Why Fat Loss Training Fails

Philip Pape 0:01

Most people make one critical mistake when they cut calories to lose fat. They adjust their training incorrectly. They switch to high reps to burn fat. They drop the weight on the bar. They add a bunch of cardio, and they wonder why their strength tanks, their muscle disappears, and they end up looking like a smaller, weaker version of themselves. Today I'm showing you exactly what needs to change in your strength training during a fat loss phase and what absolutely can stay the same. You'll learn why dropping intensity could destroy your results, how to adjust training volume while keeping load heavy, and why most fat loss training and advice costs you some of that muscle. This is a topic I see people messing up all the time. They will dial in their nutrition pretty well, they'll create the calorie deficit, they'll start losing that weight on the scale, but then they make some often disastrous adjustments to their training that don't make any sense. They drop the weight on the bar, they switch to high-rep fat-burning workouts that they see on YouTube, they add tons of cardio thinking, well, I'm stuck and that's what I need to do, and then wonder why their lifts crash, why they're exhausted, why, despite working so hard, they're still not getting the lean muscular look they were going for. Then they're done with the fat loss phase and they're like, hey, it's not revealing what I thought, or I can't even get through it the way I intended. The problem is not the calorie deficit itself. The problem is they're adjusting their training in the wrong way. Thinking that fat loss requires lighter weights and higher volume, for example, when oftentimes it requires the opposite. It's very contextual, it's very personalized, but there are principles behind all of this that I'm going to walk you through today. What are the adjustments you have to make to training during fat loss? What happens to your body during a cut that affects your training? How do you maintain intensity while reducing volume if needed? Why auto-regulation is so important and what the heck I'm even talking about, and how to manage recovery when that is your most limited resource during fat loss. I will also, as always, bust some of those often heard so much on social media common myths about training during fat loss, including why certain forms of cardio could be holding you back and why you should never be afraid to lift heavy. All right, let's get into it.

Myth Busting: High Reps For Fat Loss

Philip Pape 2:52

Sometimes on episodes, I do like to throw in a little testimonial or feedback that I've gotten from a listener, or in this case from a Fitness Lab user. Real quick, Beth writes in, I've been using Fitness Lab for 18 days now. The AI in the app is always there to answer questions and work through any struggles you have. Oh, by the way, she started by saying, I just want to mention how much I love the app. It's crazy how it feels. Like you are chatting with Philip. Looks at the data with a very human-feeling connection, not generic advice, but advice using my data for the advice. P.S. I was not paid for this endorsement. LOL. Okay. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing. I didn't give her last name away. But that is the kind of feedback we're getting on Fitness Lab. And that's all I'll say about that now. I'll probably mention it at some point in the episode, like I always tend to do. Let's talk about training for fat loss and start with what most people get wrong when they start a fat loss phase, because if you understand this, it's going to set everything else up for a much better time. You've probably heard lots of advice, right? Part of our mission here on the show is to cut through that and try to clarify what makes sense versus what doesn't, what's nonsense, what's silly, that's not going to work. And when you're trying to lose fat, the biggest advice that I always see that is flat out wrong and can be counterproductive is that you need to lift lighter weights for higher reps to tone up to burn fat. Maybe you've been told to do more cardio, especially HIT, high-intensity cardio, and that's gonna accelerate fat loss and fasted training and use intermittent fasting. There's so many things about, you know, we burn more fat doing this. Maybe it's cut carbs to nothing at all and you're gonna burn more fat. All of that stuff. Maybe even things like cut your rest periods shorter because that keeps your heart rate elevated, burns more calories, right? All of this is everywhere. It's in fitness magazines, if you even know what that is. We'll say YouTube, Instagram, all of that. It's what the trainer at the gym who doesn't know what he's talking about might tell you. And that's what we're here to correct. So when people start a cut, when you start a cut, you're in a calorie deficit. And I would say, look, if you do nothing else, doing what you're already doing when you're not in a deficit, if it's effective, might be just fine. And that's it. And that's the end of the episode. You don't even have to listen. Okay. But for a lot of us, especially as we're over 40 and we have other recovery issues at play, there are things you have to think about. So what a lot of people do is they drop the weight on the bar, the dumbbells, whatever. I say the bar colloquially, but they drop the weight because they think lighter weights with higher reps is gonna help them burn more fat. So where they were doing a five rep program

