The Importance of Resistance Training
If you want to gain muscle while losing fat, it should go without saying that the only logical place to start your training efforts is with resistance training, preferably with weights (barbells, dumbbells, cables, some machines, etc). Without some type of resistance training, all bets are off - your muscle gains will be minimal.
In fact, it has been a frequent finding in research on starvation and very low calorie diets that in the absence of weight training, a calorie deficit can lead to 25% of the weight loss coming from lean tissue. In extreme cases, as much as half the weight loss could come from lean tissue. You’re not even in the recomposition game without serious strength training.
Even if your goal is fat loss, the weight training is necessary to maintain the lean body mass you have and to keep your body looking hard and lean. I think the opposite of successful recomposition is what most of the general public does for weight loss: they crash diet without training and lose a lot of body weight, but their body composition doesn’t improve. They simply become smaller versions of their old selves – skinny fat people. They fit into smaller clothes, but they don’t look good out of clothes (and they may not be healthier either).
Resistance training has a powerful effect on anabolic hormones and the partitioning of energy and nutrients. In the absence of weight training, a large percentage of the energy surplus gets stored as adipose tissue. By simply adding resistance training, if all else remains equal, calories will be utilized for energy to fuel training, amino acids shuttled into the muscle for tissue repair and growth, and carbohydrates sent to replace muscle glycogen.
What kind of resistance training is ideal?
The Holy Grail program does not require a specific weight training program. It is a system of nutritional periodization and cyclical dieting which you can match to whatever training you choose. However, weight training is mandatory and so crucial to getting optimal results that we need to discuss the basics of training design.
You can use almost any strength and hypertrophy-based workout program you like.
If you do not have a weight training program that you currently prefer, I have two recommendations that will work perfectly in the context of body recomposition goals, which are decidedly cosmetic goals:
(1) Traditional bodybuilding split routines as seen in the ebook, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. For physique athletes, I recommend physique-oriented training and that usually means a body-part based split routine, typically performed on a 3 day or 4 day split. I recommend not training more than 2 days in a row, so a 2 on 1 off schedule will work well in conjunction with The Holy Grail nutritional cycling plan.
(2) “The New Bodybuilding” (TNB) workout as seen in Men’s Fitness
magazine. I recommend this style of training – an upper and lower 2-day split for everyone else who wants to gain muscle and lose fat, but who is not interested in bodybuilding. I’ve included the TNB training program as a bonus with the purchase of this Holy Grail e-book.
Regardless of which training system you use, you should run your program through this quick checklist to make sure it’s an optimal choice to use in conjunction with The Holy Grail nutrition program.
9 The program should have a dual strength-hypertrophy emphasis.
Optimal results will be achieved when you rotate between heavier lifting in the 4-6 rep range for strength and moderate lifting in the 8-12 rep range for hypertrophy. High rep training in the 13-20 rep range can be included in smaller amounts, but should not replace the heavy and moderate training.
This program will not work optimally if you only use high reps. It’s a huge mistake to lower the poundage and perform only high reps thinking that you’ll burn more fat. You will actually be more likely to lose muscle.
9 The resistance training program should emphasize mostly straight sets and or supersets. You will get the best results if you use straight sets, where you perform one set then rest, or supersets, where you perform two exercises back to back with little to no rest in between, then rest. Circuit or bodyweight-only training can be excellent for conditioning and fat loss, but it lacks the maximum strength and hypertrophy elements. I have case studies in my files of people who gained muscle with virtually every type of program imaginable, including circuit training. However, you will almost always find the presence of the X1 and X2 factors (beginners, etc) that explain the concurrent muscle gains with fat loss even with sub-optimal protocols.
9 The resistance training program should have an appropriate training volume and duration. More sets and exercises are not necessarily better.
Better is better! Better training means more intensity, good exercise form and continuous progression. The training volume you choose (number of exercises X sets) should usually not have you training more than about 45-60 minutes per session. No training duration is set in stone, but the job can get done in under an hour.
