Cutting fat not muscle

jdholland5508

6' Male that started at 237. I had a lot of muscle mass then but I also had a ton of fat. I am down to 190 and my strength has been going down pretty fast lately(Can do about 90% of my 3RM on most things). I have been eating about 2400 calories a day but do an hour of cardio in morning and a hour of weights a night 6 days a week. I have been dropping like 3 or 4 pounds a week. Do you think that some/most of that weight is muscle that im losing? Is there anything that I can do to retain most of the muscle I have left? At what pace should I be losing weight?

jdholland5508

Bueller?

BigRich822

I personally would say you have lost a ton of muscle. You really dont want to lose more than a pound a week or you risk losing muscle. How much protein are you getting a day. My guess is not enough. You really need to keeep your protein level high. It seems you are doing everything right. If you can hack cardio and weight lifting everyday then keep it up but it may be too much for your body. You might want to switch it up to like 3 days cardio and 4 lifiting or vise versa. Your body needs to recover a little.

jarrettd

Read up on some of Lyle McDonald's stuff on bodyrecomposition.com, or try Mike Westerdal on criticalbench.com.

Hubs is trying Lean Hybrid Muscle Reloaded (Westerdal/Hulse). It uses a combination of high protein, intermittent fasting, and carb reloads with a 3 stage exercise regimen to save muscle mass while cutting fat. So far, so good.

Good luck!

jdholland5508

I personally would say you have lost a ton of muscle. You really dont want to lose more than a pound a week or you risk losing muscle. How much protein are you getting a day. My guess is not enough. You really need to keeep your protein level high. It seems you are doing everything right. If you can hack cardio and weight lifting everyday then keep it up but it may be too much for your body. You might want to switch it up to like 3 days cardio and 4 lifiting or vise versa. Your body needs to recover a little.

Thats what I was afraid of but atleast I have leaned out a good amount and can start to lose it at a slower rate. For protien I try to get to 200 grams a day. Does that seem like enough? So you think I should switch to having a 500 calorie deficit then? Eat back all my cardio calories when I do it?

docktorfokse

Losing 3-4 pounds a week does sound a little high to me. However, I think the main problem is overtraining; unless you're on steroids, lifting six days a week is definitely too much. I recommend you take a week or two off from lifting and resume with three to four days of lifting per week. Also, make sure your protein intake is high enough. Some people say to eat 1 gram per pound of lean body mass, others recommend .8*your bodyweight if you don't know your lean mass. Hope this helps.

JayByrd107

It could be muscle loss, but your protein seems sufficient and an hour day of weightlifting should be enough to stave off muscle loss due to your calorie deficit. Your loss of strength could also be from overtraining. Be sure that you're giving yourself time to recover. Depending on how strenuous your lifting program is, the extra cardio in the morning could be taking its toll. I've cut back on my cardio to make sure that my legs recover enough to kill that next round of squats.

I would advise buying a set of body fat calipers and taking measurements so that you can get a reading of BF% as you see your weight drop. If weight and BF% are going down simultaneously: good stuff. I’d also look at reining your calorie deficit to about 10-15% (rather than a set 500 cal). As you have less body fat to lose, you need to get less aggressive in your deficit as your body doesn’t want to give up the fat as readily and tends to look to other tissues for fuel (i.e. muscle).

tdigirl

I'm gonna have to agree. Sounds like you are over-training. I'm kinda in the same boat. I want to start cutting but don't want to loose muscle mass. I'm just now getting somewhere on my bench and got my leg press up to an acceptable range. I lift 4 times a week and actually have started doing cardio 3 to 4 times a week and was yelled at by one of my trainers. I was told I'm undoing everything I did in the gym that week. Burning muscle/lean body mass by doing too much cardio.