Simple Fat Loss: a 4-Week Experiment

I like it when things are simple. Simple things make me happy, and I like to be happy.

So when I looked at my kettlebell swing form in the mirror after getting out of the shower (don't try to form too clear a picture in your head, and definitely don't ask why) and saw things jiggle that ought not to jiggle, I decided it was time to drop some body fat.

Not lose weight, mind you. You can chop off an arm and lose weight. I still want to be strong(ish) and I still want to look like I'm strong(ish), and that requires holding on to or even gaining muscle mass. That means staying far away from any starvation-based, macro-nutrient demonizing, Hollywood bimbo-endorsed "diet cleanse" that leaves you hungry and weak and requires you measure every seed in your tiny serving of watermelon so as not to go over your allotted food mass limit of the week.

For my fat-loss program to work, I need four things:

-Plenty of protein to maintain muscle mass
-A caloric deficit large enough to be effective but small enough to stay away from starvation mode
-Plenty of vitamins, minerals, and fiber to keep me feeling good and healthy
-Some leeway to account for having a life outside of dieting.

This last one is what I thing breaks most people. In a bubble, I think most people have the willpower to see even a super-strict diet to its conclusion and see great results. But life...just, like, frickin' life man, it just gets in the way. Work gets overwhelming, your significant other wrecks your car, 30 Rock has its final season, and when your buddies invite you out to the bar Saturday night you just want to unwind and have like six plates of wings and a beer for each one and not have to explain why you're on a diet and only ordered water.

The other half of the equation is what happens in the gym. Nineteen protein shakes a day won't help you hold on to your precious muscle mass if you don't give said muscles a reason to exist. I firmly believe you should keep lifting heavy while dieting, and seek to at least maintain your strength levels while throwing in some conditioning work to burn more calories and increase your work capacity.

Here's the thing though: I hate training when I'm on a diet. My willpower is usually so sapped from denying myself food that I can't pony up the man juice to do that last set of heavy front squats. As a result, my workouts suffer and I don't do enough to elicit a training effect to hold onto what little mass I've worked so hard to get.

I need three things from a training program:

-Simplicity. I don't want to write an extravagant workout-to-end-all-workouts every time I lift, I just want to train and go home. Or more accurately, back to work, seeing as how I work in a gym.
-Rigidity. I need a plan on paper that I'm not allowed to deviate from, and that I must complete before I'm done.
-Intensity...sort of. I need weights that keep me strong without breaking me, and conditioning work that gasses me without obliterating me.

With that, and with not just a little inspiration from T-Nation, I've developed a four-week fat loss plan that is simple and has everything I require.

Nutrition

My diet, every single day, is:

Breakfast
1 cup oatmeal
1 scoop vanilla protein powder
1 tbs peanut butter

Meal 2
1.5 scoops protein powder
1 tbs peanut butter
1 serving of fruit

Meal 3
1.5 scoops protein powder
1 tbs peanut butter
1 serving of fruit

Meal 4
1.5 scoops protein powder
1 serving of canned vegetables

Meal 5
1.5 scoops of protein powder
1 serving of canned vegetables

Total Calories: ~1800
Protein: ~ 180 grams
Calories required for defecit: 2200

See that last part? I have 400 calories not included in my meal plan. Those go wherever, however I want them. Two slices of pizza at night? Go for it.  A couple of brownies my roommate cooked up? Sure! Even -gasp- a beer or two after work? CRAZY! IRRESPONSIBLE! ....and allowed.

I try to eat a lot of colors and add spices here and there to make things bearable, but that's the entirety of my meal plan.

Training

Even simpler. The 10,000 Swing Kettlebell Workout, as prescribed by Dan John:

http://www.t-nation.com/workouts/10000-swing-kettlebell-workout

I chose this one for two reasons:

1. Dan John wrote it

2. See number 1

Okay, a little more reasoning:

I am a big fan of kettlebell swings for conditioning. They gas you pretty quickly, they're easy to learn, and they work my favorite muscle group, the glutes. The workout also intersperses heavy strength movements into the mix, which I really like. 

It's also tough, but doable. My first workout left me sweating like I haven't in months, but I didn't have the burning in my throat and the dizzying fatigue I remember from my Crossfit days. And something about the workout just...I don't know, felt right. 

Starting video and photos

Here's a video of my fourth round of the workout:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mze_bMBd0jk

And here are my starting photos:

I will try to update often, post about my progress and, above all, see this little experiment through to the end.

