The Last 10, and How to Lose It
It starts about now: The pressing sensation around the waistline of your pants, the paralyzing lethargy when the alarm goes off each morning, the dawning realization that the hardest workout you’ve had in months was taking the trash out after Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, it’s happening again—the annual outward migration of your gut. Every year, you balloon up over the winter, trim down during the spring and summer, and then by fall you’re fit, or at least fit_ish_, again. But just when you think this is it—the year when you finally break through the barrier that separates the Truly Fit from the Yeah, I Know How to Keep My Weight Under Control—you stall. The scale stops moving. Your motivation evaporates. And soon enough, the holidays arrive and the yearly yo-yo begins all over again.
So why is it that despite your best efforts, you’ve never been able to permanently tighten that softness you’ve had around your midsection since college? The short answer: It’s because you’re thinking about that weight in the wrong way. Pushing through the plateau is less about losing weight than it is about adding muscle. It’s about bulking up, but not in some steroidal, which-way-to-the-Jersey-Shore-casting-call way. Replacing that remnant flab with lean muscle will make you look and feel the way you imagine you’d look and feel if you lost ten more pounds. The scale may move only a little (or it may not move at all), but you’ll be in the best shape of your life.
You already know the first rule of weight loss: It’s about expending more calories than you consume. To start losing weight, you change your diet and exercise habits to create a caloric deficit that causes you to get thinner. But a thinner body requires less energy to sustain itself, which means fewer calories burned. "As you lose weight," says Madelyn Fernstrom, Ph.D., founding director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Weight Management Center, "your metabolic rate falls. That means you don’t need as much food as you used to." Eventually your reduced metabolism offsets the caloric deficit you set up by dieting and ercising, and your body establishes a new equilibrium.
In order to keep making progress, you need to set up another caloric deficit. But now it’s really hard. You’ve already done the easy stuff—those fries you gave up at lunchtime, the three days of moderate exercise a week you increased from none—and the next steps are all unappealing. Six months of counting calories? Too much like fat camp. Five or six hours of exercise a week? It’s challenging enough to squeeze in three.
Luckily, there’s another way to a leaner, stronger body: tweaking your body composition. Muscle cells have twice the metabolic activity of fat cells, which means the higher your ratio of muscle to fat, the higher your baseline metabolism and the more calories you burn at rest. If you focus on building muscle once the weather turns cold—instead of getting frustrated that the scale has stopped moving downward—you can get leaner without any radical diet interventions or dramatic increases in exercise time. And that way, come spring, you’ll be building on fitness gains instead of making up for lost time.
Step 1: Get Strong
Sure, you’d love to look like an action-film hero. But those dudes work out six or seven days a week with private trainers, and their diets are designed by personal nutritionists. (Sometimes they even get a little boost from CGI.) Pick one of these three regular-guy strategies and you’ll maximize the muscle-building potential of your workouts.
Hit the Gym
If you’re like a lot of guys, you probably have a basic fitness routine that revolves around doing some regular cardio—running or maybe riding an exercise bike—a few times a week. In order to change your body composition, you need to replace some of the cardio with high-intensity weight training that hits every major muscle group. You want to do circuits, moving from exercise to exercise at a pace that keeps your heart rate as elevated as it would be if you were still on the treadmill or bike. That way, you’ll be getting the same cardio benefits while also increasing your lean-muscle mass.
Sounds simple, right? Not necessarily—especially when it comes to the motivation required to break out of your current routine. Running and cycling are rewarding in part because they’re easy to measure: After a workout, you know how far you went and how fast. To make weight training work for you, you need to find specific, practical goals, just like you would when training for a race.
Three Strength-Training Goals an Average Guy Can Accomplish
Increase your vertical leap by four inches.
Do ten pull-ups without rest.
Bench-press your own weight.
