Cutting fat and gaining muscle. How do I do it?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Personally, I think all that carb/protein/fat mix is crap. Just google the twinkie diet. Some guy lost 20 pounds in two months eating a diet for which two thirds of the calories were “convenience store food”.

Yoga will not help you lose weight. It might help with flexibility, balance and stress, but it won’t help you lose weight.

How hard do you push yourself when you run or bike? If you exercise vigorously, for twenty or more minutes at a shot, you should do better. That is, warm up first, then 20 minutes with a relatively high heart rate, then cool down. More like 40 minutes of exercise. one problem with biking is that unless you live someplace flat and without traffic lights, you coast and stop a lot.

Finally, are you actually chubby? Or is it your perception? What is your BMI?

22

I won’t even comment on that twinkie diet. I don’t care of he lost 27 pounds eating crap, he also felt like crap. I prefer to fuel my body with the stuff it needs, not sugar.

Depending on the type of yoga, yes, it can burn calories (and help you lose weight), but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it for flexibility and also because I have a three year plan to become a yoga instructor, which takes dedication to the practice of yoga under one or two teachers for a number of years before you even apply to the program.

I know exactly where I should be when it comes to exercising. I’m a certified fitness instructor and working my way through my Personal Training designation. I measure my exertion using a heart rate monitor, and depending on what I’m training for that day, I push to between 70% and 95% of my max HR. When I am doing my cycling training, for instance, I’m maintaining more then 75% of my max for most of a 90 minute class. If I’m doing a run, I’m running for 60+ minutes most of the time, at a pace consistent with my goal of the day (hills, tempo, long run, etc.). I’m not new to this, I know how to exercise, I just don’t know enough about nutrition, especially nutrition for someone in my situation with my history. This is why I asked for advice.

I am 5’9" and 160lbs. I would look better and race better if I were closer to 140 or 145.

23

A few years back I wanted to put on 20 lbs of muscle and while my workout was good I had no idea what I should be eating. I found Power Eating and haven’t looked back, I highly recommend it. What initially interested me was the author goes over all the common diet techniques and specifically why they don’t work, I bought it because in the back it lists specific foods and quantities for the daily diets for a wide variety of body types and fitness goals.

24

FYI, he was a nutritionist making the point that weight is all about calories in vs energy expenditure. To his surprise, he felt fine, and that is why he did it for two months instead of one. His HDL went up and his LDL went down. I wouldn’t live like that either, and he did give it up when he reached his goal weight.

From the article I read, the guy figured out he was so busy making sure he ate enough of the right mix of food, that he was losing track of total calories.

25

I read that he didn’t feel well for the first week, and that he did eat veggies and took a multivitamin as well, in addition to trying to achieve a balanced diet (and tracked it daily). The story is misleading (the way it’s portrayed in the media) and will unfortunately be used be people as an excuse to eat like crap. He did it for a short while, and while his cholesterol may have improved (which is what happens when you lose weight, fancy that?), long term issues from following a diet similar to this, like diabetes and heart disease, were never discussed in most media outlets. A regular person is not as diligent in tracking their diet and will probably eat all crap and get few nutrients.

Calories in vs. calories out is a surefire way to lose weight, but it has little to nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish. I can eat 1500 calories of crap, but I certainly wouldn’t want to exercise daily, let alone improve my speed, endurance or muscle mass, because I’d be too tired to do it.

26

The article I read said he got two thirds of his calories from the convenience store, and one third from a protein shake and veggies.

It sounds like you are trying to accomplish two goals: lose weight and improve performance. If you want to improve performance, you need carbs. A fair amount of them, like 40-60% of your diet, and 40% is pretty low on the carbs. (I’m sure you know you’ll have to bike more and more.)

I’m a pretty good athlete, I broke 3 hours in a marathon at altitude this summer and I’m 49, and I eat lots of fruits and veggies, Cheerios with fruit for breakfast, and a standard father-with-teenage-boys dinner.

27

Weeellll then, I’ll take your meta-analysis and raise you two…

http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/PIIS0899900710002893/fulltext (search on term “saturated fat” )

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/3/502

You may prostrate yourself in humility, now :smiley: P.S. I don’t blame you for caution, that is common sense.
As far as the OP’s question, I can only advise you to carefully balance the cardio training while you’re attempting to build muscle. Too much cardio can hamper muscle growth, IMHO. Training for an endurance event complicates things, so you’ll have to experiment unless someone knows for sure. What carbs you do eat, have with protein within 1-2 hours after your weight training . I believe the old rule of thumb was to eat 1 gram of protein per pound lean weight per day. There is some talk that excess protein converts to glucose in the body, but I would guess your cardio would prevent that.
I can say for sure that after you train hard and heavy for a year or so, your metabolism will burn like a thousand suns.

