Time to CUT!

digitalwolf

digitalwolf

digitalwolf

Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2004
Posts
3,589
Location
England
Right, I think it's time to cut.

I'm 13st 5, 6ft'1 and i've put a fair bit of weight on.

I want to get really defined now, lose this fat off my face too!

How much cardio do I need to be doing and do I need to make changes to my diet?
 
Up your cardio, If your beginning to see differences, keep going.

Honestly, Half the questions on these threads are common sense. How are complete strangers suppost to know how much cardio one individual is suppost to complete to start seeing "cuts".
 
Any specific time length?

I'm training with my mate atm who is trying to hit 1.5 miles in under 10 mins for the army.

Worth tagging along in the cardio.
 
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HIIT to lose fat basically. The best time to do it is 10mins after you wake up when your glycogen levels are low it'll release the catecholamine quicker and in higher doses. The difference is that 1hr of basketball fore example will burn muscle mass to a certain extent. Catecholamine will be released up to 36hrs after HIIT, so doing it 3x a week is a good way of doing it. Then you can keep going to the gym 3 times a week for some weight training to keep up the mass. 13.5st isn;t that big for a 6'1" person though... however at that weight dropping 1/2 a stone of BF will probably look great if you've got a decent physique in the first place.

I do a 6/9 split for about 20mins when I do it. The secret is to peg it as fast as you can till you're nearly feel sick for 6s, then jog for 9s, then peg it again for 6 then jog etc... do this for 20 mins 3x a week. The advantage is you'll preserve your muscle mass, but do it more than 3x a week you'll start burning too many calories i.e. muscle.
 
Nice one!

So run for 6 seconds as fast as I can then jog for 9 seconds then run for 6 seconds over and over?

For 20 mins.

When I wake up.

Right? ;)
 
HIIT in the morning before food, please tell me you are joking...

If you do HIIT it'd best be done an hour+ after food. I used to do mine after work @ 5ish. Best of following something like this;


251interval_big.gif
 
Oh and running as fast as you can for 6 secs then jogging for 9 secs for 20 minutes?!

If you can 1) keep that up for 20 minutes 2) keep decent timing every 6/9 secs i'd be VERY impressed :D

If you don't get along with HIIT, low intensity cardio in the morning for 20-25 minutes will also do the trick just fine.
 
ethos said:
Oh and running as fast as you can for 6 secs then jogging for 9 secs for 20 minutes?!

If you can 1) keep that up for 20 minutes 2) keep decent timing every 6/9 secs i'd be VERY impressed :D

If you don't get along with HIIT, low intensity cardio in the morning for 20-25 minutes will also do the trick just fine.
Click to expand...

My target is 20 mins. I get to about 12 mins at the moment, and I do take a breather for a minute every 5 mins or so as I'm not that kick ass! :p It's good to push yourself though, it's like squats if I don't feel close to puking I'm not pushing hard enough! ;)

I do it before food first thing in the morning - each to their own, I know what my body responds to, maybe HIIT is a bit OTT first thing in the morning, but medium intensity cardio first thing IS good no matter what people say as it's just categoric fact that your glycogen levels will be lower.

Oh and it's important to address your diet, i.e. cut out fizzy drinks, sat fats, high levels of simple carbs - the usual tricks really, antioxidants, vitamin rich fruit and veg etc...
 
Freefaller, out of interest have you tried doing HIIT in the afternoon etc... I think you'd get much more out of it. Possibly following the schematic I posted above :)

I honestly don't think HIIT in the morning is good for muscle loss, especially twelve minutes which includes LOTS of hard sprinting!

I'm sure you'll lose weight doing it your way, but I have a feeling some muscle will be sacrificed.
 
