Before addressing the subject head on, it is worth considering what are the most common beliefs about it the mutual importance of nutrition and training, when you want to highlight those muscles that we have trained with so much love in the previous months.
We have people who dramatically minimize, or completely ignore, the importance of nutrition, and who perhaps tend to accentuate its importance to the point of making the motor component decisive only for a few tens of percentage points.
Index
Where is the truth?
Wanting to give a concise but exhaustive answer, we exclude the case of a bad diet and that of a bad workout. We can say that if we manage to follow even a moderately balanced diet, with an excellent level of training, we will have much more results than a perfect diet, but combined with a just decent workout. In fact, an excellent workout will still have a high organic impact that will be able to stimulate muscle hypertrophy and / or fat loss.
If we want to give an example outside our topic, if we want to reach a goal quickly with our car, a powerful engine will be more important than an absolutely precise steering wheel. Even if we will have to make corrections, to keep the car in the right direction, we will get there much earlier than having a perfect steering wheel with an engine planted like a pole. Well, power is our steering wheel, training is our engine.
Now, after these elaborate motor and non-motor considerations, let's get more specific: what has just been said, is more valid in the case of a goal to increase muscle mass; then, the power supply must adapt to the type of training we intend to perform.
Muscle definition phase: how to set it up?
Things turn around completely, in the phase of muscle definition; goal for which it will be the training that will have to be at the total service of the nutrition followed at that juncture.
But let's proceed and remember that, for lose body fat, we must create a calorie deficit, either by decreasing the input, i.e. by decreasing the calories ingested, or by increasing the output, i.e. by training more or more intensely. The ideal would be to act on the two elements in a complementary and subsequent way.
When we are forced to decrease the calorie input, we will have to carry out the same operation for the intensity and / or training volume parameters. It is intuitive, in fact, that having less energy will make you less productive workout with high stress parameters.
Furthermore, the risk of muscle catabolism will become moderately higher, which could become functional to compensate for the lack of energy caused by low-calorie nutrition.
We will initially decrease the volume, because it is the element that suffers most from calorie depletion, trying to reduce the intensity as little as possible, aiming at maintaining high workloads. Due to the fewer calories ingested, we will still have a decrease in the overloads used that we can counteract by introducing strategies such as moderate buffer work.
Let's put everything into practice
A schematic proposal, for a training related to the definition, but absolutely to be contextualized on the subject, could be:
- Increase in caloric output thanks to a moderate and progressive increase in volume. In a first cut phase, in fact, this variable can still be administered and it will be important to try not to decrease calories until it is mandatory to do so. As we are forced to decrease the food quantities, we will have, as mentioned before, to reduce the total number of sets of our workouts.
- Plan for a training workout with a simultaneous slight reduction in calories as soon as point one becomes unmanageable. If we get the timing right, we will achieve a significant weight loss in a relatively short time, thanks to a significant loss of water extracellular to be attributed to a reduction in inflammation following the decrease in training parameters. At the same time, we will have an overcompensation of glycogen, despite the slight caloric reduction, precisely due to the lower demand for carbohydrates for energy purposes, thanks to less training, which will give a fuller and leaner appearance.
- When we notice an excessive muscle depletion, we can insert a short one reverse diet, with fats as low as possible, in relation to the sex of the subject, with workouts that slightly tend to prefer the muscle pump, to better convey the progressive increase in carbohydrates.
Do we include cardiovascular work?
We can consider the hiit, at high intensity, at the beginning of the cut phase. We will still be with energies at a good level, which will help us to manage adequately, both from an organic and psychological point of view, the stress of this variable and we will be able to face for a certain period the increase in the inflammatory state that this practice involves.
In a second phase, characterized by a lowering of the calories introduced, a simultaneous decrease in energy, an increase in the inflammatory state given by the previous hiit work, and an overload of metabolic and cognitive stress, it will be appropriate to switch to a type of liss work, at low intensity. In both cases, it is absolutely necessary to keep the value of neat, the calorie consumption given by activities not directly related to physical exercise.
Muscle definition: let's sum it up
Nutrition and training must be balanced in a way related to the goal we are pursuing at a given moment. If our aim is to decrease the percentage of body fat, the training component will necessarily have to take on a containing role, in order to try to keep the muscle mass gained as much as possible, but it will no longer be the time to demand increases that will be destined for phases. high-calorie diet.
Dr. Enzo Raco
Graduated with honors in Sport Sciences, he has been fitness manager and personal trainer manager for the largest fitness centers in Turin, for almost fifteen years.
Currently professor of sports nutrition courses, personal training and functional training for the Italian Fitness Academy, he practices the profession of personal trainer both in Turin and online.
Contacts: +39 3472551399
website: www.enzotrainertorino.it
fb: @enzotrainertorino
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