Eat more, train harder?

Someone decides to get lean. She reduces calories, which means less food, fewer nutrients, and, more importantly, less energy. Problem is, when she decides to lean up she also decides to INCREASE her training volume. It’s a natural instinct, but also a common mistake. Food is what allows you to recover from your workouts. It also fuels those sessions. Does it make sense to train more when you’re eating less? Does it make sense to train more when your capacity to recover is lower?

It makes exactly zero sense. It’s a great way to burn out, fail to repair the muscle damage caused by your workout (leading to muscle loss), and be short on fuel, leading to poor workout performances. And don’t forget, the more you train, the more you raise cortisol. And the less you eat, the more you raise cortisol. Combining low calories with a lot of training will lead to very high cortisol levels, which will cause all sorts of bad things: muscle loss, lower libido, less sleep, bad moods, and, eventually, a harder time losing fat.

I’m all for increasing activity level when dieting down, but do it with a non-stressful activity like walking, not by doing more and more hard lifting. Keep training hard to maintain or even slightly increase your muscle mass, but don’t add more volume. It’s smarter to decrease volume while upping the intensity. –