9 The resistance program must use a frequency that allows optimal total body recovery and individual muscle group recovery. Your
muscles don’t grow during your workouts, they grow after your workouts. For body recomposition, resistance training frequency is optimal in the range of 3-4 days per week, depending on your experience level, available time and your goals. Bodybuilders might be the exception, utilizing more training days with a body part split routine (ie, 4-5 days per week of training). However, the frequency of working each muscle group would actually be lower, as each workout might only focus on one major and one minor muscle group and each muscle group might only be worked once every 5-6 days.
9 The resistance training program should emphasize basic compound lifts, with isolation exercises used as secondary movements. The majority of your exercises should be basic compound movements such as squats, Romanian deadlifts, lunges, split squats, chest presses, dips, shoulder presses, pull ups, rows and deadlifts. Isolation exercises and small body part exercises should be included, but considered of secondary importance.
Cardio training
It’s widely believed today that endurance training, also known as aerobic exercise or cardio, can interfere with your strength and muscle gains. In fact, there has been so much aerobics-bashing in the fitness and strength training community in recent years that debates between pro-cardio and anti-cardio camps sometimes get heated.
Research plus anecdotal evidence from groups such as competitive bodybuilders, suggests there’s room for both.
Most bodybuilders integrate cardio with weights year-round in moderate amounts and in larger amounts before contests. They seem to have no problem maintaining their muscle mass as they get ripped. But there’s no doubt that too much cardio added on top of a weight training program has the potential to hinder strength and muscle size gains.
Exercise physiology 101 tells us that the human body adapts specifically to the demands imposed upon it. If you impose the demand of lifting heavy weights, you stimulate mostly fast twitch (type IIb) muscle fibers, increase the size of your muscle fibers and increase the neuromuscular connections. In short, you send a message to your body to get bigger and stronger.
If you impose the demand of endurance training, you stimulate mostly slow twitch (type I) muscle fibers, increase maximal oxygen uptake, muscle aerobic enzyme activities, capillary density and mitochondrial density of your muscles. In short, you send a message to your body to increase aerobic capacity and become more
resistant to fatigue.
Some athletes need a little bit of both – strength and aerobic capacity. And of
course, many people want to gain muscle and lose fat, so they lift and do cardio. But what happens when you do both together?
Many strength and aerobic adaptations are antagonistic to one another. After all, no one can successfully train for a marathon and a powerlifting contest at the same time, can they? As they say, jack of all trades, master of none.
The question is, how much cardio is too much? How much is too little?
A study published in Medicine and Science and Sports and Exercise recruited 30 sedentary (untrained) healthy men who were divided into three groups, strength, endurance and concurrent (both).
The strength group performed eight weight training exercises for one warm up set and three maximal effort sets for 5 to 7 reps per set, to the point of muscular failure.
Rest between sets was approximately 75 seconds. The endurance group performed 50 minutes of continuous cycling at 70% of heart rate reserve.
The concurrent group completed the strength and the endurance protocol in the same session, with a 10-20 minute break between each workout (lifting or cycling).
The order of weight lifting or cycling was rotated with each session.
Results: When strength and endurance training were performed on the same day and for only 3 days per week on alternate days, strength development was NOT compromised as compared to the strength training only.
But here’s the kicker: The subjects in the concurrent training group actually experienced greater muscle growth in the thighs than the strength training only group!
The interference effect of doing cardio and weight training together is definitely not a foregone conclusion. In many of the studies which showed impairment in strength, the training protocol involved training the thighs 6 days per week (either via strength training such as squats, etc or cycling, etc.).
In some studies showing strength interference, up to 11 workouts per week were performed. Therefore, lower body recovery, choice of exercise and frequency of training are all important factors when you design a cardio program for concurrent muscle gain and fat loss emphasis.
Moderate amounts of cardio can help you gain muscle, while staying lean!
When the amount of cardio is moderate (2 to 3 days per week), cardio and strength training together can actually improve muscle growth without impeding strength. As one group of researchers from McMaster’s University put it, “A combination of some forms of strength and endurance training may be ‘additive’ rather than antagonistic.”
This may come as a surprise to many people, but there are many explanations for why this is the case.
9 First, cardio can help increase nutrient clearance from the blood and enhance nutrient uptake into the cells.
9 Second, cardio can increase capillary density, which can enhance delivery of oxygen, nutrients and hormones to the muscle cells. At the same time, the increased capillary density helps with the removal of waste products from working muscle tissue.
