Relatively light people trying to get leaner

For the love of god, why hasn't this thread been stickied yet?

Wow... I sincerely applaud you for your commitment to helping people out on here. I read 8 pages of this in one sitting and am so happy I found this.

Well thanks. This is fun for me. I mean the most I have in front of me at my gym is 20-30 people when I'm training teams and they're on autopilot for the most part. It's neat being able to reach so many people at once using this medium of exchange.

I knew I needed something more than cardio to get these 10 lbs off of me, so I started looking into strength straining, slightly afraid of bulking up, but knowing if I ever started to look too bulky I could just stop.

Heck, I've had female clients coming to me begging me to help them get the last 5-10 lbs off of them. Fast forward 1 year and often times they're heavier then when they came to me and happier than they could have ever imagined. Mind you, these are the relatively small women who come to me looking to "tone up" as they like to say. But the fact remains... by and large this is the experience they have.

I've started to do exercises targeting my whole body (core, chest, back, arms, quads, calves, glutes & hamstrings) - like you, I've never believed in heavily marketed packages for the masses, since everyone is different. Most of my workout relies on body weight and a pair of 2.5 lb dumbbells, since I don't have access to a gym for now.

As far as my workout routine goes, I know I need to invest on heavier dumbbells (it's already too easy to do 12 reps, and I end up doing 24 to make up for it). I usually warm up pre-workout and jog 1 mi on the treadmill post-workout (it takes me about 15 mins, sometimes stopping for brisk walking breaks). The whole deal takes me an hour and a half, depending.

At the very least, if a gym membership isn't in your future anytime soon, I'd pick up some adjustable dumbbells. There are some very expensive sets out there, but I know I've seen a set at ****s Sporting Goods for a reasonable price. Here's a link:

http://www.****ssportinggoods.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2173649

Not the greatest but they'll do the trick for the time being.

The problem with sticking with a very light weigh and adding more volume with it is this - our bodies require a stress above and beyond what they're accustomed to to elicit change. Right? We force our bodies to change for the better hopefully by making it keep up with an ever-increasing challenging environment (the gym, the treadmill, or whatever).

In research, rank novices have shown increased leg muscle size simply by walking. But that's because moving their own body weight walking was sufficient enough (overloading enough) at the time to warrant biological changes within the muscle cells. Eventually, once their body "catches up" or adapts to that overload, walking will no longer provide enough of a challenge to justify further change in regards to muscle cell size.

So right now you don't have the ability to increase load since you've static dumbbells. I'd argue you could find ways to make certain exercises more challenging but lets not go down that road right now. So in its stead, you're increasing volume or reps. Here's the issue with that...

Not only do you need to overload the body - the overload also has to be specific if particular adaptations are to be realized. Meaning, we can't go out and run further and further and expect to grow lots of muscle simply b/c we're increasing the challenge to our bodies. Sure, something is adapting since we're progressively overloading our bodies by running further... but that overload isn't specific to muscle size. What's changing in this example? Our bodies are becoming more aerobic centrally and locally - meaning our hearts getting bigger, it's pumping more blood, it's beating slower at rest, out cardiorespiratory systems are getting more efficient and effective at delivering oxygen to the muscles and removing waste byproducts, etc, etc.

In terms of hypertrophy (the growth of muscle cells), not only do you need to be lifting weights (which generates tension in the muscle), you need to be lifting sufficiently heavy weights. If you're not, the only thing you can do is do more reps, as you are, with the same load and eventually this turns into an endurance exercise. You might derive adaptations (such as better oxidative qualities of the muscle being trained) but that's not going to do much of anything for you in terms of muscle growth.

Which, I might add, is what most relatively light women looking to get leaner are looking for, unbeknownst to them.

Rambling a bit... but hopefully you followed that logic. If not, simply say so and I'll try and explain it differently.

(background info: I'm 22, 5'2", and 123 lbs. I have a small frame and have been retaining fat waist-down, so all I want is to lose the lovehandles and thigh fat, although numbers on the scale are satisfying, I just want results)

Welcome to being female, lol.

Unfortunately thanks to the evolutionary course we, as humans, took (not so unfortunate since we're still alive, lol), women generally have biological differences of where particularly stubborn fat cells reside - generally hips, booty, and thighs.

As far as nutrition goes, I did start counting calories MFP-style, and thought (naively) 1,200 cal. makes sense for me. I was slightly confused as to what my maintenance levels would be. I saw your calculations and calculated 123 x 14 = 1722 cals, so for a deficit I calculated 1476 cals (123 x 12). So, from my understanding, I need to stay within 1400 cals in order to be losing fat. Am I on the right track? I've always felt smaller people naturally need to eat less, and I am small.

Smaller people definitely need to eat less.

Read the above post of mine about the process.