Its not really a catagoric fact that gylcogen will be lower in the morning. If you're on a cutting diet your ideal will be eating meals every few hours that provide less calories than you actually need in that 3 hours, so before any meal you should have your body burning body fat for energy rather than carbs. But at the end of the day, you don't simply burn all the carbs you store in muscle. Your body stores fat in muscle aswell, and will (it would seem) try not to burn all the carbs first, because its not the best source of energy for one thing, and its not the best used for long term energy either which is why in cardio you will burn fat after 5-15mins. Either way, think about this, when you start increased activity it will prefer to use carbs at first while it ramps up production of everything it needs to burn fat and start transporting fat from other fat sources. At the lowest glycogen levels, if you simply burn up say the last 2 minutes worth, and the body is another 10 minutes from getting to optimum fat burning, whats it going to use for energy inbetween? Muscle most likely.

Even when you've carb loaded all day and you are heavily loaded with carbs, you will burn carbs when you start a steady 65% HR cardio, or HIIT and once your body realises its prolonged activity it will switch over to fat even if you've got a shedload of carbs onboard. The body doesn't only burn carbs as long as carbs are available. They are quicker to access, but thats it, they aren't the best source of energy. SO low levels of carbs aren't particularly needed IMHO.

If you eat right after a highish fat meal, and end up burning up all the fat you've eaten rather than body fat, that still means in the next 3-4 hours before you eat again, you'll just burn more body fat rather than the fat you ate. For purely weight loss, I don't know it remotely matters when you exercise, i know for a fact its not completely needed. 2months, and roughly 10 days, and I'm down over 2 stone with zero exercise. Dropping weight, its mostly diet anyway.
 
I haven't been doing HIIT for a few months as my BF is pretty spot on at the moment (I'm happy at around 13%, being 98kg it looks good enough at 6'1"). I tend to do it when I've "let myself go" a little with my diet, which doesn't happen often as I eat a very well balanced diet. However I will try it in the afternoons (I get up at stupid o'clock anyway, so I'll get an extra 45mins in bed which is always nice! :D).

AS for glyocgen levels, well I was pretty sure that they dipped at night, I'm pretty sure they do on average for most people. The joy of HIIT is the catecholamine which is released. No doubt HIIT does chew away at some lean mass, but I've always found it the best way to remove that stubborn layer of fat (not that I suffer from much BF anyway). I just feel I get a better burn in the morning though than playing say 1hr of squash in the evenings - because I treat myself to a decent breakfast (which I absolutely thrive on).

You're right carbs aren't the best form of energy for the body, muscles are, but if you have little carbs in you, i.e. after a long night's sleep, and your body is still building itself up to it's "at temperature" so to speak, and has low levels of glycogen and high levels of catecholamine it will primarly target fat stores before touching muscle. That's what all the experts I know tell me, I'm not going to pretend that this is my knowledge or expertise, but I do trust the people that share this info with me.

Of course doing 45mins of 65% cardio isn't going to be bad for you at all, but the enzymes released for fat loss vs actual efficiency of fat loss is going to lower by all accounts from what I've seen and heard.

Lastly, it's really what works for you, of course I'm rather mesomorphic, and carry relatively low BF and cardio has a huge and immediate effect on me, but HIIT is like my coup de grace it just REALLY works for me. However as stated when I start doing it again I will try it in the afternoon for 3 weeks and see how I get on with it. Eitherway I'm sure the results will be similar after a 3 week period anyway. :)

I agree with you about losing weight is purely down to diet. I don't drink fizzy drinks, grill all my meats, always buy lean meats, I don't eat sweets or high fat foods, or crisps & snacks of that type and eat a lot of fruit and veg and generally a well balanced diet. Hence why my fat seldom creeps up by more than a few 0.x of a %. Ideally I'd love to drop to 12% but I just prefer the slightly "bigger" look anyway. Having just gone past 100kg (though I've dipped back down to 99.5) for my height and body weight my BF levels are really very very agreable to me.
 