Deficit Reality: Strength Vs Muscle

Philip Pape 5:20

or, you know, even like five to eight or eight to ten, now they start doing higher rep programs. Maybe they cut the rest periods down, they do more circuit training, add more HIT, all of that kind of stuff. And and many times it's a mindset of, okay, now I'm in fat loss. I've got to go harder on everything, right? I've cut the calories, now I need to move more. It's that old mindset that doesn't work, although the logic seems at the surface level to make sense. But what happens instead is you're going to lose your strength because the main stimulus for strength is that intensity, that weight, that on the bar, right? That high level of percentage of your max. And then you're going to lose some of that muscle without the stimulus and you're going to get more exhausted, more depleted because your mode of training is going to be more like cardio. And now you're maybe adding more cardio on top of that. And so the irony is that trying to burn fat this way is going to just backfire in all the ways we don't want to backfire. You're going to look worse when you're done. You're going to maybe even plateau with your weight loss because of all the stress that's now causing your metabolism to adapt even further. You lose muscle, right? Our goal during fat loss when we're in a calorie deficit is we want to lose weight, sure, but we want to do it all from fat. We don't want to lose muscle. And so ironically, you end up losing muscle and getting more skinny fat and less definition and smaller, weaker, all of that stuff because you're doing something counterproductive. You're effectively throwing out what works about training. So you don't lose fat by changing how you train during fat loss. You do it by being in a calorie deficit and continuing to get that stimulus. Your nutrition creates the fat loss. Period. Your training's job during a cut is to send a signal to your body that says, keep the muscle, because we still need it, so that that weight loss comes from fat and it does become fat loss. Okay, we the extreme case of this today is weight loss medications when people are not lifting weights. They're gonna lose a bunch of muscle. Now you're saying, well, I am lifting, I'm just doing it a different way. Well, the problem is if you don't do it the right way, keeping the intensity at a reasonable level, at least enough to maintain your muscle, then you're gonna have a problem. So that's the first one. The the second one is this uncomfortable reality about what happens to strength and what happens to muscle. Let's clarify this right now. If you're gonna be successful during a fat loss phase, you are not going to linearly gain strength while losing body fat. And the only exception, the little asterisk on that footnote, is if you're brand new and you're just starting this for the very first time, but if you're doing that, why the heck are you in a calorie deficit right off the bat? You're not, you haven't listened to the show, obviously. I can point you to an episode like your very first cut, which we did, I think earlier in 2025. Maybe that was last year. But you should not be in a deficit right off the bat. Anyway, you should be working to build strength and build a foundation, not gain weight, not lose weight, and then go into fat loss phase. Anyway, enough of that rent. My point is you're not gonna, your goal isn't to gain PRs and gain strength in absolute terms while losing body weight. And I know that's not what you want to hear because you want body recomp, don't you? But being in a big deficit to lose fat, that's not the goal. And if you understand that reality, it separates you the people who do this successfully, lose fat, build muscle from those who don't. So when you're in a calorie deficit, several things are happening that affect your training performance. Your energy availability is, of course, lower because, well, you're eating less. Your recovery is compromised because your body has fewer resources to repair tissue. Your glycogen stores are depleted because you're not eating as much and you're probably not eating nearly as many carbs. And that affects your ability to produce the force on those, you know, in those lifting sessions. And if you're losing body weight, your leverages literally change, which can make the same weights feel heavier. And you're just lighter. You're lighter. You can't, you don't have as much cross-sectional area to produce the force that you did before. And of course, we're trying to get lighter, so that's okay. That's a trade-off that we make. Now, my coach, Andy Baker, fantastic strength coach, has been on the show at least, what, three times? He talks about this all the time that lighter lifters lose more strength when cutting than heavier lifters.

