THERE IS ONE RULE I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU FOLLOW: DO NOT LOWER YOUR FAT INTAKE UNDER 20 PERCENT OF YOUR DAILY CALORIES.
YOU CAN’ T OUT-TRAIN A BAD DIET
Cardiovascular training is a smart thing to do regardless of your status with gaining size or cutting fat. It’ s helpful for aerobic capacity, work capacity, heart health, and overall health. The mistakes made with cardio could fill a book, but we will focus on one particular aspect of it here. Cardio is not a panacea for cutting weight. You cannot expect to use cardio to compensate for excessive calorie intake. Unless you’ re training for a marathon, you’ ll be using a lot less energy than you think.
What cardio can do is continue to assist in utilizing energy, allowing your heart to keep working efficiently— thereby, allowing you to burn fat. I have seen, firsthand, numerous people cut fat without cardio. They used caloric deficits, hard and focused training, and time to burn the fat off. Cardio helps it along, but it will not be your magic bullet. The magic is in the application of diet first and foremost. Training is second. Cardio is third.
For your longevity and heart health, do it. For your aerobic capacity and recovery, do it. For a a significant assist with fat loss, do it. Just remember, it is merely“ a” tool, it is not“ the” definitive tool. You can pretend you can train harder than a bad eating plan, but the reality of it for 99 percent of us is that you cannot run from poor food choices, poor distribution of macronutrients, and excessive calorie intake. You are not the special one. Eat less than you use and you will experience fat loss.
This is a process and it requires just as much patience to lose fat as it does to gain muscle. Embrace it all, learn what works for you, keep notes on your calorie intake and macro distribution, and you will see progress. You may never want to be contest-level shredded, but you can learn a lot about yourself by bulking and cutting properly.
BY THE NUMBERS
To start leaning out, you’ ll have to get into a slight daily calorie deficit. To create a deficit, you have to know how many calories your body uses on a daily basis. There are several online calculators you can use to help determine your daily caloric needs, known as your resting metabolic rate( RMR). The following equation is one easy way to estimate your number and is typically accurate to within about 10 percent.( You will have to do some self-experimentation to dial in that last few percentage points.)
Men: 10 x weight in kg + 6.25 x height in cm- 5 x age + 5 = RMR
Women: 10 x weight in kg + 6.25 x height in cm- 5 x age- 161 = RMR
From there, multiply your RMR number by where your activity falls on a scale of 1.1 to 1.9. The first number reflects an almost completely sedentary lifestyle while 1.9 represents an incredibly intense and high-volume workout regimen. Most people are somewhere in between.
If we use an example of a 198-pound man who is 5’ 11” and 30 years old, his RMR would be 1,880 calories. If we give him a moderate level of activity and multiply his total by 1.3, his daily caloric usage is 2,444 calories. That is the number from where he can figure out his proportion of macronutrients and start creating his daily deficit.
58 JUNE 2017 | ironmanmagazine. com