OnFitness Magazine - January/February 2022 - 60

WWW.ONFITNESSMAG.COM | VOL 22 NO 4 | 2022 60
Smart Training
ACRASH
COURSEIN
BODY
CHANGE
Garret Keyer
Body change is as much art as science. The
best practitioners of fat-loss know the rules
(science) and use the right tools (art). Just
as someone building a clay sculpture must
know the science of clay, the way it bends,
its thickness, and what it can and can't do,
they also must have the right tools to get it
to respond the way they want it to.
If you're going to be the sculptor of
your own body, you need to know the
tools in the toolbox, which ones to use, and why.
The first thing to understand is your body does not like to do
two things at once. While it's possible to build muscle while
simultaneously losing fat, it's not as efficient as concentrating on
one or the other. Since this is an article on complete body change,
we will cover both separately and together.
-
Getting the fat off your body to be able to see what the actual
shape of your body might be is a good first step. This process
involves optimizing hormonal metabolism first so that your calorie
consumption is naturally regulated.
Doing things this way as opposed to reducing calories to an
arbitrary number based on a one-size-fits-all calculation works
with, rather than against, your body. Try it the other way and
you'll enter into a push and pull with your metabolism's natural
regulatory processes, and your mind cannot outsmart nor out-will
your metabolism.
To keep your body from perceiving a food shortage and
slowing down the metabolism, don't decrease, but rather, ramp up,
your food intake. This does not mean all food, but only foods that
have low caloric density. These foods provide lots of bulk but little
calories.
All low-fat animal proteins and vegetables should be eaten at
will. Then include a sprinkling of carbohydrates. Enough to keep
your energy levels up for intense exercise, and also maintain
muscle, but not so much to slow fat loss.
We call this your carbohydrate tipping point and it's different
for everyone. Start with fifteen to twenty grams of carbohydrate at
each of five or six meals and tweak the levels up or down from
there.
Exercise for fat loss combines the best of weight training and
scorching interval-based cardio. Don't separate the two modalities,
but combine them in one integrated workout. This approach can
create ten times greater fat loss than more traditional fat-loss
strategies.
-
To provide your body with firmness and contour you must first
add muscle. Adding muscle means putting your body into an
anabolic state. Anabolic means building tissue up. Many people
think extra calories only go to fat, but this is only true if you give
them no other choice.
When trying to add muscle you need extra calories and the
proper hormonal environment. The tools for this include
carbohydrates, protein, and weightlifting using heavier loads and
larger workout volumes. Carbohydrates maximize insulin
production, which is a fat-storing hormone, but it's also a musclebuilding
hormone.
Insulin is essential to get amino acids into the tissue to
increase muscle protein synthesis. Carbohydrate and protein
intake are not enough alone, but when they're combined with
weight training they create the perfect environment for muscle
growth.
A large body of evidence points toward this method as a
primary stimulus for muscle growth. It appears timing this
combination immediately after a weight training session provides
the best result. Building muscle matters because women and men
alike who want fit athletic bodies cannot achieve success without
it.
Where weightlifting can be seen as the best tool for putting
muscle on, aerobic exercise is the best method for taking it off.
The only problem is aerobic exercise is indiscriminate. If you're a
female trying to decrease the size of your legs and choose running,
you are likely to see your breasts, arms, and middle lose just as
much if not more than your legs.
To keep this from happening, heavy weight training for your
upper body, combined with lots of long-duration cardio exercise,
can often do the trick. The weight training stimulus to the upper
body tricks the body into maintaining its muscle tissue in that
area, while the catabolic stimulus of aerobic exercise is directed
exclusively at the legs.
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OnFitness Magazine - January/February 2022

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