Lessons On Lockdown: Nutrition - Part 1

Part 1 – Basic Principles

Do you want to know a secret? The way you train on lockdown doesn’t make that much difference to the shape you end up in. Yes, usually if you go on half-marathons for fun on a Wednesday evening as opposed to squatting your 3-rep max you will end up with a different body-type, but neither of those is possible for most on lockdown. Yes, if you train for 5 minutes as opposed to 50 each day you won’t build as much muscle. We’re making that statement under the assumption that you’ve been sensible and followed our Ultimate Guide to Building your own Home Training Program.

When you look at physique competitors (or “bodybuilders”), the people in the world looking to build their ultimate form, their training changes very little depending on whether they’re trying to bulk or cut. When they are in a muscle-building phase, they will do whatever training program that research and experience (plus a pinch of personal preference) has shown them will elicit the largest muscle gain response. When they are trying to lose body fat, they will do pretty much the same training programming, just with lower expectations on the strength & hypertrophy gains they will manage to acquire.

So, what changes? You should have guessed it by now; their food. When they are trying to build muscle, they eat in a calorie surplus. The fact that their body is consuming more energy than it requires just to operate allows them to make “gains”. If they weren’t causing incremental stimulus to their muscles that resulted in a repair & grow response (see our article How Personal Trainers Build Muscle), the extra energy would be stored as fat. However, because their muscles need to adapt to the stress they’re being put under, the energy is used for growth.

When they are trying to cut fat, they then move into a caloric deficit. At this point, the goal is to lose fat whilst maintaining as much of the gained muscle as possible. If the deficit is gradual, and they keep providing enough stimulus to the muscle to ensure the body doesn’t think it can afford to start breaking down muscle tissue for energy, the body will look towards fat tissue to compensate for the missing calories in its daily needs.

In general, their daily protein intake will remain the same, and when in a deficit they will cut their carbs and fats, the ratio of which is completely person-dependent, as everyone operates best on different energy sources. When they are in a surplus they will push both of these energy sources up to increase their total energy intake. Where on the calorie surplus or deficit scale you need to be is very dependent upon your goals, but if you feel like you’ve never been able to achieve that muscle-gain or fat-loss that you aspire to, maybe it’s time you did a bit of tracking. If you read our blog post “Consistent Weight Loss: Explained”, you’ll find our guide to using online calculators to find your baseline calorie requirement, and then how to tailor your calorie intake for weight loss accordingly over time. The muscle building formula just requires you to swap the recommended percentage deficit into a surplus.

If weight loss is your goal, one of the main problems you’ll be having at the moment is that one of your three key calorie burners is missing: NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. This is a fancy way of saying “everything you do that involves getting out of bed or off the sofa, not including your work-out”. Usually, this includes the hustle and bustle of your commute, walking to meetings in or around your office, going for lunch, etc. All of that is now gone and your commute involves walking from your bed to your living room.

The most common way to measure your NEAT is by using a step-counter and it’s a pretty effective way of doing so. With the world’s THIRD LOWEST average daily step-count, it’s no wonder Malaysia has such obesity rates. Anyone who has a wearable will have seen theirs plummet recently and maintaining this number is the key to ensuring you can keep eating your usual 3 meals a day whilst if you’re trying to build as much muscle as possible, you needn’t worry as much about NEAT, depending on whether you’re also concerned about staying lean. Moving less makes creating a significant surplus much easier, but overdo it and you could end up also putting on more fat than you’re comfortable with. It’s a personal thing that you need to figure out according to your goals, and we’ll discuss this in Part II.

 

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