you giving your body the extra time it needs for this process?
Getting your mind and body to relax at night can be a problem. Make sure your day-night cycle, which is controlled by darkness and light, is functioning normally. When it's dark, your body releases more melatonin. When it's light, the body reduces melatonin secretion and increases levels of stimulating hormones.
The light you are exposed to can mess with the body's natural melatonin release and delay a restful state for sleep. Reduce your use of TV, laptop and cell phone in the evenings when you are not reading my articles and open the curtains so that your body is awakened by natural sunlight each morning. Exposure to morning sunlight will help you to get your day-night rhythm back on track.
Additional help: If you have trouble shutting down your brain in the evening to relax, try a good ZMA product. And take 1 to 5 milligrams of melatonin on evenings when you can't switch off.
Mistake 4 - Not keeping track of how much you eat
It's easy to over- or underestimate your calorie needs. Keep track of calories and macronutrients - at least until you've developed a better sense of proportion when it comes to portion sizes.
When people start a new nutrition program or diet - to build muscle OR lose fat - they often simply change their portion sizes. One of the biggest problems with dieters is that they don't understand the importance of getting a handle on their portions and macronutrients. How will you know if you are meeting, exceeding or falling short of your necessary nutrient intake to build muscle or lose fat?
Don't start a diet if you're not going to take the time to weigh and measure your food. Even if your goal is to lose body fat and you make the big mistake of eating significantly too little, your dieting efforts will be unsuccessful if you break down and gorge yourself. And with certain foods, the calories will quickly add up. If you use olive oil every day when cooking and don't measure it out, this could be the only reason you're not losing fat. One tablespoon of olive oil has 119 kcal. This is not a large amount of oil and if you pour the oil out of the bottle for two seconds too long, it can mean that you double or triple the calories.
If you are convinced that good fats are important but ignore total calorie intake, then good luck with fat loss. I've had clients who, after they started measuring their food, found that they were eating more than 800 kcal more per day than they thought they were.
Spend a few months weighing and measuring your food to know what correct portion sizes look like so that you can estimate portion sizes by eye in the future. You'll be surprised by the differences in the rate at which your body changes when you actually adjust your calories and macronutrients correctly.
Mistake 5 - Not drinking enough
Even mild dehydration will ruin your performance in the weight room. Drinking ice cold water will stimulate your metabolism.
Sounds painfully obvious. Water is the one simple trick that plays a huge role in fat loss. Water has a thermogenic effect in the body that has been shown to aid fat loss. In fact, a study of healthy men and women showed that drinking 500ml of ice-cold water increased metabolic rate by around 30% for 40 minutes.
That being said, even a small amount of dehydration (around 2% of body weight) can affect your performance. And while most of the data concerns endurance performance, it's not far-fetched to say that being well hydrated for intense weight training sessions is crucial.
A simple rule of thumb: not sure how much to drink? Just drink 60 ml per kilogram of body weight per day. Yes, that may be a large amount of water, but it's better to drink a little too much than to be even slightly dehydrated.
References
- Boschmann M, Steiniger J, et al. Water-induced thermogenesis.
- Nedeltcheva A, Kilkus, J, et al. Insufficient Sleep Undermines Dietary Efforts to Reduce Adiposity.
by Paul Carter |
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/5-mistakes-that-wreck-body-composition