28

I’ve spent years on pretty much a ‘twinkie diet’ (junk-food vegetarian). I’m significantly lighter when I eat crappy food, mostly tons and tons of sugar and flour - I’m always skinny, but I can’t build or maintain any muscle mass eating that way. I thought I felt okay at the time; in hindsight, my health was not so good then. I thought the frequent tension headaches, constant shitting, persistent upper respiratory infections, the 15 horrible rashes and episodes of hives I’d get every year, horrendously painful periods, and sleeping 10 hours per day and still feeling tired were just things I was stuck with like my father - everyone has their little issues with their body, right? Turns out that every single one of those things were a direct consequence of my diet and lifestyle.

Calories in vs calories out isn’t a theory that applies very well for my body it seems. Whatever and however much I eat, which ever since I started my concerted effort to gain weight has been in excess of 2500-3000 calories per day (before, when I tracked my calories to see how much I needed to add, it was 1500-2000), my body will find a way to burn it off. My skin gets hot to the touch, I feel overheated and sweat easily. I get antsy, and fidget and move around more without even thinking about it. I’m heavier than I was when I are relatively little, mostly junk food, and didn’t exercise - by about 5 lbs.

However, if I add weight-bearing exercises (just yoga, bodyweight stuff before - now I’m powerlifting as well), I will start gaining weight eating the same amount. Mostly muscle mass it seems. I’ve gone up another 4 lbs since I started really exercising, and am hopeful that I can reach my weight-gain goals as long as I am consistant with working out.

29

It’s counter-intuitive, but honestly you’re probably better off eating a bit more. Depending on what you’ve done in the past, eating a calorie-restricted diet may encourage your body to keep adipose tissue.

I’m going to plug the Paleo diet. You don’t necessarily need to buy Cordain’s book since there’s a lot of free info on modern versions of a paleo diet out there, but he lays out the scientific arguments for it pretty well. Even if you don’t buy into it completely, eating paleo-ish will definitely clean up your food quality. More protein helps a lot with both building and maintaining muscle, and also helps with satiety. You almost literally cannot eat too much protein from whole food sources; you lose appetite before you get to abnormally high intakes. The basic outline of the diet is: lots of veggies, especially green leafy vegetables; no starch, bread, or processed carbs; some nuts; and lean meats, fish, other seafood. Basically, anything that would have been around before the advent of farming.

Besides backing up a recommendation of Rippetoe, you might want to check out Stumptuous, for a female-friendly perspective on lifting heavy stuff. (I just noticed that she also has some choice words about low-fat carb-heavy diets.)

30

Just posting to say thanks to Sitnam and Sleel. Plan on checking out the Power Eating book, and also Paleo diet.

31

Your OP states you want to lose fat and gain muscle, but conventional wisdom (backed up by plenty of research) shows that you can’t do both at the same time. To lose fat you need to create a calorie deficit and to gain muscle you need to create a calorie surplus. The best you can hope for is to either lose fat while preserving as much muscle as possible, which involves creating a relatively small calorie deficit of about 3-500 calories a day while preserving muscle using regular weight training, or gain muscle while minimising the amount of fat you will inevitably gain simultaneously as part of the process, which involves creating a similarly small calorie surplus, weight training, and eating lots of protein.

32

Great advice and discussion everyone, please keep it coming!

I found Stumptuous a couple of years ago, actually, and I did one of their work outs last night, in fact. It doesn’t seem like the site is updated that often though?

Additional weight lifting site recommendations would be appreciated if anyone has other suggestions. I am also looking for actual routines as well.

Thanks everyone! I was up to 102g of protein yesterday - I don’t know why everyone doesn’t eat cottage cheese! It’s such a power food.

33

Your age, has a bearing on any aspect of training because it can influence your rate of recovery, both short term - such as getting your breath back, through to development of physique.Your age is exactly right for developing endurance, you will probably be able to recover from moderate training within 48 hours - which means alternate days.

If you overtrain you can become weaker rather than stronger.

The yoga is a superb instrument to assist in recovery on your rest days.

I assume that if you are intending to road race then you must be capable of riding at better than evens for at least 15-20 miles( 20mph for all you non competition riders)

I am also assuming you are capable of riding around 40 miles without rest and over 70 with a break.

This would be a baseline for an off season competitor.

