It’s been drilled into me since youth that a person’s weight is governed by their caloric intake and energy burn alone. My dad, an incredibly thin man who still runs five miles daily despite being only months away from his seventieth birthday, still regales all who’ll listen with tales of the vast quantities that he’s seen people eat, particularly on the frequent all-inclusive cruises that he and my mum take around the Med. The incredulity in his eyes as he describes his fellow passengers’ portions is truly something to behold - it’s halfway been revulsion and envy. He’s just as quick to wax lyrical about what he feels is their pandemic lethargy, often launching into monologues that vividly describe holidaymakers sat around troughing all day long as he - quite literally - runs around them on the deck in his hand-me-down sneakers. And to a certain extent, my old man’s quite right. If your only concern is maintaining that weathered, skeletal look favoured amongst septuagenarians, eating little and exercising a lot is going to work for you; it can’t not. Whatever your unique bone density, metabolic rate or even thyroid activity levels, if you can somehow create a negative balance (burn off more than you put in) then you’ll lose weight. Over time, your metabolism will slow down and your breath will reek, but you definitely won’t get tubby.
The trouble is, I don’t want to be skinny - the geek-chic look is so 2006. But then I don’t want to look like a no-neck Sontaran either. I’m gunning for that elusive, lean-but-muscular ‘Men’s Health’ physique. And getting it, unfortunately, isn’t as simple as eating less and moving more. In fact, it’s perhaps the most complicated thing that I’ve ever attempted to do, short of building a LEGO Death Star.
Part of my initial difficulty was down to ignorance. For years I had fundamentally misunderstood how my body works, and even once I’d read countless books and articles on the matter, it wasn’t until I put the matter to my own pseudo-scientific test that I actually started to put some stock in the terrible truth. I’d always understood - well, assumed - that whenever doing high-impact cardiovascular training, my body burns food first, then fat. But when reading up on the subject, it seems that it ain’t necessarily so: sometimes it burns food then fat; sometimes it burns food then muscle. Essentially, it draws on anything that it can to maintain the requisite energy output. As such, whilst high-impact cardio is great for losing weight across the board, many experts posit that it can actually be counter-productive if you’re looking to burn fat but maintain or build muscle as I am. At best, you’re killing some of your gains.For most of 2013 I trained with as heavy weights as I could handle on Saturdays or Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays for sixty to eighty minutes, and did a lot of cardio on the other three weekdays (eight miles’ running, six or seven miles’ very brisk walking). I weighed myself and measured my body fat most mornings, looking for trends, and body fat was invariably higher on a morning after a heavy cardio day, leading me to conclude that, in my case at least, my body probably does often sacrifice muscle to meet its incredible energy demands. This obviously became something of an obstacle when it came to me gaining some decent mass - even when consuming as many as 4,000kcal (gross) every day, my lean weight was only just being maintained over most weeks; some weeks it actually fell. My bodybuilding brother’s solution was to consume around 600g of slow-burning carbohydrates throughout the daytime along with the requisite protein (my eight-mile run finished the day as it was how I got home from work) to meet the demand before the event and thus safeguard the muscle. I tried this once and ended up having to take a shit in the woods at around the seven-mile mark, by which point I’d already long-since decided that the practicalities of this plan hadn’t been fully thought through by my big bro, having waddled at a snail’s pace through town and out into the countryside, farting all the way.
Consequently, for the last six weeks of 2013 I decided to go all-out with a “dirty bulk-up”. Whilst I didn’t give up on cardio entirely, burning as many as 700kcal some days through walking alone (according to Runtastic Pro), I did cut out running, saving my body not only the calories that it had become accustomed to burning three times per week, but some of the muscle that had been regularly set fire to too. On 4th October 2013 I weighed in at 11st dead (154lbs, or 70kg); by 6th January 2014 I was 12st 2lbs (170lbs, or 77kg) and my metabolism was like a furnace. Inevitably my body fat had risen, but my lean weight had increased more dramatically, and by the time that I’d finished I’d hit all of my strength / performance goals and was ready to set some new ones.