Keep Intensity, Trim Volume

Philip Pape 9:32

That's that's uh kind of a side tangent on this that's important to understand. And if you think about the physics of it, it makes sense. A 150-pound person who loses 10 pounds is losing a bigger percentage of their body weight than a 220-pound person who loses the same 10 pounds. And oftentimes the amounts of weight loss are kind of similar, even when the person's baseline weight is quite different between two different people, and that's where we get these discrepancies. So, what's the goal during fat loss? It is not to PR your strength. Your goal is to preserve your muscle. That's a different thing, it's a different goal. So when we accept that, we can then accept that absolute strength will probably dip during a cut, and that's normal. But relative strength may actually increase. What do I mean by that? If you're squatting 225 for reps at 180 pounds body weight, and then you cut to 165 while maintaining 225, well, what is just happened? What just happened? Your strength relative to your body weight went up, even though the absolute number didn't change. And this could be a mental challenge to grasp because it feels like we're we're regressing or we're only holding. When in fact we're getting relatively stronger, but it's because we're losing body weight. So the real win during a cut is maintaining your muscle mass. You're going to look dramatically better when you do that. That's the goal. That's the body comp goal. You'll be leaner, you'll be more defined, you'll have kept the hard-earned muscle you built during your building phases. Exactly what bodybuilders are trying to do all the time. They're trying to spend an off season training super hard, eating a ton of food, building, building, building, building, improving. And then they want to efficiently cut that off. Efficiently and quickly, but not so quickly, that they lose muscle and reveal that hard-earned muscle. And that's why I tell people to think of a fat loss phase as a maintenance phase for muscle. You're not trying to grow, you're trying to hold on to what you have while your nutrition handles the fat loss. And that changes how you train. We're going to get into that now. And one of the ways it changes how you train is that it takes a lot less volume to maintain muscle. So you don't have to worry as much about the volume if you don't have the recovery for it. All right. So let's let's, if you take nothing else from this episode, remember this. During fat loss, try to keep your intensity high while reducing your volume. That is, I'll say, almost a universal principle that works for almost everybody. And that's the way I'm going to put it because nothing is absolute, right? If we're going to be nuanced about things. This is the opposite of what most people do. A lot of people keep volume the same or they increase it thinking more training, more fat loss, and then they're exhausted, their lifts crash, they lose muscle. No, we don't want to do that. The research is clear on this. Training intensity of about 75 to 85% of your one rep max maintains muscle beautifully during a deficit, right? You don't need high volume to maintain muscle. High volumes have diminishing returns because your recovery capacity is limited. What why is that? Well, volume is total number of hard sets per muscle group per week. And during a building phase, you might do upwards of 15 to even 20. I mean, that's really the high end, but I'll say 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group to per week. During a cut, I would just drop that to about 10 to 12, maybe even below 10 for some muscle groups. Because again, we're thinking in terms of maintaining here and balancing the stimulus to fatigue, given we have limited recovery. So the key is keeping the weight on the bar heavy. Again, when I say weight on the bar, I just mean whatever weight you're pushing for whatever reps for whatever machine or implement you're using. Okay. I love barbells, I'm using that predominantly, but there's obviously a bunch of other things.

