My wedding is in 12 weeks and I’d like to lose (at least) 12 pounds by then.
I saw in another thread where you said 1A should keep training for strength while letting diet take care of body comp, because LISS and high rep sets do not work well.
My dream would be if I could just run Layers forever. I totally love cluster sets, as well as just getting in & out with one lift. I also like C2 sprints (30:30) or your upper/lower pairing 4xEMOM for conditioning.
My options seem like:
1- Increase from 4 days a week to 5 or 6, with separate conditioning days
2- Keep 4 days, do strength + conditioning every day: 2 days EMOM pairing, 2 days C2
3- Double up on my usual 4 training days, preferably with at home workouts in the AM. Not sure how to “beat” the LISS or dumbbell/kettlebell workouts I would do at home though, but could probably put my head down and do it in service of the goal.
That’s NOT the reason. Physiology is physiology. 1A aren’t worse at mobilizing fat from LISS than others. It’s just that most 1A will find LISS boring and it can kill their motivation.
I do NOT believe in using the lifting workouts to burn more calories and certainly not to increase the amount of lifting significantly when trying to lose fat.
Be in a caloric deficit. Honestly, losing a pound a week should be pretty easy with a proper caloric restriction, unless you are like 145lbs. You should not require any crazy strategy to achieve that rate of fat loss. Just be in a deficit, reduce carbs to ingest them only around the workout, keep your protein high.
I would add LISS twice per week at 30-35 minutes a clip and intervals once or twice a week.
Another possible strategy is to perform your rest period between exercises actively, for example walking 2 minutes on the treadmill for 2 minutes between each set.
Maybe because it’s been hard for me even to get 0.5lb/wk, I’m seeking something more. I have done all the calculations, all the tracking and weighing food, and even at 10xbodyweight for calories, with several thousand steps per day including a fasted walk first thing in the morning (for a few years now, to try to “upregulate the enzymes that mobilize fat for fuel”) plus 2 HIIT sessions per week. The only solution I can think of is TRAIN MORE. I’m at 20+% and work a desk job, so I feel the need to overcompensate that lifestyle as well. I’d also like to drop more like 20+ lbs but wanted to sound more reasonable.
I do intervals 2x/wk so I will add 2 real LISS sessions per week as well on days I do not do strength training.
I will try some variation of this. I work out in a big university gym, where the cardio equipment is on a separate level, so maybe just walk in circles around the platforms.
My current 21-week average is 8K per day - I walk the dog 3x per day and make sure to take walk breaks at work. I will say the one time I lost a bunch of weight was while living in a major European city where I could walk everywhere and to/from metro. Probably 15K+ per day. Didn’t really change diet in any meaningful way - in fact probably more carbs than usual.
Thank you for the tips. I will begin adding the 2 LISS sessions and walking around between sets and see where the next 4 weeks end up.