How to train when dieting.
What's up everyone.
Today I wanna talk about how you should go about your training when you’re going through a dieting phase. This is something that I always see a lot of people royally fuck up and they end up throwing in the towel or end up looking skinny when their diet is over.
The annoying thing is that it doesn't have to be this way if you’re smart about it.
A few small tweaks can go a long way, so let’s get into it.
Training volume
First things first, let's establish the main goal of a dieting phase.
We’re intentionally eating in a calorie deficit, so we can lose body fat and maintain our hard earned muscle mass to look like a jacked chad.
One of the best ways to ensure this is to make sure our performance in the gym remains high, so we don’t wanna overdo the overall training volume as we don’t have the same recovery abilities as we would in a surplus/maintenance calories.
We want just enough stimulus to keep the muscle hanging around, but not too much that we can’t recover.
Let’s establish a few important terms I want you to understand.
MED = Minimum effective dose
MAV = Maximal adaptive volume
MRV = Maximal recoverable volume
Training volume is the amount of overall hard sets that we’re going to do for any given muscle group per week.
Take a look at the graph below as an illustration.
Via ReviveStronger: http://revivestronger.com/2016/11/09/what-is-maximal-recoverable-volume/
So when we’re dieting, we want to train at the minimum effective dose (MED). Just enough stimulus to ensure we maintain our gains. It makes no sense to try and push towards your maximal recoverable volume (MRV) as you don’t have the same abilities to recover.
For most people, their minimum effective dose is going to be around 10-14 hard sets per week per muscle group, some may even be a little lower than this 8-10 sets.
So I’ll give you an example below of how this would work in a week's training plan.
Monday - Lower day 1
Squats - 3x8 @ RPE 8
Snatch grip deadlift - 3x8 @ RPE 8
Leg press - 3x12 @ RPE 8
Hamstring curls - 3x15 @ RPE 8
Total quad work - 6 sets
Total hamstring work - 6 sets
Thursday - Lower day 2
Front squats - 3x6 @ RPE 7
Stiff legged deadlift - 3x8 @ RPE 7
Reverse lunges - 3x10 @ RPE 8
Glute ham raises - 3x12 @ RPE 8
Total quad work - 6 sets
Total hamstring work - 6 sets
Total WEEKLY quad work - 12 sets
Total WEEKLY hamstring work - 12 sets
This is exactly how you would work it.
Training intensity
This is another area of training people get wrong when they’re dieting. They love to switch to all sorts of high rep style training, supersets, minimal rest and all that garbage.