To be fair i would have to do more research on it all to really decide for me whats best but I think, on a cut, with less calories, HIIT just seems unnecessarily intense. If diet is 95% and normal "easy" cardio is 4%, and HIIT is 5%, it barely seems worth it.

Then the supplement/chemical side of things is. Adipose tissue, the harder to remove fat, has lots of alpha 2 receptors which help to deter the body from using the tissue for lipolysis. Chemically speaking, yohimbine topical gels should work quite effectively. Lots of body builders swear it does infact help them out on the harder to remove fat area's so maybe it does work well. Aromatise inhibitors coupled with them can also help, drop estradiol a little, give more free testosterone, as estrogen is a pain in the **** when trying to lose adipose tissue.

Its not a shortcut or a free ride, effective use of both only helps your body be much less resistant to burning that fat, you still gotta eat/jump on a bike to actually do the burning.

I'm still way up there on the bf%, with a long way to go. I was always a little heavy since I dropped out of sports at 15/16 due to knee injuries and chronic pain, always slowly gaining for years, but uni, put me in overdrive, was drinking, eating pizza, not exercising at all. IF I hadn't been to uni I'd almost be done losing weight now, i think I probably gained close to 4 stone over uni years :(
 
Sucks about the knee injury - I know the feeling as I had lots of issues as a teenager! :( Is it ever going to be rectified? The uni days probably didn't help - somehow in spite of my uni days I luckly remained relatively trim, in fact I was probably in relatively decent shape, just a lot less bulky!

I only do HIIT for a couple of weeks at a time from time to time, I'm relatively active in terms of sport when not doing it. It is intense but it does kick start the body into shedding fat - it probably is overkill for most people though I'll admit.

A more gently HIIT session is good, but to me defies the objective of it being high intensity! :D I'm a glutton for punishment evidently! ;)
 
Well uni was just, sucky, still chronic pain, crappy halls with awful people who just destroyed the kitched so I settled into eating drinking late into the night, sleep till midday, eat, eat before going out and usually both takeaways :p Added to little activity I got in a pretty sorry state.

I really don't know if it will get better, tbh, I also don't know how bad it is. IT was especially bad as it was both knee's, and the issue inside my knee wore down my knee cap and being it was rehab from both at the same time it was very hard to stay active between physio due to pain. Weakend muscle to track the knee cap as it should, plus a dodgey kneecap and slightly worn groves in the femur from a year of the knee cap being knocked out of place all meant that around my surgery physio was so intensely painful they gave me shots to keep swelling down and I don't know if I ever actually got enough strength in my legs to track the knee cap correctly.

At this point I'm kind of resigned to some pain, but if I lose weight and get enough strength/support into my surround muscles, then maybe the pain won't end up that much worse. There was a couple years of physio where basically it was the idea that pain would eventually go away when leg got strong enough, but they said that didn't seem to be happening and at that time, the pain was significantly worse after weeks of exercise due to swelling making everything a bit crappy.

Maybe years down the line, hopefully slightly better scar tissue, less weight, better eating, less depression(and maybe codeine) and I can break though the pain barrier to a point where its not so bad? we shall see ;)

The other thing was, I was young, couldn't afford a gym so had, running on pavement, which is as bad as you can do joint wise, or cycling which was recommended due to low impact. But it seems its not actually the impact, its the fast movement that hurts, which is actually much worse with cycling than running in my case. So grabbing a treadmill with good support, and trying walking/running, for weight loss and knee rehab.

A lot of the depression was feeling so massively let down from doctors, if they'd sent me to the right guy a year earlier, the chances the surgery had for being completely successful would have been stupidly higher, I wouldn't have had a year of pain, knee cap/femur wouldn't have been damaged and I'd probably have been fine within months. Plus I get the feeling the physio I was sent to was fairly hopeless and gave me all the wrong advice for my particular problem and once the surgery was done my surgeon wasn't remotely interested in if I was actually ok, the surgery went well on his books, job done. oh well.
 
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