1. I know you don’t wanna hear this but dieting year round is killing your progress
I knowwwww being lean is important to you, hey it’s important to me too. But attempting to eat in a deficit as many months of the year as possible without significant breaks is actually doing your physique more harm than good.
Let me explain:
Firstly we have good ol’ metabolic adaption (kind of an a-hole for physique outcomes, but of decent help for survival… important right?)
This means our metabolic rate is adaptive.
Think feed me less for long durations consistently and my metabolism adapts and down regulates making my use of energy in more efficient. And when we eat more our metabolism up regulates and we burn more.
So you can see how we can tank our metabolic rate if we don’t feed it enough for long periods of time.
Things brings me to point 2 which is building and holding onto our muscle mass is energetically very expensive. In other words, eating enough (at our maintenance intake if not even a wee bit more) is of utmost importance for us to hold onto our shape and strength!
Key takeaway - Dieting year round is not fun and will be negatively impacting your metabolism and gainzzzzzzz.
2. Fitspo Youtube & IG workouts are for the algorithm and the influencers income, not your muscle growth benefit
There are a few principles of training that evidence and results based programming adhere too. They are consistency, volume, intensity, effort, progression, frequency and recoverability.
Random workouts die at the very first hurdle - not to mention every single other point too. Eeeeeek, we know!
Nobody wants to be slaving away in the gym, but not getting a return on their effort!
If your current workout regime does not tick each of these boxes… welp it’s time to find one that does.
3. Being just as diligent in maintenance and surplus phases as you would in a deficit phase is critical for massive body composition change.
We hear you!
Being on point can be a real challenge when you have heaps of flexibility and you aren’t seeing yourself get shredded in your weekly check in pics.
Some would say killing it at maintenance is wayyyyyy harder than killing it in a deficit.
But here’s the kicker - the greatest amount of physique change is actually going to happen by you nailing maintenance. Why you ask? Because ain’t no improvements to your lean body mass is happening in a deficit, hell you’re putting them at risk each time you diet. Getting jacked happens in maintenance and surplus phases! We should probably call them improvement phases they are so critical.
How do we recommend that you stay laser focused year round and when having the flexibility that comes with eating at maintenance or more?
A value based framework made up of your values, goals and trackable progression. A framework like this ensures you have a strong anchor to keep you locked into what you’re setting out to achieve year round.
4. The SAID principle
This schmancy sounding principle stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand.
At its most simple it means exactly what it says which is if we want a specific adaption (like getting hooooge glutes) we need to apply a demand or stimulus that generates that outcome. This is why running, walking, random classes and workouts might be super fun, but aren’t getting you your bang for your back.
Running will get you good at running.
Walking is great for calorie burn and mental health.
And random classes are great for… fun (hey whatever floats your boat)
But none of these things are the specific demand that results in optimizing muscle growth.
They are of course fine to do - but understand that they are an adjunct to specific hypertrophy based programming.
5. Your perfection is both your biggest asset and greatest liability. Learn to harness it to your advantage.
Probably the biggest drag that we face as perfectionists is the ol’ self sabotaging self talk.
If it ain’t perfect then everything is a disaster and why should I even continue?
All or nothing checkin in for duty?
Can’t celebrate any win because well if it isn’t absolutely spot on, tip top perfect then it’s not worth celebrating?
Yeah we know, this was us too.
The good news is we can use our traits of aiming for more and better all the time coupled with a dose of high expectations to propel us to results that we never thought possible AS LONG as we also have a framework to help keep us down to earth.
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