Increase Your Speed
You don’t need a gym membership to change your body composition; you can get stronger by increasing the intensity of your runs. Start by doing at least one day of sprints per week. After a mile or so of warm-up, run as hard as you can for a hundred yards, then stop and stand still until you feel as if you could comfortably carry on a conversation. Repeat the sprint three more times, then cool down for a mile. The following week, do six sprints, then eight the week after that. Work up to ten before starting the process over, this time with quarter miles. Increasing the intensity in this way will encourage muscle growth in your legs and enhance your cardiac capacity. And if you can work in at least some body-weight training—sit-ups, push-ups, squats, or lunges—you’ll quickly see improvements in lean muscle. "If you’ve just done aerobic work, you can be ’skinny fat,’" says Ironman champion and fitness consultant Dave Scott. "That’s what endurance athletes call guys who can run long distances but have no muscle tone."
Three Strength Goals for Runners
Decrease your pace on a quarter-mile sprint by twenty seconds.
Complete ten quarter-mile hill sprints without requiring more than two minutes’ rest between each.
Shave a minute off your mile time.
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Try Something Completely New
Another great way to build muscle is to force your body to adapt to new types of motion. Instead of running four times a week, replace two of those workouts with bike rides or swims. Or do something even more radical, like signing up for yoga or Pilates classes twice a week. The variety will encourage growth in muscles your body isn’t accustomed to using, which will in turn get your metabolism climbing. Whatever you do, you can’t just phone it in: To see any real benefits, approach the new activity with the same intensity you applied to your old one.
Three Activities You’ve Never Considered That Will Kick Your Ass
Boxing: There’s no approach to fitness that offers a better combo of strength and cardio.
Pilates: Yeah, your girlfriend does it. But if you find a gym that’s serious about it—you’ll know when your trainer starts talking reverently of Joseph Pilates himself—you’ll be so sore you’ll never smirk again.
Crossfit: Crazy-intense daily workouts posted on the Web that have acquired a cult-like following.
Step 2: Get Lean
Although changing your workouts will get you a long way toward altering your body composition, you need to tweak your diet, too. But don’t panic: These are adjustments, not major lifestyle changes.
Target Just a Few More Cuts
You’ve already made the easy sacrifices, but there are probably some cuttable things you’re still allowing yourself—a few oversize portions, an unnecessary snack here or there. "It’s really not all that hard to change your body composition," says Matthew Byerts, a trainer and nutritionist who helps actors prepare for their roles. "You need to burn 3,500 excess calories to lose a pound of fat. If you can be aware of how many calories you’re eating and cut out 250 a day, that’s a pound every two weeks."
Start by trying calorie counting—but just for seven days. The best way to do it is with an app for your phone (such as Calorie Tracker), since you always have it with you. Record everything you eat for one week and then look for things you won’t really mind giving up, especially simple sugars. You’re probably taking in at least a few hundred unnecessary extra calories from sodas, energy drinks, or that weekly lunch of fried chicken. Cut out soda entirely and make that chicken a biweekly splurge—and then delete the counting app from your phone. You’ll never need it again.
Snack Wisely
The problem with hunger is that it outlasts your body’s need for food. So by the time the feeling of hunger goes away, you’ve generally eaten more than you need to. This is especially true with snacks, as an intense late-afternoon hunger can often be sated with far less food than you think you need. So rather than eating until you feel completely full, identify a few foods you enjoy that come in 100-to-200-calorie servings, such as a few pieces of fruit or a single serving (a couple of handfuls) of almonds or pistachios. Eat one serving first, then wait twenty minutes or so. If you’re still hungry, have another.
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Step 3: Get Real
Assuming you succeed at replacing fat with muscle this winter (and you will, right?), you’ll soon be faced with the same problem again: another plateau. And that plateau is probably going to arrive before you start seeing anything resembling a six-pack where your gut used to be. "When you’re getting close to your ideal, you need to determine where is good enough," says Fernstrom. "You need to say, here’s my new equilibrium. It may be higher than you really want, but take a look at your effort level and decide whether or not it’s sustainable."
Some days, you won’t have enough time for your planned workout. That’s okay. The best part of teaching your body to train more intensely is that once you learn how to push yourself, you can still get something out of a very short gym visit. If you wind up with only thirty minutes after work, for example, a quick, hard circuit of weight training will pay far higher dividends than a short run will. Just don’t make the mistake of skipping exercise entirely. That’s the fastest path to winding up on the yo-yo. And now that you’ve come so close to true fitness, do you really want to be starting over again?
Mark Kirby is still sore from taking out the Thanksgiving trash.
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