If you’re wondering how to ask a question, sign-up for this thing. I send out weekly notes with personal, honest training reflections and tips, book reviews and suggestions, and the most recent blog posts from my personal email address. All you have to do is hit reply and type away. The question: I’ve really struggled with [...]
If you’re wondering how to ask a question, sign-up for this thing. I send out weekly notes with personal, honest training reflections and tips, book reviews and suggestions, and the most recent blog posts from my personal email address. All you have to do is hit reply and type away.
The question:
I’ve really struggled with a proportionate body. I’m not fat. I’m flabby. I don’t have a huge belly, just a lot of flab there. I run, I lift, I play sports, but it seems I can’t juggle the right amount of cardio (because that’s what they say makes you lose fat; especially post workout cardio) with the right amount of lifting and eating and gaining.
I just want a lean and muscular body that’s athletic. Period. It has occurred to me on multiple occasions that my regime is not cut out for how I function: daily lifting routines focused on one to two body parts per day followed by a short post workout cardio thing isn’t enough and doesn’t leave me satisfied. Going on a run, doing sprints, and doing compound lifts satisfies me mentally. I just struggle with how to arrange a new routine like this and gain muscle and be lean.
The answer
What pops out to me right away is this: you want (a) a lean body, (b) a muscular body, and (c) and athletic body. Let’s do ourselves a favor and see each of these things as skills, because that’s truly what they are.
Learning how to eat and train and live in a way that enables you to be lean hinges on habits, and the execution of these habits manifest themselves with a certain physical output. Your body is a reflection of your lifestyle, so to speak. Since you want three things, consider building three sets of habits.
Three skills.
I’m going to assume that, right now, you don’t know how to do any of these skills. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your list. Let’s flip things to put them in perspective.
Say you wanted to be a musician. You go up to the lead guitarist in a band and say, “You don’t understand. All I want to be able to do is play the guitar, trumpet, and drums. Why is this so hard for me?” And the answer is probably because you’re trying to learn how to play three different instruments at the same time.
Suffice to say, I think you need to pick one skill and find out how to make magic happen. After that? Move on to the next thing.
I distinctly remember, in my life, these periods:
- Early teens: flexibility and tricking
- Early 2006, late teens: losing fat
- Early 2007: gaining weight
The idea here is that, after 2006, I never had a problem losing fat ever again. Why? Because I knew the “skill.” I knew the set of habits I needed to implement in order to get the work done. After my tricking stint, I knew what I needed to do to get better at tricking. After 2007, I knew what I needed…you get the point.
And it’s not all peachy, either. I mention “weight” rather than muscle (in 2007) because I truly didn’t learn the “skill” of muscle building. I simply knew what I needed to do to gain weight (because I got more fat than muscular during my initial bulk). It was a “failure,” but it wasn’t a failure because every piece of non-information leads you to information.
Now a days, I juggle lots of things. But behind the scenes of this juggling is the very fact that I learned how to do each thing solo before introducing them into the complex juggle.
Here’s a little snack from Buddy Morris:
“If you correct one thing at a time and you have an 85% success rate, correct two and it drops to 37%. Best of luck with three!”
For my skinny-fat guys, I tell them they should learn how to lean down first. I should start calling this first goal, “The David Project,” as I think the focus should be to carve yourself into the ideal starting point — almost like a reboot. You won’t be hugely muscular, but you’ll be lean. Prime the barbell and bodyweight exercises that will be the foundation for the rest of your life, yaddah yaddah yaddah, I’ve said this before, just visit the archives and browse around.
Why is this important? There are physiological reasons that I think I think make sense, like having better partitioning. Getting the body to think more about muscle while focusing on losing fat means the body will be ready and familiar with thinking about the muscles when you start eating more nutrients. But beyond all of this, the reason behind my fat lost first mind is simple: the art of losing fat is timeless.
If you try to bulk first and you fail (not uncommon), then where do you go? You’re fatter, and all you know how to do is get even more fat. Even if you learn how to build muscle, you still have to learn how to lose fat eventually. What happens when you try to lose fat and don’t yet understand the skill? You might drop so low as to lose a lot of your hard earned muscle (although this is mostly short term).
Since skinny-fat guys have lived their lives with enough physiological fat baggage. The idea of being even fatter without a developed fat loss skill is juice not worth the squeeze.
Now, the real question here is this: do you have what it takes?
Being able to sacrifice goals in the short term for long term accomplishment is something that falls under the bucket of delayed gratification and, what I like to call, training like an adult (or, not training like a golden retriever).
Maybe you live in a seasonal climate and right now it’s sunny outside. You have your three goals on the table. It might be in your best interest to focus on flexibility or tricking, if that’s something you want to do.
Maybe you can make some nutrition changes during this time, too. Simple ones, like drinking only water and eating a generous heaping of raw vegetables instead of any bread products. But I wouldn’t expect to be in fat loss cram mode. I’d just let whatever effects come knowing that, right now, you’re worried primarily about tricking.
“What about Joe Bill Hill? He lost fat and gained muscle. Why can’t I?”
The people that can consciously lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously (known as a recomposition) are people that already know how to gain muscle and lose fat, in my opinion. In that situation, you’re simply juggling two skills you already have.
Others can recomp, primarily out of ignorance. There are beginners that come into this fresh, and a beginner body is, empirically, a bit more plastic in it’s ability to lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously.
Really, it’s just perspective. If someone came to you complaining about not being able to play three instruments, you’d probably tell them to just play one for now. If they started to whine and complain and say, “But I want to play all three!” what would you say to them?
And now the real…
It’s easy for me to say this because it’s retrospective. I didn’t connect the dots moving ahead because I had no dots to connect. I just happened to be interested in different things at different times in my life. Ignorance was bliss.
Otherwise, I’m just like you: a glutton that wants everything overnight. And I’d probably try to do exactly what you’re trying to do. In fact, I have before. That doesn’t mean it’s the smart thing to do though. You can get good at things slowly and take the long term mindset, or you can burn out from a lack of consistent progress.
If you want to be ambitious, more power to you. Just know that, in the end, it’s really hard to learn how to play three instruments at the same time.