9 Third, when your cardiovascular fitness improves, you can also recover faster from your weight training. Many forms of low intensity cardio actually serve as active recovery.
9 Fourth, when you’re in good cardiovascular condition, you can perform better on demanding compound strength training exercises like squats, deadlifts, rows and lunges. If you ever felt yourself sucking wind after a set of squats or rows, then you can appreciate the role of good cardio in a strength training workout.
Cardio recommendations
Looking at the research on concurrent cardio and strength training, combined with experience of physique athletes and strength athletes helps us come up with some solid guidelines for cardio while seeking concurrent muscle gain and fat loss:
9 If your primary goal is muscle gain with a secondary goal of fat loss, limit yourself to 3 days per week of cardio. Research says that moderate amounts of cardio can actually help increase muscle growth. The key is to keep it to 2-3 days per week. Let the weight training and nutritional manipulation do the rest.
9 If your primary goal is fat loss with a secondary goal of concurrent muscle gain, start with 3 days of cardio. Increase conservatively.
When your primary goal is fat loss, longer and more frequent cardio sessions are helpful for increasing the weekly caloric deficit and burning fat faster.
However, if your secondary goal is muscle gain, be alert to the impact this may have on strength and muscle retention. Increase cardio conservatively and use mostly nutritional manipulation to get the deficit you need.
9 If your goal is focused fat loss, higher cardio frequencies are helpful and sometimes necessary. Bodybuilders typically do cardio 4-7 times per week during precontest training in addition to strength training as often as 4-5 times per week. During any cutting program, gaining strength and muscle mass are no longer priorities, as the goal switches to getting lean while maintaining muscle. As long as you maintain your LBM, the higher cardio frequency is not only acceptable, it is ideal for helping you get leaner faster.
9 Choose a cardio duration between 20 and 50 minutes. You can start on the low end and increase duration or intensity based on your weekly progress.
The duration will be dictated largely by your intensity level. The longer sessions will be low to moderate in intensity. The shorter sessions may be higher in intensity and could be performed as interval training (HIIT).
9 Use running or high impact cardio sparingly or not at all. Choose any type of cardio you want. However, keep in mind that the greatest area for concurrent training interference effects is in the legs. Cardio with high intensity, high impact or a strong eccentric component may place additional stress on the lower body and on your overall recovery capacity. Running has been shown to be particularly taxing on the lower body and is believed to increase risk of muscle loss more than other forms of cardio.
9 Restrict intense cardio to 2 days per week, 3 days max if you have good recovery ability. High intensity interval training (HIIT) has become popular as an effective and time-efficient way to do cardio, but too much intense cardio on top of intense weight training can easily lead to over training. I recommend no more than 2-3 HIIT sessions per week when concurrently doing 3 or more days per week of high intensity strength training. If you do additional cardio, make it lower intensity training or light activity like casual walking, which may even serve as active recovery while burning some calories.
9 Do cardio and weights separated into 2 sessions, if possible. If you do cardio and weight training in the same day, separating them into two
sessions, at least 8 hours apart, may help you enhance recovery and avoid some of the residual fatigue where one interferes with the other. Be especially certain that your legs are recovering completely and that fatigue from cardio doesn’t interfere with your weight training workouts, especially on leg day.
9 Do weights first and cardio second. If you do cardio and weights in the same session, always do the weights first and cardio second. Endurance athletes are the exception to this rule, but when strength and muscle increase are primary goals, the strength training should go first.
Body composition testing and the scale
Weekly weigh-ins and body composition tests are extremely important for tracking your progress. But be forewarned: When you’re using cyclical dieting methods, especially those with large carb-ups, scale fluctuations can mess with your head. As glycogen stores fill up on high carb days, your body weight usually spikes, and then drops precipitously by the third low carb day before jumping back up.
Keep a meticulous progress chart with weekly results for total body weight, fat mass, lean body mass, and body fat percentage. However, pay more attention to the trend in body composition over time and not so much to the daily fluctuations, especially if you are prone to large water weight fluctuations.
For detailed information on how to measure your body fat, refer to my fat loss book Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle chapter 3 and chapter 4 for detailed information on how to track your results and chart your progress.