14 calories per pound for calculating maintenance works out for many people. For others though (due to lifestyles, non-exercise activity thermogenesis levels, genetics, etc), their actual maintenance is higher or lower. For females who are light, in general, it tends to be a bit lower. Especially if they've a history of dieting.

But no reason for concern, if you read the process. The process will fix it in 2-4 weeks. If things aren't changing in the right direction and you can honestly say you were accurate and consistent, you know, more than likely, that 14 was too high for you and you need to bump it down.

I'd say for most people 10 calories per pound tends to be the sweet spot in my experience.

Makes a lot of sense, so just making more repetitions of the same thing will just have the muscle adapt to those small bits of tension, instead of adapting to larger bits of tension.

Well sort of.

You have to define the adaptation you're talking about or seeking.

In the case of muscle growth, there are a number of parameters that must be met. One of them, the most important, is something known as tension overload. When we "ask" our muscles to overcome an external force, tension is created similar to a stretched rubber band in our muscles.

There's also a threshold of tension (generally expressed as intensity defined by % of maximum effort in a particular movement) that must be met or surpassed in order to trigger muscular growth. Which is why once your body adapted to the 2.5 lb dumbbells.... doing reps until you're blue in the face isn't going to do much as far as getting you over this tension threshold.

Which is why progressive overload is required.

Granted, there are many ways of overloading the muscles besides increasing the load. But by and large, this is the primary mechanism.

And like I was saying, doing high rep, light weight lifting will elicit adaptations assuming they're above various thresholds. But that's just it - all adaptations have their own unique thresholds and specific stress applications that they need in order to be realized. High rep, light weight lifting is best suited for adaptations associated with local muscular endurance - not strength and/or muscle growth.

Does that make any better sense?

The way I'm seeing it is if you yank something elastic with a bigger force, it would take fewer repetitions to make it stretch out than if you're just doing small yanks over and over which would be inefficient. I'll look into those adjustable dumbbells, $50 does seem reasonable.

Replying as I read along, but you're on the right tack as far as your thinking goes.

To improve your example... follow this line of thinking. You say "a bigger force would take fewer repetitions to stretch out the rubber band." And that's right. But the logical progression from that statement would imply something like, "so a smaller force would require more repetitions to stretch out that same rubber band."

And that's not the case. The smaller force would never stretch out that band as it's below the threshold I discussed above.

It's better to think of it not in terms of repetitions but as tension alone. Picture a very thick rubber band hanging from a hook. If you tie the other end to a 50 lb dumbbell, it stretches. If you tie a 10 lb dumbbell to the other end though, it does not. In this example the stretch is required for strength and mass to increase. And no matter how many times you tie that 10 lb dumbbell to the end of the band, it's not going to stretch.

Make better sense?

Now you are onto something though. Intensity and volume are inversely related. Think of intensity as weight on the bar and volume as reps per set. The heavier the weight, the lower the reps and the lighter the weight, the higher the reps. We can use this logic to conclude that we want to be using weights in any given exercise that keep us in the 6-12 rep range, generally speaking, assuming muscle growth is the goal.

And you don't want to be going so heavy that you're failing either.

So say I start at a middle ground and use 12 calories per pound for now, that would set me at 1400 for maintenance so I could stay at 1200 for deficit. Would those 200 really make that much of a difference? Right now eating 1400 and exercising 200 seems easy, almost more or less what I've been doing already (and have lost 4 lbs give or take). Granted I still have to modify what sorts of things I eat... but this I'm aware of.

Here's one of the most important things I'm trying to get across to people in this thread. Calculations and estimations should not be dictating which direction you take your calories. The process I defined above should. If you're moving toward your goals (per the tracking mentioned above) at a reasonable rate, don't consider moving your calories simply because some formula says you should be eating X.

For starters, the formula may not fit you well. Secondly, your estimations of intake and expenditure may be significantly "off." Which is why you can't make judgment calls based what should or shouldn't be - you can only do that based on what's really happening.

I've female clients, for example, who swear they're eating 1200 calories. They're maintenance cals are around 2000. And the long term trends in data show they've lost nowhere near what they should have if they were truly eating 1200 calories, implying they're eating much higher, but still in enough of a deficit to trigger about a 1% rate of body weight loss per week.

I'm not going to tell them to eat more since they're "eating 1200" and by my calculations should be eating more. For all I know they're really eating 1500 and bumping them up would throw them too close to maintenance to realize any sort of progress.

Catch my drift?

Oh, and you asked will 200 calories really make a difference? Well, to put it succinctly, yes. The smaller you are, the more significant and impacting calorie variations become. Which is why for small women, like yourself, it's usually not the "starvation mode" that's causing them to stall in weight loss. Rather, it's some seemingly small oversight in calorie consumption that keeps them too close to their maintenance.

When you're 300 lbs with a maintenance of 4000+ calories per day... small oversights won't make that much a difference. When your maintenance is under 1500 though... all of a sudden small variances really matter. You've less room to wiggle so to speak.