• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Training principles to build muscle or burn fat

This is an excerpt from Elite Physique by Chad Waterbury.

Most people have one of two goals in mind when they train—to build muscle or burn fat—and in reality, almost any resistance training program can do both. Consider three intelligently designed resistance training programs, based on the muscle rules discussed in the previous chapter. Let’s say each of these three programs has a different emphasis:

• Training plan 1 emphasizes heavy loads (3-5 sets of 3-5 reps).
• Training plan 2 emphasizes moderate loads (3-4 sets of 6-12 reps).
• Training plan 3 emphasizes lighter loads (3-4 sets of 18-20 reps).
  
  

If you simply look at the sets and reps, and don’t know anything else about the programs, you could say with some confidence what each program is designed to achieve. The goal of training plan 1 is obviously to build maximal strength. Plan 2, using the most common hypertrophy parameters, is for someone trying to increase muscle size. And plan 3, with its high volume (up to 80 reps per exercise), would be best for fat loss.

But what if you learned that every set in plan 3 is to be taken to momentary muscular failure to create metabolic stress, a potent stimulus for hypertrophy (Schoenfeld 2010)? Or that plan 1 includes lots of single-joint exercises for muscles that wouldn’t typically be emphasized when the goal is pure strength? Or that plan 2 has relatively short rest periods and thus limited recovery between sets, which wouldn’t be optimal for hypertrophy? Wouldn’t that change your sense of what each program was designed to achieve?

The truth is, any of the three can be a muscle-building or fat-burning program. Training with heavy loads induces greater growth of type II muscle fibers, or equal growth of type II and type I fibers, mainly by myofibrillar hypertrophy. Training with lighter loads for a high volume or to momentary muscular failure causes more growth in type I fibers and might stimulate sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (Haun et al. 2019). What matters most is this:

• All muscle fiber types can grow with the right type of training. In chapters 8 and 9 you’ll see programming with repetitions that range from 3 to 30 per set to get maximal stimulation of all muscle fiber types.
• Your daily nutrition is the difference maker. If you consistently consume 500 calories a day above your maintenance level, you’ll gain muscle with any of the three programs I just described. If you eat 500 calories below your maintenance level, you’ll lose fat with the same programs.
  
  

Regardless of your goal—to build muscle or to burn fat—the core component of your elite-physique training programs will be three full-body circuits each week. And you’ll prioritize multijoint exercises, since they stimulate more muscle groups with each set than isolation exercises do. But this is where the similarities end. A fat-loss program needs a few modifications because training and eating to burn fat requires a caloric deficit, which imposes stress on your immune system. With too much overall stress, you won’t be able to maintain optimal levels of testosterone and other anabolic hormones (Fry and Kraemer 1997; Schoenfeld et al. 2020). The modifications are as follows:

• Less volume: You’ll do four rounds of a circuit instead of five or more.
• Less intensity: You’ll stop each set one or two repetitions short of failure to avoid excessive muscle damage (another form of stress).
• Fewer exercises: Fat-loss workouts often have three or four multijoint exercises instead of five or more.
• Shorter rest periods: With 30 to 45 seconds of rest between each exercise in a circuit, instead of 2 to 3 minutes, you’ll elicit a larger cardiorespiratory response (Alcaraz, Sanchez-Lorente, and Blazevich 2008).
• More metabolic work: Each workout will end with a metabolic exercise (e.g., sprints or sled work) to stimulate fat loss. You’ll also do lower-intensity cardiorespiratory exercise on nonlifting days to promote fat burning and manage fatigue.
  
  

The first three changes—lower volume and intensity and fewer exercises—help you limit training-induced physical stress at a time when your body is already coping with the stress of a reduced-calorie diet. If you’re relatively new to strength training, or coming back from a long layoff, you may increase strength and muscle mass during a caloric deficit while also losing fat. But if you’re an intermediate to advanced lifter who’s been training consistently for the past few years, you may be lucky to maintain your muscle mass while losing fat. The more likely outcome is that you’ll lose some muscle along with the fat. That said, if you have a lot of fat covering strong and well-developed muscles, you will probably appear more muscular as you get leaner, even though you actually have less total muscle. It’s a trade-off most of us will gladly make when the goal is to improve your physique.

The fourth change—shorter rest periods—increases the density of your workout. In other words, you perform more work in less time. Your heart rate will increase, and you’ll breathe harder from the greater cardiorespiratory demand (Alcaraz, Sanchez-Lorente, and Blazevich 2008). You’ll also have higher levels of EPOC (excess postexercise oxygen consumption), which means you continue to burn calories at a higher rate in the hours following your workout (Greer et al. 2015). Some research suggests EPOC aids in fat loss, although probably not to the extent you often see promoted in fitness marketing (Williams et al. 2013).

Calorie burning is also the reason for the fifth change. Metabolic work is similar to strength training with limited rest periods, in that it raises your heart rate and contributes to EPOC. The low-intensity cardiorespiratory exercise on the days in between strength workouts will also burn calories and train your body to better utilize fat for fuel. So why not do only high-intensity metabolic exercise, like interval training, on nonlifting days? The goal is to limit fatigue and facilitate recovery. High-intensity exercise creates an acid load on the body that must be buffered by your kidneys, which can be stressful if you do too much of it. Simply walking at a brisk pace on those days, instead of remaining sedentary, will increase circulation, which helps your body clear the waste products left over from your strength workouts.

More Excerpts From Elite Physique

---