Auto-Regulation Done Right

Philip Pape 13:12

And it also means training close to failure. That does, that never changes. That's a principle. And there, therefore, you're sending the signal to your body that it needs this muscle. High intensity, and intensity means percentage of your one rep max, means weight on the bar. It doesn't mean sweating and volume. And we say intensity, we mean load here. It tells your body this muscle is still necessary. Lower volume then reduces your systemic fatigue, which is a big factor on how well you recover and reduces soreness, gives you more energy, allows you to make best use of your nutrition and your sleep. So for something like your main lifts, you're still gonna stick to, say, your three to six or three to eight rep range. For your accessories, you're still probably gonna be around six to twelve. But maybe you're doing fewer sets. Maybe, not always. Interestingly, there are some really effective fat loss programs that I've run that use a set-based progression where you're increasing sets, but you're not increasing the load and you're just keeping the load reasonably high the whole time. You know, anywhere from roughly 70 to 90% of your max ish, maybe as low as 65%, but you're still in that regime. So a lot of people struggle mentally when it comes to this because more, more, more feels productive. But during a cut, more is often counterproductive. And in fact, more is often counterproductive no matter what. One of the biggest, I guess, counterintuitive things about this about fitness. So your margin of error for overreach, overtraining, overreaching shrinks in a deficit. Now, I'm not worried about any of you really overtraining in the classic sense, because most of you are just not training hard enough, but you might be overtraining in the quantity and fatigue sense, if that makes sense. Right. And then it just smashes you and then it's counterproductive. So during a building phase, for example, you might be hitting a lift twice or three times a week, say four, five, six working sets per session. If we're doing like accessories in there plus the main lift, let's say, and it comes out to 12 sets a week. During a cut, you might drop sets or you might drop frequency, or you might not and just maintain, but you don't get you don't get more volume than that. If anything, you might drop it. And so your overall volume for all your lifts across all sessions might be the same or less, generally. You're you're generally not gonna increase it, is my point. And you're always training within one to three repshi of failure. Classic mechanical tension principle that we care about for progressive overload. Understanding you're not gonna keep increasing your strength linearly here. That's what gets confusing to people. So that brings us to the next topic. See, I'm segueing naturally from one to the next. The next topic is auto-regulation. Auto-regulation. During a building phase, so when you're not into deficit, you can get away with pushing through when you're tired and hitting the reps you're trying to hit because you have other reserves usually from your food, for example, or even just the fact that you've been eating means you can slack off in other areas and still have enough recovery capacity. Maybe, hopefully. But during a cut, you definitely do not for the most part. If you're in a reasonable cut, if you're in a very, very, very light cut or you're aiming for body recomp, you know, that changes the game a little bit. But let's just assume a normal cut where you're cutting, say, 500 calories a day, and this is where auto-regulation becomes really helpful. Auto regulation means you're gonna adjust your training, you're gonna regulate your training based on how you feel and perform on any given day. That's the auto part. Auto, not meaning automatic, but auto as in it happens based on you on that day, right? I'm not very good at explaining the word itself, but it's adjusting your training based on how you feel perform rather than sticking to the exact, we'll say, loads and volumes. And this is where having your program set up in a way that just naturally uses auto-regulation so you don't have to think about it is helpful. Now, a lot of people will say, okay, that means RPE or RIR, rate of perceived exertion or reps in reserve. I actually prefer just using rep ranges for this. Like for me, auto-regulation comes from rep ranges. It can also, though, come from, let's say, testing a 1RM and using a back-off from that, for example, where the one RM, the one rep max, is that day's one rep max, not an all-time one rep max. And this is the way to tell on that day where am I? Another way to do this is using AMRAP, as many reps as possible on a final set, so that the next session you know what you're capable of. That is a little trickier and more advanced. So I'm not going to get into it too much. But for the most part, if you're using a rep range instead of sets across, so instead of three sets of five, it might be three sets of four to six. And that way you have a little bit of flexibility in there. And I would also say on your second and third sets, if you need to drop the weight to stay in the rep range, go ahead and do it. That because of the auto-regulation, right? Because you feel you need to do that. And you'll become more and more experienced with this over time. This is not an excuse to back off and not train heavy and hard. You still want to get within one to three rep shy failure. It's just getting there may require a little bit of a trade-off versus just linearly pushing it like you would in the past. Right. So on a good day, oh, you're feeling great. Maybe you're doing one of these weekend diet approaches I recommend where you're refueling on the weekend and then going back into the deficit on the weekday. Well, Monday, you may feel really good and get everything that you planned and everything's like a two R R I R, right? Two reps shy from failure. Perfect, great. But other days, in fact, most days in fat loss, you're probably going to be more fatigued. And if you hit the same weight, it might feel like one rep shy of failure. So you either do that, or if it's a grind, because you don't really want it to grind, you know, you drop off the weight for your back off sets, right? So you kind of have to feel it out a little bit. But if it's built in with rep ranges and with back offs and things like that, you can you can do it really well. Speaking of back offs, I do love back off sets and fat loss, where you might do two sets of your lifts. The first set is at a lower rep range, the second set is a little bit higher, but you drop the weight. Boom. It's a great way to deal with this. So the key here is being flexible, but not using excuses. It's kind of a fine line based on your load selection and based on the percentages and the rep ranges, right? You're not married to hitting exact specific numbers. It's auto regulation. So with the top set back off set approach, by the way, it doesn't have to be two sets. You could still do three sets. You could do two or three back off sets. Or you can do what we do in like the Westside style conjugate program, which Andy Baker introduced me to, where you test a 1RM and then you back off from that. You do, let's say, 90% for two to four or 80% for. Or three to six or something like that. And this approach then naturally adjusts to your readiness and fatigue level on that day, where the goal is to keep training hard enough to maintain your muscle, but not so hard that you dig yourself into a hole that you can't recover from. Because remember, again, what is your most limited resource during a cut? It is your recovery. So now let's talk about that. Again, another amazing segue. I'm proud of myself, guys.