This is the level you need to attain before seriously training for race pace.

I would seriously consider dropping the running, its ok for winter maintenance - something around 4-5 miles at 8 to 9 minute mile pace twice a week, but you would also need to be pretty near to race fitness, otherwise you are spreading your training effort too wide.

If you intend to use weights, then I advise that you do the power work rather than strength - this means lots of repetitions within a set time period, followed by a fixed rest period. Its often useful to use cardio monitoring for this - once it takes longer than 90 seconds to recover to 80% of your max allowable heart rate. You train at a load intensity of 80% of your max weight capacity. As soon as you take longer to recover, you stop.

You have an awful long way to go, I think you should re-evaluate your targets. What sort of times are you doing in that 90 minutes, and what sort of distance?

An off season rider at the lower levels should be able to knock out 25 miles in 90 minutes over reasonably hilly terrain, if you cannot do this, then you have quite a ways to go.

I don’t think you should worry too much about the amount you eat, once you do get into the racing you’ll find you simply can’t eat enough, you can easily burn 2500 calories a day in the racing season.

Cycle racing in not completely unlike other sports, but it has some wrinkles in it that need experience, whilst a general fitness coach can take you a long way, you really need more than this, and you also need a companion.

I have raced in various forms of event over many years, and following a long break, I am getting back into it, it’s taken me 6 months to get from utterly abysmal up to well below average - this in terms of club riding, and it will take another year before I can consider being capable of hanging on with the bunch, perhaps longer.

I suggest you join a club, its really the best advice anyone on this board can possibly give you, the knowledge resource you will be able to tap into is so wide and so specific you really can’t consider competitve riding without it.

34

Thank you casdave. I am a recreational rider and have been for a number of years. The club I am considering joining, and am currently training with, is Speed Theory. They are one of the best in the area, and the training I am doing through them is targeted towards building up for the spring.

In the summer, I ride with my husband. I do a 60km (~37 miles) out and back in ~90 minutes, give or take 5 - 10 depending on wind (he does it easily in 75 minutes, which drives me nuts).

I hadn’t considered the effect my running might have on my cycling. In the past, I have either trained for running, or trained for triathlons (usually Olympic), but I guess if I really want to focus on road racing, I need to just focus on road racing.

If you have any links to share for general information on road racing/time trials, please do. I’m a total newbie to it and don’t want to go in to it with a complete lack of knowledge. I certainly know I’m not going to be a cat 3 or 2 racer, but I would like to have a good first season.

35

I will have a word with a colleague who is an accredited coach, rather than give you what would amount to my opnions.

It seems to me you have the basic speed to start on more serious work, I expect that your rides of 37 miles is two-up riding, so I guess you would be about one to two mph slower than that.You do need to build up to that 75 minute ride though.

You will need to do some conditioning work, this is designed to get you to feel the discomfort and learn how to handle it. This will involve short circuit training, pick out a route of something like 700-900 yards.Its also not a bad idea to have a few good sweeping corners. Instead of weight training, you do this. Warm up for maybe 5 laps, stretch a bit, get yourself limbered up.

Now you do timed circuits, longer runs and shorter runs, the longer runs would be around 5 laps, the short ones would be one or two laps. You need to find out your absolute maximum speed for one flying lap and use that as your standard time.

Next part is up to you, you determine what your target time is, are you intending to ride at 75%? - it depends upon you. You will have to learn how to handle your machine, how to sprint out of corners, especially when it hurts and your legs are starting to go wobbly.

Your longer runs should be something in the order of 75% but for your first few sessions you really need to feel fully competant in your bike handling so perhaps 60% will do for those early sessions, then move up to higher levels, if you can exceed this for the full 5 laps then I suggest you have not set your standard time fast enough.
This will occur on a regular basis, you will have to revisit your flying lap as you improve.Once you are falling 10% outside your target time then you go home and rest, ride home nice and easy and unwind.

You need to intersperce your longer runs with fast 2 lap runs, which need to be significantly faster - by as much as 10%.

This sort of work is done no more than twice a week. It should not take more than an hour, preferably 45 minutes. You might also do a couple of 200 metre sprints when you have done your timed runs.

If and when you enter road races, do not fall into the trap of thinking that a short race of around 40 miles is the best event to cut your teeth on, these events are usually extremely quick. I would choose a handicap event, something where you start off in groups - fastest group starts last - you don’t get any points toward your rider category for this, but it keeps you in the event for longer and you get more of an opportunity to learn to work together with others. Don’t be discouraged if you get dropped, another group will soon be coming past and you can try and hang on.