Just as important as learning how my body fuels itself was learning how to properly fuel it. One widespread myth that does seem to hold true is that you should consume a gram of protein for every pound of your lean target weight. This is far above the recommended daily allowance for adult men, yet still way below what many looking to bulk-up consume. Of course, the type and quality of the protein is important - your protein of choice needs to have all of the necessary amino acids necessary to build and maintain muscle. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to complement it with another that has what it’s missing.However, whilst this “one gram to one pound” protein myth seems to hold up, society’s rampant anti-carbohydrate propaganda certainly doesn’t. For several months my carbohydrate intake was nothing like sufficient to keep me going, let alone rebuild following muscular hypotrophy, no matter how hard I trained or how much protein I consumed. I was unwittingly on an almost Atkins-like diet, and a result I shed pounds and pounds of fat and got slimmer than ever, but I wasn’t putting on much beef. Having been bombarded with marketing for expensive protein supplements, I thought that if I ate nothing but chicken and whey I’d be ripping through my shirts in no time, but my protein-heavy diet was like trying to build a wall with a ton of bricks but no hands. You see, carbohydrates are vital in muscle-building - they provide the necessary fuel for your body to use the protein to repair and rebuild your gym-damaged muscles; the carbs lay the protein bricks, as it were. For weeks I wasn’t even getting enough to keep a regular bloke going, let alone one doing my level of exercise and looking to create a positive balance. Yet almost as soon as I increased the carbs, not only did I finally start to pack on the poundage, but I also experienced an obvious, yet naïvely unexpected, surge in energy. The amount I was lifting increased dramatically over just a few weeks and I felt, well, good.
At the end of my bulk-up though, particularly with all the nutrition-free excesses of Christmas, I’d actually exceeded my initial goal weight (the upper echelons of my height’s ideal BMI) and was looking to literally trim the fat. Now I hadn’t seriously reduced my caloric intake in years - I don’t drink alcohol at all anymore and, save for in my arthritis-enforced year off running, all that dashing about I did swiftly put paid to any fat from excess grub. This time, though, I didn’t dare to run on dramatically-reduced calories as I’d have probably lost some muscle with the fat, and in no time at all found myself back where I first began. So, like a reluctant fatty straight from Dr Jessen’s clinic, I jumped from several thousand net calories per day to just 1,800, and even those had to be protein-heavy and spread over six “meals” (meals my arse!) to try to mitigate the inevitable non-fat losses. It was horrible. I was fucking starving.And in addition to cutting down on my food intake, I had to make it clear to my body that it shouldn’t even think about burning any of its hard-won muscle to keep me ticking over. I laboured a lot over whether to opt for the commonly-favoured “high reps (12-15+), lighter weights” workouts in favour of my normal regime as I’ve read some very persuasive articles advising against it. Some say that lower weights have only fallen into favour when fat-cutting as no sod can lift heavy weights when they’re not properly fuelled, and that this “easy option” will do little, if anything, to preserve your muscle; all you’ll improve is your endurance. Indeed, they even say that if you decrease your weights, your body won’t think that it needs all its muscle and will promptly set fire to some - the only way to maintain what you’ve got is to actually keep pushing for overload and progression. Others dismiss this as utter madness: if you wear down your muscles with a workout, but don’t build them back up again with enough food afterwards, then you’ve lost the muscle anyway. To a layman like me, both schools of thought seem to have some logic - not to mention a few gaping holes.
Eventually I elected to go for the generally-pushed soft option for my first five days of fat-cutting. I kept my weights at level where I could crack out 16+ reps on everything, and made sure that my workout was restricted to one hellish, intense hour. The results were okay - I shed around four pounds and hadn’t lost much, if any, muscle (it’s hard to be precise over such a short period when using fancy electro-pulse scales or even callipers, but crucially my vital statistics didn’t budge) - nonetheless to hedge my bets I reverted to my usual heavy training circuit for day six, upping my gross caloric intake to 4,000kcal for that day to (a) lessen the risk of not fully building the muscle back up; (b) remind my body that isn’t starving, just in case it was thinking about slowing that raging metabolism down in an attempt to defend its current weight; (c) keep me sane and functioning. I was pleased to find that I was just as strong as I had been a week earlier, if not a little more so. For day seven, I stuck to 4,000 well-balanced, muscle-repairing calories again, before repeating the cycle for week two. Now I’m back to eating loads every day, albeit not 4,000kcal’s worth; lifting loads; and running occasionally, which is slowly but surely eradicating the last visible traces of the extra fat that I gained in my bulk-up without destroying my gains. Of course, it would no doubt be possible for me to get ripped in six weeks or so if I went on an “alligator and ostrich” Made in Chelsea crash course, but as someone who has a life and a wife and a two-year-old daughter (not to mention local supermarket staff who look aghast whenever asked for alligator meat), the most crucial thing for me is workability. And, whilst the above might sound terribly complicated, it fits in with my work and childcare duties with relative ease - the real challenge is doing it affordably, which is what I’ll turn my attention to in the next instalment of First-hand Fitness.