Recovery Is The Limiter

Philip Pape 20:24

It doesn't usually happen this way. Recovery. This is where most people fail during fat loss. When you're in a calorie deficit, recovery capacity is far lower than it was when you weren't. And even lower than you might think. And guys, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who've been dieting for a long time and need to just spend some time out of a diet, this doesn't apply to you. I don't want you to take this advice from that position. I would rather you recover, get to maintenance, fuel up, spend there, developing your foundational habits and your behaviors, then do a fat loss phase from a good place. Okay, that was a side tangent. So recovery drops, which means you accumulate fatigue faster and it takes longer to dissipate that fatigue. And some of that is very ever-present, literal fatigue, like your low back is just feeling achy from your Romanian deadlifts or your squats or something, and it's just not going away. And you got to listen to that because that's like bending before it breaks, right? I don't mean break like you're gonna break your spine. I just mean from an ability to hold on to things and progress and really train the way you want. So the first lever is reducing volume, which we already covered. The second lever, if you need to do it, is to reduce frequency, where instead of doing four days a week, you do three days a week. I love this move. It gives you an extra day of sleep as well. It gives you a little less pressure, and then you can kind of focus on some really good, efficient quality sessions. Now that doesn't mean you can't go the opposite direction, and three or four days a week becomes five or six, but very tiny sessions, because that's another way to switch things around without necessarily changing the frequency or just splitting things up across the week. Anyway, you have to figure out what's what works for you. And you also have to optimize the other things that support recovery. So, what would that be? Well, sleep. Come on, guys, sleep. If you weren't getting good sleep out of a deficit, oh damn, you really have to get good sleep during a deficit, right? If you're getting six hours, you probably need seven or eight, right? That's gonna affect your recovery and your hunger and your performance. Do the things, get your room dark and cool, stick to a consistent schedule, all the things. Stress management matters more during a cut as well. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, it promotes muscle breakdown, promotes fat storage, right? We're not trying to do that. We're trying to lose fat. We're trying to call on our resources the right way. We want to manage our stress through walking, through breathing, whatever works for you. Protein intake, people don't realize this. Oftentimes it needs to go up during a cut. If you're already hitting 0.7 or 0.8 grams per pound at least, stay at least there, but try jacking it up to up to one gram per pound and see if that makes a difference to your hunger, for example. Okay, and for your ability to stick to this. Not everybody needs to do that, but it's you definitely need to have that minimum, if not more, during fat loss. And then I want to I want you to consider adding light movement for recovery. This is gonna live you give you a little boost to your neat, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and might actually help with the calorie burning side of the equation anyway. This is your, I'll call it, optimal form of cardio if we're gonna add cardio, and that is walking, easy biking, some mobility stuff that you enjoy. Maybe it's yoga, right? Nothing that's interfering with your lifting or adding more stress, things that increase blood flow without adding fatigue. Okay. Recovery is not just about the rest, it's supporting your body's ability to adapt the whole time during fat loss because you have fewer resources. Now, speaking of managing all these variables, because I know it sounds a little overwhelming when you're during a cut. And that's why, that's why people struggle with this sometimes. But if you're ready to do this, then do it the right way. So I want to tell you about something that can make this entire process dramatically easier.

Fitness Lab: Coaching Assist

Philip Pape 24:10

Some of you know, and if you don't, I'm telling you now, I've been working on an AI-powered coaching app called Fitness Lab, designed specifically to help with situations like this. If you're in a fat loss phase, you've got to adjust these things properly. Your training, your nutrition, you're not sure if you're doing too much or too little. Fitness lab is gonna figure that out with you and for you. It's a coaching intelligence layer. You tell it what you're trying to do as you go because it prompts you, it has conversations with you. There's a chat feature and it knows what phase you're in and it will help you make those smart decisions to pivot and to adjust to your training. Not make excuses, not back off. It still does a great job of prodding you in a good way to keep you accountable, but it looks at your biofeedback and your sleep and your stress. And by the time this episode comes out, we should have the Apple Health integration turned on, which levels it up even further. And by the way, we're coming out on Android as well. So again, depends on when this episode comes out, when this stuff is available. But the app is already out and it's incredible. The feedback we're getting about how helpful it's been, it's like having a coach in your pocket. Some people say it's like having Philip in your pocket. I hope that's not a terrible thing. Uh, if you like the podcast, it sounds weird to me, but it is what it is, right? If you log that you're feeling fatigued, if your biofeedback scores are low, if your last workout was logged as feeling harder, because it's gonna ask you that did this feel harder than last time? And you're like, yeah, actually it did. Fitness Lab's gonna take that and suggest something to change. It might pull back on the volume and adjust your load for the session based on that feedback. So you can still hit it hard, but not feel like past the point of no return with your fatigue. If you're being consistent, hitting targets, feeling good, it might push the progression a little bit, even during fat loss, because you can handle it. So, in addition to it being able to pull in your data, sleep, your steps, your heart rate variability, your rest, resting heart rate, all of that stuff with Apple Health, all of that, plus everything you tell it is going to give you extremely personalized coaching. Really like nothing you've ever been able to have before because of technology. So the app is now available. And from December 17 to January 2nd, you can get 20% off. Go to witsandweights.com slash app, check it out. There's a two-minute quiz that will give you a plan before you even decide whether you want the app. So that'll tell you, hey, yeah, this thing's for me or not. All right, no pressure. Witsandweights.com slash app. All right, let's get back to other adjustments you make to your training during fat

