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Active Rest vs Passive Rest

The importance of rest in training cannot be overstated even if it doesn’t get talked about enough.  Many people train too hard too often, often overtraining.  Factually, they would benefit from more recovery both in an acute (day to day) and long term sense.  In general, I recommend most take 1-2 days of rest from training. But that raises the question: is active rest or passive rest superior from a recovery standpoint.

Defining Active and Passive Rest

First some definitions.  Passive rest should be pretty easy to understand, on a passive rest day you do nothing.  No training at all.  Some might allow for something like a brisk walk.  But basically this is a day completely off.  Sit around, do nothing, relax, recover.   I don’t have much else to say about passive rest beyond that for the time being but I’ll come back to it near the end of this article.… Keep Reading

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Nutrient Intake, Nutrient Storage and Nutrient Oxidation

This is going to be a bit of technical/unapplied article, I’m going to try to keep it short and to the point and mainly it serves as a background for some topics I want to talk about in the near future (especially alcohol) so just be forewarned as you start on this.  When people talk about diet, it’s common to divide the various nutrients that humans consume into two gross categories which are:

  1. Macronutrients: nutrients consumed in large amounts (‘macro’ = large)
  2. Micronutrients: nutrients consumed in small mounts (‘micro’ = small)

So macronutrient refers to protein, carbohydrates, fats and alcohol, those nutrients that, when they are consumed are generally consumed in gram or larger amounts.  The micronutrients refers to vitamins and minerals which are usually consumed in very small amounts (e.g. the DRI for Vitamin C is 60mg where 1mg is 1/1000th of a gram).  I’m not going to talk about micronutrients in this article and will only focus on the macronutrients, specifically protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol.… Keep Reading

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Muscle Loss While Dieting to Single Digit Body Fat Levels

A question that comes up quite often is how much fat someone can lose when they are dieting down to the single digit range.  It’s often claimed that losing more than two pounds per week will cause muscle loss or that the ratio of fat to muscle lost will start to shift in a negative direction.  Even that data is usually based on studies of the obese and it is likely to change as people get leaner.  So what’s the reality.  How fast can fat be lost in lean individuals without muscle loss.

The 2 Pound Per Week Limit

The idea that weekly weight loss should be limited to 2 pounds has been bouncing around for decades although nobody seems to know where it came from.  There’s no real physiological reason for this to be a weekly maximum and much larger rates of both weight and fat loss can be achieved with extreme deficit diets.… Keep Reading

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The Long Term Delayed Fat Loss Effect

Over the many years I’ve been involved in the fat loss game, I’ve seen some weird stuff happen.  When I was in my 20’s and only thought I knew what I was talking about (as opposed to now when I’m simply usually sure I do), I had observed one of the things I’m going to talk about today but didn’t have any real clue why it happened.  With clients or whatever, the only answer I could give was “Because it does.” or “Magic!”.

Now, I have a bit more clue what’s going on, or at least what I think is going on so I’m going to share one of these with you (I’ll address others in future articles).  Today I want to talk about something that I like to call the LTDFLE,  an acronym that I genuinely hope you will use at every possible chance on forums to confuse people, and which will make sense shortly.… Keep Reading