Right, to start off with, my name is Nick, and I have decided to cut. Been lifting/ bulking for nearly two years. Made some decent gains got to about 220lbs, want to cut for holidays. Got the diet sorted out as far as I can go with canteen food, and stuck wiht it religiously for 5 weeks, and doing a pretty intense, but balanced regime to cut the fat. Ive read loads of articles and basically followed the principles in the war room fat article and 'CT's running man'.
About a week ago I met with ex Pro Bodybuilder Fred Dimenna, and got some excellent advice from him and his website. He advocates burning as many calories in a 30 session to create a caloric deficit and that slow paced cardio is fair enough, but if you burn off fat and then eat and dont burn off the calories in that, then its just going to be replaced: Basically what Ive already read, but its nice to get it said face to face.
ANyway the cardio I have been doing was: two sessions of HIIT a week, Two intensive circuits (Kettlebels and Boxing) and two slow paced cardio seesions in the morning, whihc have now been replaced with moderate intensity cycling.
My problem is the HIIT. I do it with two mates, and we follow the progressive HIIT one on running man (30 jog- 20 sprint- 40 jog-30 sprints…etc) Now what I found was that the ‘sprints’ were not really sprints but fast jogs. Im not sure if thats what its meant to be or not. But Its unrealistic to expect relatively unconditioned people to start ‘sprinting’ for anymore than 20 seconds. SO today I thought, instead of this, I will do this:
Warm up- sprint (we dont have a track but its like 150-200m) and because there is three of us, we are going all out against each toher) then quick walkback, and then sprint again. Six times. The HIIT session had us ‘sprinting’ for spurts at varying distances but because we were always conscious of burning out, the only real sprint was for the first part oft he last sprint.
So Im wodering whihc do you think is more beneficial? We would ahve done a jog round for another 10 mins, but one of us threw up, so he wanted to go back!
Sorry for the long winded post. Any help is always much appreciated.