Carb Fueling And Timing

Philip Pape 26:43

loss. Let's talk about carbs and fuel because an underrated aspect of training during a cut is carbs in general, as well as the timing of the carbs. Carbs, carbohydrates, one of the three macros, of course, along with fats and protein, fuel your glycolytic lifting. They support your central nervous system. They do help protect and spare muscle, they reduce your perception of effort, they improve recovery. You guys know how much I love carbs. And if you didn't know that, and you know that now, and you're wondering, really? I thought carbs are bad, stick around. We love carbs on widths and weights because they are magical. And they're magical. During a cut, carb timing is also important. And the strategy here, because the carbs are lower. So here's the thing. Here's the thing, guys. In a cut, your calories are lower, but your protein's the same or higher. Ergo, or as they say in Latin, QED, or the three little dots, if you ever did geometry proofs, uh talking to my nerds out there. Ergo, the carbs have to be a lot lower. If protein's the same and calories are lower, the carbs have to be a lot lower. So in that case, you're down to 150, 100, maybe 70 grams of carbs, depending on where you are. Where do you put the carbs? Well, put them around your workout. If you train in the morning, load your carbs pre-workout, post-workout in the morning. So that's like maybe that's breakfast and your midday meal or lunch. Depend depends on when the timing, right? If you train in the evening, your carbs at lunch and dinner, meals further from training can be lower carb. They can have protein and fat, vegetables, low to almost no carbs potentially, right? We we still like some balance, but you can do that. And vegetables are a carb, and they're because they're fibrous, they will help balance out the digestion of blood sugars and all of that. But I would have your carbs around your workout because that's when it's most beneficial for your performance, for your recovery. So that's a strategic way to do it. And if you don't do it that way, if carbs are low, if they're poorly timed, if you train fasted during fat loss, your training might feel awful. Or if you're like, my training's okay, and now you try having a banana before you work out, tell me the difference. If you don't feel great, then that's you. The vast majority of people are like, whoa, that is fuel. That is like nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide? Yeah, yeah. What is the stuff that when you're driving a non-street legal sports car and you want to go faster, right? Nitrous. So if you don't do that, you're gonna feel more flat, you're not gonna have a good pump, you're not gonna push as hard, all of that. You're gonna have a better performance, most likely, if you time your carbs around your training. And you know, I do I never suggest extremely low carb, even during a cut. If you can get at least 100 grams of carbs, that would be ideal. I know many of you can't because your calories are down to like 14, 13, 12, maybe 1100 if you're really petite, even lower than that. So it really is trading off one macro for the other. And oftentimes that's trying to keep fats reasonably low so you can do that. Not super low, just reasonable, like 20% instead of 30% of calories. All right. So one more mistake, I guess, I want to address is cardio itself. All right, a lot of people add cardio, just the big umbrella term cardio, to quote unquote accelerate

