Cutting Weight

[JanTanja]

Hey guys! What are some good ways gymnastic-y ways to lose a few (8) pounds? Particularly, what are some exercises that will help my gymnastics training AND lose weight? My nutrition is fairly decent, with lots of fiber and protein. I try to eliminate as much carbs as possible. My goals include re-learning all the basic movements (FL, BL, PL, HS, L-SIT).

 

Should I focus on losing weight first, or should I move straight to working with gymnastic movements? (around 18% BF) 

 

I gained a bunch of weight due to a focus on weightlifting but I'd like to get my relative strength back that I had lost a couple of months ago. Thanks!

[Blairbob]

 Workout and try to tighten up your diet.

 Shoot for something like a 250-500 calorie deficit per day. That's a really slow cut as it would be 2# per month. Anything more than 500 is pretty rough.

 Fewer carbs. I don't believe carbs are the devil but if you are going kind of crazy on your carb intake, cut it back.

 Whey protein helps cut weight as well. Or L-Leucine does of about 3grams to spike mTor. You can figure out what that is animal protein with some google searches but L-Leucine is pretty cheap TBH.

 Drink A LOT of water. You'll end up having to pee a lot but somehow it burns calories supposedly. I've been meaning to look into the science of it. As well, your body will be less likely to retain water when you are drinking A LOT of it per day.

 Some people have some success cutting exogenous creatine out of their supplements. Personally, it makes sense but OTOH gives you more energy to train.

 Probiotics to help you, ahem, loosen things up. Probably not an issue but doesn't hurt. If you do think you are  a bit backed up, down a small bottle of Magnesium citrate.This stuff will work in about an hour. I did not like the Bisacodyl sulfate. That stuff sucks. Never again.

 Another simple solution is walk more. You could run as well or do other cardio but walking is a lot easier to recover from until the mileage starts piling up.

 Cut out unnecessary junk food. Unfortunately this means cutting calories so be mindful of this. Lately, I like to go to the market and look at all the tasty things to eat, take pictures of them and salivate and go home. It's lame.

 You could tack in some more anaerobic exercises like KB swings, sprints, shuttle runs, stair running, etc.
 

[Mikkel Ravn]

Doing GST is in itself a fat loss strategy, so by all means go ahead with it. Weight loss isn't a very good measure of progress though - As I'm sure you know, you're likely to actually gain weight by strength training, once you've shed your initial fat.

 

...And remember not to go newfound-enthusiasm-gung-ho on the straight arm exercises, or you risk popping your elbows.

[Nigel Leeming]

I agree with everything Blairbob said, except the water bit. The only thing I would add is to write everything down: exercise calories, food calories, weight first thing in the morning - draw graphs as your weight day to day oscillates around a mean, and only with a graph can you see the general trend. Without this, you can get disheartened and give up.

 

Some studies show low carb diet reduces weight faster than a low fat diet. I've tried both and believe it. It may be becuase if you focus on reducing carbs, you're not tempted towards the odd bit of sugar. I can only do low carb (<50 grams per day) for a few weeks though and then I start craving cornflakes.

[Blairbob]

Low carb cuts weight easy as you end up cutting retained fluid.

Cornflakes sound like your body wanting to refill glycogen. At 50g/day, you're not really going to be filling up your glycogen stores. Obviously you can convert protein and fat to glucose but it's not efficient at all.

[Nigel Leeming]

Yes, a glycogen refill. The carbs in cornflakes are 2 glucose molecules, so a higher GI than sugar, which is one glucose, one fructose.

 

To add to your first statement Blairbob - in case anyone cares - is that the retained fluid is the fluid required (3 to 4 molecules of water per 1 molecule of glucose) for glycogen storage.

 

And a disagreement I am a disagreeable fellow at times. Yes, protein can be converted to glucose through glycogenesis, leaving behind its nitrogen in the process - this could be a bad thing in excess - but fat cannot be converted to glucose. The cell uses either glucose from the blood or glycogen stores or lipids (fat) from the blood is my understanding.

 

In addition, I was watching a BBC programme about dieting yesterday and they were testing for ketosis (this is the nitrogen bit). After 3 weeks on a low carb diet I had occasionally had a small but measurable amount of ketosis. After 1 day of fasting, some of the dieters had a fairly significant amount of ketosis going on. I'm not sure what to make of this, and it was presented as high ketosis = high fat burning, when I think it should refer to protein burning.

[Nigel Leeming]

That should be 3 to 4 grams of water per gram of glucose, not molecules.

 

A water molecule weighs in at 18g/mol and glucose at 180g/mol, so that's 30 to 40 water molecules per molecule of glucose. I wonder what they're all doing?

[Joshua Slocum]

Basically reiterating what has already been said:

 

- eat healthy

 

- do strength work

 

- do cardio work

 

It's not rocket science; just consistency and hard work. 

[Paul SONNEVILLE]

Hey,

I just started back myself after some 8 months break from any activity (complet potato mod), supplementing with sprints first (2 days foundation 2 days HS and 2days sprint), t'was too tiring.
I switched back to kettlebells, and it works like a charm (lost something like 6kgs of fat in two months, dropping from 72 to ~65kgs stable and still dropping in fat, with a gentler variation on back loading). Currently doing Foundation on Mon/Fri, HS and kettlbell on Tue/Thur (only KB on Wed and very cool, sometimes not altogether depending on recovery). The KB stuff is always : grinding move first (I love bent press) then a power move (clean and jerk mostly, sometimes swings).

The recovery I found is more important than volume for fat loss and kettlebells are just perfect to supplement for gymnastics for the grip gains, the principles used (irradiation, breathing, etc), and the metabolic side with quick lifts (I personally hate running so that's a very nice switch to me). As long as you avoid failure with grind moves - and specially be careful with swings and snatches, it did impedes my progress on the side lever at first (just gotta remember it's a supplemental practice, so whenever I'm tired that's the first thing I cut back on, sometimes even suppressing it altogether and splitting GST practice into two days).

T'was more a matter of finding how to calibrate supplemental practices so as not to impede recovery on GST elements.
My problem personally is to build more muscle (I re-introduced carbs (oats and things) and recovery feels better, muscle building too soon to say, it does seem to help but no numbers ATM).

Good luck with that, feels awesome to be back to my younger body here,
Godspeed
 

[Andrew Long]

The thing that works best for me ATM is walking... Between rock climbing and gst I don't have the recovery time to chuck in sprints and other high intensity exercise. Walking and the occasional run has worked wonders. I end up walking up to 2 hours a day. 30 mins to work 40 mins to the gym and another 40 mins home again or there abouts. Sometimes a 30-40 min walk to the shops. Although I normally run that one as it only happens 1-2 times per week.

The other thing I'm trying to do is a half day hike on the weekend. Burns crazy amount of calories doing that and it's fun with pretty scenery