I’ve been a personal trainer for over a decade now. Feels like it hasn’t been that long, but time flies.
I’ve worked with many different people, mostly in the Campbell area. I’ve worked in other cities as well, but Campbell has mostly been my home base.
During that time I’ve written and designed many different training programs, for a lot of different goals. My primary focus has always been strength and muscle gain, but each program had it’s own modifications and adjustments based on the client and where they were starting from, and also the amount of experience they had.
But one thing always remained constant in all the different programs. No matter what the goal was, there was always an initial building phase.
Some people like to call it an endurance phase, more specific training verbiage would be an accumulation phase. This is where you essentially build up your endurance and ability to handle a lot of exercise and work, so that following phases when you would transition into higher intensities your chances of success are much greater, and the physical and mental adjustment is not as rough.
This is because you spent time building, or accumulating, or as I like to describe it as building your “work capacity” in order to handle higher demands and tougher challenges later on in your training program.
This is a pretty standard process for writing training programs, they are built on multiple phases that progress into each other. It wouldn’t make sense to jump a person who just signed up right into sub-maximal lifting at a very high percentage of their 1 rep max. That wouldn’t go over very well and could be potentially dangerous and inefficient if their system isn’t ready for it.
The way we make them ready and get them there eventually is we phase them into it. We build up their ability to handle the demands of the program as time goes on through lighter loads and gradually making the intensity and challenges greater. We accumulate or build up their abilities first, before really pushing them and increasing difficulty. That’s the standard and effective route to go when it comes to writing a program. That generally leads to significantly more successful outcomes.
Yet, we don’t do that with dieting. Many people never do phases with their nutrition at all. It’s completely overlooked or skipped, which is unfortunate. Similarly to lifting weights and building muscle, phasing someone into their diet and increasing their body’s ability to efficiently handle calories, macros, and meals is a much more effective route to go. And, this will lead to significantly more successful outcomes.
What do people do instead? They take their preexisting habits, whether that’s eating sporadically or eating unbalanced or mindlessly, and go straight into an aggressive calorie reduction. Or sometimes they go straight into extreme portion control, or an elimination diet.
And this is very similar to having someone who wants to lift and get stronger, jump right into the extremely challenging and heavy parts of the program…without building themselves into it.
For them, it’s a harsh shock to the system. Their body is absolutely not going to handle and respond to that training as well as it could have if the person spent some time beforehand working on building up their ability to handle those tougher weights and intensities. In this scenario, their body responds with shock, pain, soreness, not as much physical power and ability since it was developed properly, and a very limited amount of work it can do before their system is just taxed and exhausted.
And yet many people do the exact same thing with dieting. Instead of building up their ability to handle foods and calories more effectively, and getting their system’s capacity increased just like you would for lifting…they go straight to the higher intensity. Only in this case, the higher intensity is cutting calories drastically, or reducing serving sizes and portions right off the bat.
In this scenario, the body responds with shock, low energy, hunger, stress, tiredness, irritability, and eventual loss of really important tissue like muscle. It wasn’t ready for that immediate jump into a challenging calorie cut, and it fights back in various ways.
The thing is, you do need to cut calories and portion sizes eventually if you are trying to lose weight. Eventually that does need to happen.
The problem is many people completely skip building up their own body’s ability to handle food and calories effectively in the first place. They very often will start a diet before having a really solid foundation in place. And that solid foundation is incredibly similar to the accumulation or build up phase for training.
That foundation sets the tone for everything, and a strong foundation will lead to a much higher success rate.
What is that foundation? Some people like to call it your maintenance calories. But it’s just eating enough calories mindfully for your current body size and physical proportions, i.e. amount of muscle mass and total weight. When you do that, you are building up your body’s ability to handle calories effectively for its current size. You are also giving it the fuel it needs to succeed and do it’s processes daily.
When you don’t do that, (which many people inadvertently don’t because they tend to eat for taste and aren’t mindful of amounts their body needs), your body isn’t nearly as effective at handling calories and doesn’t always have all the fuel it needs for it to succeed in all its daily process. (Think of things like energy, hormones, muscular tissue/cellular repair etc.)
And when you try to cut calories and reduce portion sizes from there, because your body never had a really strong foundation to begin with, the effectiveness of those dietary attempts are usually pretty minimal, and will plateau fast. This is because your body didn’t have an optimal capacity/foundation to begin with, and is now getting shocked with these higher intensity dietary protocols. It will work for a little while, but just like trying to lift heavy without building up into over time first, the results are not going to be anywhere near where they could have been, and overall it will feel and be a lot harder since there wasn’t a sturdy foundation to begin with.
This is the one thing that is always skipped when dieting, and it causes a lot of headache. Of course when someone wants to lose fat, they don’t want to eat more consistently or even higher amounts of food because in their mind that doesn’t equate to what they’re going for. It’s just like the lifter who wants bigger muscles and to be strong, they want to lift heavy and intense right off the bat.
But if we can instead get them to build up their strength and muscle with lower intensities over time in order to create a really strong foundation, then when they do go to those higher weights and intensities, their body is much more efficient and can handle it.
Dieting is exactly the same. People who want to lose weight without a strong nutritional foundation first, are just like the lifter who wants to lift heavy right off the bat. The immediate calorie cuts are the higher intensities. People should not jump to those right away, and instead should take some time to build their foundation. And in this case their foundation is their metabolism. This is how their body processes food and calories and turns it into useful energy for different things.
They’re really building up their body’s ability to effectively handle calories, and getting it used to optimal amounts for their current size, so when they do go to the “higher intensities” and cut calories, they are much more successful because their body and metabolism were primed and already had a really strong foundation. They accumulated efficiency in handling foods and calories, and built up their metabolic efficiency. So when they do decide to drop calories in the future, it works significantly better and is not as much of a shock because they phased into it strategically. The success rates are always much higher when doing that.