Cardio Without Killing Gains

Philip Pape 30:00

fat loss. And it sounds appealing, right? Cardio can be intense, it can feel productive, it's exercise. Sometimes it doesn't take that long. Many of you hate cardio, but some of you don't. Some of you like it. Not many. Maybe that's my own bias putting on the on the population listening to the show. But during a deficit, when you're also strength training, cardio has to be very, very strategic because too much high-intensity cardio can be too stressful. And I mean like a lot of running, even a lot of high-intensity other cardio, like biking or something like that, like too much of it can interfere with your glycogen stores because you just don't have that many carbs. If you lift, if you do it before lifting, you're really gonna screw up your training. If you do it after lifting or in between your training sessions, you've got to think about when so it doesn't impact your recovery too much. And this is where the frequency and when you train and all of that can make a difference. So, cardio, especially at high intensity or lots of volume, can increase your systemic fatigue because it does tax your central nervous system. It can also do a little bit of muscle damage. And I don't mean that as a like scary thing, it's just preventing the muscles from adapting or recovering as fast if you do something like running, for example. And then it's gonna increase your overall stress. Now, again, exercise and training always increase stress a little bit. That's okay. It's a hormetic stress, but if you're doing a lot of it, it could increase more your chronic stress. And then that does the opposite of what we want. It promotes, it promotes a catabolic environment, which means breakdown of muscle, especially when you're in a calorie deficit. So, what do I recommend instead? Well, anything lower intensity, like walking, easy cycling, rowing at a conversational pace, and also the occasional sprinting can be fit in there. But I mean the anabolic sprinting, like we talk about on the show, that's very, very short, very high percentage of your capability for a short period, because those are highly that's still highly recoverable and will support your metabolism, not going to interfere with appetite. They're gonna increase your need a little bit still, they'll burn some more calories and they won't interfere with your strength training and your recovery. I would also do it after you lift, at least several hours, maybe on your off day. You know, you got to be smart about it, keep it low intensity. It's a tool. And I have talked to many lifters on the show who are big fans of a decent amount of cardio, but it's all relative. It's relative to your recovery capacity. So, really, that's all it is. Remember your deficit, your calorie deficit is what is driving fat loss, period. Right now, your cardio may up your expenditure a bit so that you can eat more and still be in the deficit, and that's okay. So, in that case, cardio should always support your goals. That's it. It should support your goals. It's contextual. All right, a couple more things to cover because this is becoming somewhat of a definitive episode. I want to talk about assistance work briefly. Assistance work meaning the non, you know, you've got your main lifts and then your assistance work, which is the higher volume accessory work. Now, when you're in a building phase, you're gonna have a ton of that, probably, right? Like you might have five or six different exercises every training session, and you're accumulating all this volume and you're creating all this metabolic stress because you're trying to grow your muscles and your strength.

Assistance Work Priorities

Philip Pape 33:12

During a cut, think about the fact that you are not trying to add to your muscularity or to your strength. It'd be nice if we could, but it competes with the goal of trying to lose fat, sometimes to a big degree, where it's not even possible. Now you're doing neither. So the guideline for assistance work is probably something like one to two hard sets each, maybe five to eight reps. Make sure you're rotating movements over time. I don't mean every session, but you know, you're going through training blocks, let's say, so you don't have repetitive stress, depending on how stressful the lift is. And that's it. You know, it's probably not the time to be experimenting with lots of drop sets and supersets and pump work and finishers and all that, because it's just not gonna have the payoff. It's just not gonna have the payoff. Now, some people might disagree with me. There's some really great lifters out there who might say, no, you know, it's okay to do all this stuff. I'm not saying it's not okay. I'm saying you have to pick and choose based on what your goal is. It's less important than your main lifts, in my opinion. During a cut, recovery is limited. Dedicate your resources to the lifts that matter most. Keep those, the squat patterns, the deadlifts, the pressing, the pulling in place. Keep those patterns in place. Maintain all those big muscles with efficient movements that take less time, and then use the isolation work to just fill in the gaps. You also have to think about joint health, avoiding injury. You know, when you're fatigued, you might not be lifting as carefully or with as much focus. All that comes into play as well when it comes to these things. And that leads to the next thing, which is exercise selection. I would stick with what you know during fat loss. I would say fat loss is not the time to introduce a whole bunch of new exercises and learn a whole bunch of new movement patterns because you may not remember I mentioned before your leverages are different, your body's changing. Like it may not actually pay off to even learn certain things in this time because it's not going to feel the same when you're eating more again. So I would stick with things you're proficient at where you have good form and know how to load. That doesn't mean you can't switch them around, right? Over over over cycles, even if you haven't, it's not that it doesn't have to be the same thing you were just doing, but it's something that you already have some neuromuscular knowledge of. And of course, that should include all the basic movement patterns we've been talking about, squats and deads and presses and pulls and all that, and then some simple accessories. You know, don't start learning Olympic lifts during a cut, for example, if you've never done that before. That's all I'm talking about. Okay. It's stressful to do that. It's mentally and physically stressful, requires more focus, requires more practice sets, more warm-up, more volume. And then that could increase your injury risk. Maybe I'm being too cautious here. Let me know. You experienced trainers and coaches out there, if I'm full of it, let me know. But this is my observation. I think a fat loss phase should be very targeted at what you're trying to accomplish. And in my opinion, when you do that, it doesn't have to be as long because you're doing