Flat races are generally very quick races too.Try not to ride in combined junior/senior events, juniors are ****ing lunatics and have no idea how to hold a line, they also charge into corners and run wide - and you can imagine the outcome.

I recommend you get yourself a turbo trainer - ideal for time trial training.

If you can do a good road race, then generally you will do a decent time trial, but if you choose than you can specialise.

Get out for the Sunday club runs, this is when you socialise and have fun - this is more important that you may imagine.

36

I have just followed your link to the club webpage, the really interesting bit is the cyclo-cross video link - looks to be somewhere up in the hills around cleveland or Newcastle. Back in those days it was common for everyone to be riding fixed wheel - no chance of the chain dropping off or gears becoming entangled, and a lighter machine to carry.

You do not see things like the section of river wading in modern cross events these days, but you do tend to get a lot more mud.

Some of the comments are hilarious, especially the part time soccer referee who did a lot of training by running backwards, until he got hit by a car - obviously never saw it coming

One of the best comments is where the riders throw their bikes in the river, and the commentator mentions that it was not the intended crossing point, but someone (himself) had moved them since he wasn’t riding!

37

Wow, thanks!

Now, there may be an issue with this training you’re recommending. I’m in Canada, and I’m not able to ride outside in the winter. All of our training right now is inside on trainers (I use a Tacx Satori). I’ll take a look and see if I can find an indoor track, but I don’t think there is a facility available here. Either way, this is the type of training I’ll do come warmer, dryer weather in the spring.

38

Since you are going more for endurance-type stuff, I have two suggestions:

  1. Cordain’s later book, The Paleo Diet for Athletes probably is suited for you after all, since it is biased toward the needs of endurance athletes. Not that many changes from the original; less depth than the first book, but discusses when and why to eat more carbs than the standard paleo recommendations.

  2. Check out CrossFit Endurance. I don’t do their program since my fitness goals are to get stronger and be more fit overall, but I have little to no interest in running more than about 10 k at a time. The way it works is, your main workout is the CrossFit Workout Of the Day (WOD). You do the CF Endurance workout earlier or later in the day, depending on your schedule and the recommended timing. More info on the linked FAQ page.

Just to plug CrossFit a bit, it’s what I do to stay in shape, with some dabbling in pure strength work every once in a while. Just doing regular WODs, I got my deadlift up to 2x bodyweight, 1.5x bodyweight squat. My 5k was around 22 minutes, and my 10k was around 50–52 minutes. Those aren’t smoking race times, but considering that I was a 34–35 year old who only got to train erratically due to unpredictable work hours, and who did almost no long-distance training, I’d say that was decent. Good enough to beat about half the pack in the first 10k I ran, which was also the first time I ever ran over 5k.

I’m saying this in the past-tense because I haven’t been able to get more than about 2 or maybe 3 workouts a week in for the last year with any consistency, and the last 3 months have been particularly shitty. If I were training consistently and doing CFE programming, I’m pretty sure I’d be at 20 minutes or less on my 5k, several minutes faster on my 10k time, and I’d still be able to lift heavy.

39

Thanks Sleel. I do use the WOD occasionally, but not consistently. I’ll check out Crossfit Endurance and see if I can modify my schedule.

I think that before I really get in to Crossfit properly, I need to take a Foundations course. I know I am not doing my squats properly, for instance. Luckily, my husband works with a guy who owns a Crossfit studio, so I might try and get in with him.

Just an update - I am doing heavy weights every second day and have modified my diet substantially. Unless my scale is totally screwed up, I’ve lost about 5lbs in the last nine days.

40

Good idea. Olympic lifting really, really benefits from coaching since it’s so technical, but the “slow” lifts are also good to get feedback and correction on. Just be aware that while CrossFit is a great idea, their quality control for training is spotty. There are quite a few great coaches, but there are also some dingbats. Caveat emptor.

Cool. Glad the changes are working for you. After an initial loss, you might find the scale readings going up, depending on how much body fat you actually had. Keep in mind that checking body weight is a very blunt instrument for measuring body composition. If you start gaining muscle mass, your weight might actually go up.

Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention is that it’s not very surprising that you were still “chubby” even with the training you were putting in. Endurance athletes, even at elite levels, have higher body fat than explosive or power athletes. Doing hybrid training gets you leaner, much stronger, healthier in the long run, and can boost performance beyond what you get from a pure endurance program. Plus, if you train right, you’ll probably have fewer injuries of any kind, especially chronic injuries from overuse and lack of overall strength or strength imbalances.