Aligning diet and training

One quick disclaimer before we dive into today’s topic, everything you are about to read is related to weightlifting sports, most notably, bodybuilding and powerlifting.

Your diet and training program should work together to give you the best results possible. There are 3 distinct paths in terms of diet and 2 in terms of training. Let’s talk about dieting first.

Gaining weight (calorie surplus)

This phase of your diet can also be called massing or mass gaining. During this phase, your goal is to increase your weight and hopefully gain lean muscle tissue in the process. Unfortunately, there is no way you can avoid fat gain, but there are measures you can take to either minimize it or use the fat gain to your advantage.

Losing weight (calorie deficit)

This phase is commonly referred to as cutting or fat loss phase. During this phase, your goal is to decrease your weight by losing fat and maintaining as much muscle as possible. There are many strategies to achieve this goal as we discussed numerous times here on this website. Most commonly, diets rely on a reduction in carbohydrate intake or fat intake. Whatever the case may be, the ultimate goal is to consume fewer calories than we burn so that our body has to deplete its stored energy.

Maintaining weight (maintenance calories)

People usually maintain their weight either to let their body adjust to a new weight or to recover from either a prolonged cutting phase or gaining phase. During this phase, your food intake goal is to keep your weight and body composition the same.

Okay, so now we know the options for the diet part of the equation, let’s take a look at the training part.

High volume phase

Irrespective of the sport you’re doing, higher volume phases are characterized by increased number of sets and repetitions as well as increased frequency. Usually you do not go really heavy in terms of weight on the bar during these phases. I am not saying that you do absolutely no heavy work, just that the majority of your work should be in the 8-20 repetition range taken relatively close to failure (RIR 1, 2, 3 and maybe 4).

In powerlifting, higher volume phases are usually there to increase work capacity and/or improve technique. Essentially, you would do a lot of repetitions and sets so that you can do more work and/or so that you get better at particular lifts. Let’s take the bench press for example. If you want to teach your body the bench press movement pattern, you can do the bench press 2 or 3 times a week for 3, 4 or 5 sets per visit and that is going to improve your ability to perform the exercise from a technical standpoint because you get to practice it often.

In bodybuilding, higher volume phases are there to either gain muscle (hypertrophy) or make sure that you maintain muscle. This means increasing volume week to week (going from MEV to MRV) or at least doing sufficiently high volume each week (MEV and above).

Strength gaining phase

Strength gaining phases, in contrast to high volume phases, are characterized by heavier weights, lower frequency, and lower total repetition and set counts. Usually, you focus on doing the majority of your work in the 1-6 repetition range, again taken sufficiently close to failure.

The main difference between these two types of training is that high volume work primarily stimulates muscles while strength training primarily stimulates the nervous system. That doesn’t mean that strength training doesn’t stimulate the muscular system, far from it, it just means that strength training doesn’t require as much muscular system activation in order to be performed.

So we have both training and diet covered. I think we should examine what NOT to do first.

DO NOT combine fat loss and strength training. Here’s why – being in a calorie deficit sends the “lose tissue” signal to your body. Your body will “scan” the system for either costly parts or inactive parts. Muscle tissue is both energetically costly to maintain and, if you’re doing strength training, it is not stimulated as much. So what ends up happening is that you start losing fat and muscle at the same time which is not ideal. Also, you really want to have energy for the heavy nature of strength training and a calorie deficit literally means a lack of energy. So strength training generally rules out fat loss phases, maybe you can be in a very slight deficit, but I suggest avoiding fat loss if you’re trying to get stronger. Aggressive fat loss is a very, very bad idea if you’re in a strength gaining phase.

DO NOT mix mass gaining and strength training. The logic is pretty similar to the scenario above. If you are in a calorie surplus, you have more energy than you need, your body will have 3 options for that extra energy. It can use it to fuel activity, it can store it as fat or it can give it to the muscle building process. If you are strength training, the muscle tissue isn’t receiving a strong enough signal, so your body will “decide” to put more of the excess energy to fat storage.

With this out of the way it should be pretty clear what you should do.

Combine high volume phases with either mass gaining or fat loss. In doing so you will be giving the adequate signal to your body to either add muscle or retain muscle.

Combine strength training with a maintenance phase. You can be a slight calorie deficit or even better a slight calorie surplus, but generally, staying about the same weight is the best option for a strength gaining phase.

Here’s a tip for my powerlifting friends. If you are preparing (peaking) for a powerlifting show or a meet, try to get used to a particular weight and body size. Your goal is to hit a personal best and if you want to do that, you want to be accustomed to your body size. The lifts will feel different to you if you have 5 or 10 kilos more (or less) because you will be changing the size of your chest, back, and limbs. Let’s take the bench as an example again, if you are leaner, you will be able to make a better arch because there is less fat on your back which will improve your performance. By staying consistent with your weight you will allow your body to learn the most efficient way to lift at a particular size and changing your weight will obviously impact that efficiency negatively.

Bonus – mini cut

Unlike a proper cutting phase, a mini cut serves the purpose of “cleaning up” and potentiating future massing. Mini cuts are almost always used in the grand scheme of trying to get more muscular while full cutting phases are used in the grand scheme of losing fat and getting leaner. If you need more than 6 weeks to get to 10% body fat, there will be nothing mini about the cut you need. In other words, mini cuts are usually brief, aggressive fat loss phases that help you lose the fat you gained in a massing phase which sets you up to go on a massing phase again. Why does this work? By lowering your calorie and carbohydrate intake you become more carbohydrate and insulin sensitive. Generally, lowering nutrient availability makes you more sensitive to nutrient uptake, which is great news if you want to absorb protein and use it for muscle building. Also, the leaner you are the better your insulin sensitivity and muscle building ability is. Therefore, you should use mini cuts in the “in and out” style. You quickly go in, clean up the fat, set up the next massing phase and get out.

Since this post was all about aligning training and nutrition, the logical question is – what should we do in the gym when on a mini cut? Well, a mini cut is there to set up a future massing phase. It achieves that by restoring sensitivity to insulin and nutrients. You want to restore sensitivity to hypertrophy style training. Let’s look at this from a different angle. You were in a high volume phase and you combined it with a weight gaining phase. The longer you spend in a high volume phase, the more resistant to hypertrophy (muscle gain) you become. So if you want to align your mini cut with your training, you need to lower your volume a bit in order to restore sensitivity to high volume training. However, you don’t want to go extremely low, you want to be around your MEV, that’s around 8-12 sets per body part per week.

Click this if you want to read about the MEV for different muscle groups.