Exercise Selection And Joint Care

Philip Pape 36:00

it efficiently and then you get through it in say eight weeks instead of 12 or 16. Now, I mentioned joint stress briefly. I do want to mention this because if certain movements start bothering your joints during a cut, which can happen because recovery is compromised, it's okay to modify the movement. You know, switch to a high bar or safety bar instead of a low bar. Use different grips, different widths, different potentially ranges of motion, depends on what we're talking about. I would say fat loss phases should be kind of boring from an exercise selection standpoint, where you're not trying to be creative. And if you're chasing programs that are like fat loss programs, that's a red flag for me, to be honest. All right, let's quickly talk about the psychological side of training during a cut. Just be realistic here, just like with the diet side of things, it's not gonna feel as good as during a building building phase. You're just gonna feel kind of flatter. You're not gonna feel the pump, most likely, because you don't have the calories and the carbs and all that. Your strength is gonna dip, as we mentioned. Your sleep is probably gonna be harder to come by, you're gonna have more hunger. All of this is normal. It's the cost of being in a deficit, and I don't want to sugarcoat it for you. So the mindset shift here is you are not chasing performance during a cut, you're maintaining your performance. If even though I do want you to think of, you know, I'm I'm see, this is tough. Depends on how your mind works. If it helps you to have a stretch goal and say, look, I'm gonna try to get stronger and build muscle, even though I might not, great. That actually does kind of work for me. For some people, it's very discouraging because then when they see the numbers staying the same, they feel like they're failing. So it's kind of setting those realistic expectations. If your strength is the same, but you lose 15 pounds, that's a massive win, right? Don't compare your current cut also to a previous building phase or someone who's not in a deficit. Stay in the lane and trust the process for you and compare yourself to yourself, right? And not to yourself when you were building. It's it's temporary discomfort, and it's just that it's temporary, but it is gonna happen. You are gonna have discomfort. And then when you get back to maintenance or surplus, your strength is gonna shoot back up. You're gonna look incredible because you preserved everything during the cup. And of course, you're gonna track a lot more than just a few things. You're not gonna just track weight on the bar, you're gonna track your body weight trend, your body composition, your clothes, your sleep, your hunger, your energy, your mood. Because if your strength dips slightly, but all the other things are pre good, you're losing fat, you're sleeping okay, you're not miserable, you're not that hungry. You're doing great, you're doing great, it's okay. All right, so let's recap the key adjustments. Accept that strength will dip slightly. Your goal is to maintain muscle, not gain strength. Keep intensity high, at least 75% of your max, but probably reduce the total volume. Maybe as much as 30 to 50%, but that really depends on your response and how aggressive the deficit is. Use auto-regulation, whatever that means for you. Rep ranges, top set, back off sets. Manage recovery aggressively. Now that that's sounds counterintuitive, right? Be aggressive with your recovery. Sleep, stress management, protein, the low intensity movement, all of that. Time your carbs around training, avoid too much high-intensity cardio, keep assistance work minimal relative to your main heavy lifts, stick with familiar exercises and set realistic expectations. And if you follow these guys, you will preserve muscle, lose fat, and come out of your cut looking lean,

Mindset During A Cut

Philip Pape 39:20

strong, and ready to build again. So before we wrap it up, I want to mention Fitness Lab one more time because this is exactly the kind of situation where having an AI coaching layer that I've spent blood, sweat, and tears developing for you guys with all of these philosophies and principles can make a huge difference. When you are managing a fat loss phase, things are stressful. You're juggling a deficit, your training, your biofeedback, your recovery, your macros, all that stuff, and it can feel overwhelming. And sometimes it's hard to know if you're on track. That is why I developed Fitness Lab. It helps you make those decisions with confidence. It kind of takes the stress off of you. It does a lot of that thinking for you, it takes some of the emotional stress. I know it's a machine, but until you try it, don't knock it. Try it. And you've got to give it a little bit of time. You've got to give it at least, you know, a few weeks just so that it starts to learn from you. Because it's going to take your data and your progress and how you're feeling and tell you what to do next. It's going to suggest it and you can chat with it. It's now available on iPhone and Android, integrates with Apple Health, and you get 20% off from December 17th through January 2nd. Go to witsandweights.com slash app just to learn about it. Take a two-minute quiz so you can see if it's right for you. You don't even have to buy the app until you decide it's right for you. Witsandweights.com slash app. All right, that is it for today's episode. I hope this gave you a clear framework for how to adjust your strength training during fat loss so you can preserve every bit of muscle built. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember to always train with intention. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.