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← Cortisol, cardio & complexities of fat loss (Part 3)

Chapter 8 · Ruby Cherie

The Role of Weight Training in Fat Loss

January 24, 2025

i know and that's the thing it goes it goes ties it ties into what we talked about with nutrition right so like like i said you can starve your weight off. You can starve and lose a ton of fat, but you're going to lose a lot of muscle too. So it's like, let's say you did cardio by itself with no actual weight training. Yeah, that's kind of like basically pulling your deficit into a really low deficit. You're going to lose weight. Yeah, that's going to be fat, but you're going to pull a lot of muscle too. So your body composition is not going to be better and it could possibly be worse. But that's the beautiful thing about weights. And, you know, the reason you want to weight train, why that has to be a cornerstone in a fat loss program is because you have to try to prevent your body from wanting to break that muscle tissue down, which means also that you have to regulate what you're doing. Just like most people wouldn't be able to handle two sessions of weight training five days a week. Like there are specific situations where you would do that. But if somebody said, I want to put on a bunch of muscle. So I'm going to train twice a day, 10 sessions a week. You're like, bro, like you don't actually need to do that. And you're actually just going to make it everything worse because you can't recover. So it's like a little bit of cardio is good, especially if it's programmed for the right reason. But that doesn't mean that like, if you're doing four, like say four 30 minute sessions of cardio a week that doesn mean that 12 30 minute sessions is going to be heaps better You got to do the right amount of things right It goes back to that whole women just think that more is going to push you past the plateau or stop you being stuck It's like, no, you just need strategy. But I think it's not just women because men think the same thing too. They think that more – when I hit a plateau, I must not be doing enough of something. And I'm like, I can tell you, you're probably not sleeping enough. you're probably you're probably not training hard enough you're probably not recovering enough what you don't need to do is add a bunch of shit to it and do like i need to do four more hours of training doing more training is not the problem doing better quality of training with what you're already doing is is usually if you're training one day a week and you go well i've now plateaued all right yeah yeah more training is probably going to help you but if you're already training like three to five times a week with weights and maybe you're doing a little little little handful of cardio for your blood pressure and for general health adding five more sessions of weights is not what's going to push you over the hump you need to take those five sessions you're already doing and you need to go harder you need to make every rep count and you need to make sure that you're recovering because like you like we said before like you go in the gym and you're you're creating at some level some inflammation through myokines you're creating some you are creating some muscle breakdown and that's going to be the catalyst to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. But where do you get the majority of that? While you're resting, while you're sleeping. So if you're going to train hard, you need to rest hard. And if you're going to train, if you're not training hard, you're wasting your, you're not, I'm not going to say you're wasting your time because any training is good training, right? So as long as you're going to the gym and you're doing something, you're moving in the right direction. But if you want results, you're going to have to push yourself to a level of discomfort. You're going to have to go a little bit harder. Going through the motions isn't enough. This is the perfect way. I'm not even going to talk about the whole gut thing because this is where I want to end this whole thing because this section is going to resonate with everyone, like you just said with the pushing hard. Now, you see me. You see other lean people doing, quote, unquote, hybrid training. Cardio does not make those people lean. Cardio is not making me lean. Cardio isn't going to give you lean legs. It doesn't make you lean. Doing HIIT up hills isn't going to make you leaner. Although it could probably make a little bit of a bump up if you are really untrained because it can kind of use up. It's just like everything. It's a stimulus. It's a catalyst. Until it's not. That is where training comes in. When it's not a catalyst anymore, we have to push it a little harder. But I know where you're going with this, though, because the thing is it's not like the training is one piece. nutrition's another piece rest and recovery is another piece right so it's like yeah like will HIIT training make you leaner yes if you control your calories and you you eat for the performance and you don't eat more than what you need to perform and you don't eat too little what you need for them like it's again it's the Goldilocks thing right it's like you have the muscle there to start with which is kind of like the population that I coach people want this lean physique and they think that cardio is the answer there or hybrids the answer there to me for my population we will talk about the obese people because i wanted to talk about that too but the starting place should be getting as strong as fuck first building the muscle walking putting the other time into recovery and just maximizing how much muscle you can build because you don't have seven days a week when you're a busy mom like building muscle and walking need to be the main things and weights need to be your focus and i will i will say i disagree with you i know i'm gonna bring in the cardio just now because you're trying to trick me yeah exactly because i'm not i'm not muscle nods i'm not muscle mods but you need to build the body to reveal the body now you mentioned this before as well a lot of people can't push themselves the way they need to in the gym because they don't have the training capacity there in terms of the endurance so i knew you were going to bring that in and this factors in for those people as well as when someone's coming to us with excess adiposity, I know that you are a huge fan of front loading, which you can explain what that means. Aerobic work. Why is that? How are you going to progress that person who, well, I would say Marlon already touched on that, but that person that wants to get the physique, they have excess body fat to lose. They want to lose that and they want to build muscle and they want to look good. Pretty much the majority of people. Well, okay. So there's a man, there's a lot of stuff I could say on this.