Why Your Back Hurts

Statistically speaking, if you are a human between the ages of ten and dead, you are currently experiencing or are soon to experience back pain. Even in our modern society, where we work less with our hands than we do with our phones, many of us can’t bend over to tie our shoes without two ibuprofen and a heat wrap. It’s one thing to throw your back out moving furniture, but many of the clients we see here at LIFT Fitness seem to go to sleep after a quiet day of reading by the fireplace and wake up with back pain. Sometimes, the cause is something medical like degenerative disk disease, in which case the solution is beyond our realm of capabilities (vast though it may be), and surgery may be required. Most of the time, though, the problem is biomechanical, which means some pulley or lever in the organic machine that is your body isn't doing what it’s supposed to do.

Know this: as with many injuries, the cause of your low back pain is probably not the low back itself, but rather some weakness in the supporting structures above and/or below it.Stretching your lower back to relieve the pain isn’t addressing the problem, and may in fact make it worse by adding more mobility to an area that needs more stability. We’ve outlined some of the most common causes of lower back pain in modern society, and some of the things you can do on your own or with us at LIFT Fitness to help fix it. 

Cause #1: Too Much Sitting

You’ve probably heard this one before: sitting is the Chris Brown to your lower back’s Rihanna.  Good for you for working out, bonus points if you work out at LIFT, but most of us are still sitting down for the vast majority of our day, and unfortunately an hour of activity won’t undo twenty-three hours of inactivity. Sitting, especially with bad posture, puts a tremendous strain on your lower back (even perfect posture is harmful for long periods of time) by undoing the  S-shaped curve that we as a species have spent millions of years developing for the sole purpose of standing upright. Not only that, but continually keeping your knee in a flexed position for hours at a time will physically shorten the muscles attached to the back of your pelvis -that would be your hamstrings- and tilt it out of line. Your spine is on top of your pelvis, so where the pelvis tilts, the spine must follow. Hamstrings are typically the worst offenders, but the same thing can happen to the muscles on the inside, outside, and front of your pelvis, which would be like balancing a bowl of candy over your head as four angry children pull at you from different directions. 

The Fix: Stand up a lot and stretch your hamstrings. This could be the easiest solution to anything, ever, at least where your body is concerned. Stand up every commercial break, every time you get a text, every time you switch windows on your computer, any little frequent reminder you can think of to get you off your butt every so often so that your spine can get a break and the muscles attached to your pelvis don’t freeze up. If you can make it a habit to stand up as much as you sit down, your back will feel better, your weight will be more manageable, and we’ll finally see peace in the Middle East. 

 And while you’re up, it wouldn’t be a bad time to stretch those tight hamstrings. Here’s what you do: plop your heel on a chair or step, keep your back flat, your chest up, and tilt your upper body forward until you feel a stretch in only your hamstring. Don’t touch your toes. It might look like you’re stretching, but you may be ignoring your hamstrings by rounding your low back, which actually makes things worse.  A good stretch should be uncomfortable, maybe even just short of painful, and last at least 20 seconds. Come on, you’re trying to physically change the length of your tissues by pulling them apart, it can’t be easy. 



Cause #2: Weak Glutes and Bad Lifting Mechanics

Your butt (known as your glutes when they want to be take seriously) has two important jobs: filling out your jeans, and extending your hips, and if it’s bad at one it’s probably bad at the other. Proper form for picking something up involves primarily using your glutes, and to a lesser extent your quads and hamstrings, while the muscles in your low back keep things in line. If you’re bending over and rounding your back to pick up a heavy object (what we professionals call “stupid”), you turn off your potentially powerful glutes and put the stress on your substantially weaker lower back. But even with decent form, weak glutes just aren’t able to do a good job of extending your hips when things start to get heavy, and you’re left with a Tebow-Sanchez situation: you have one job that needs doing, and both of your options (lower back and glutes) aren’t very good at it, so bad things tend to happen. Jets suck.

The Fix: Learn to use and subsequently strengthen your glutes. One of my favorite exercises, the kettlebell swing, is a staple in all of my group classes and personal training programs because it gets people to use their glutes in a way that is intuitive and effective. Unfortunately, many people with back pain instinctively avoid this exercise because it looks like it puts a lot of strain on the low back. This may seem reasonable at first glance, but if kettlebell swings (or their slower cousin romanian deadlifts, also known as  RDLs) are done properly, the low back stays flat and stable, with the glutes and hamstrings exclusively working to extend the hip. Teaching proper swing and RDL mechanics -what we call a “hinge” movement- is awkward and no one wants to be seen practicing their form in public, but it does wonders for back pain (and gives you a nice backside to boot). Trust me, awkward stares while learning the hinge now are well worth the slack-jawed, lustful stares you’ll get later. 

 To hinge properly, stand up straight, keep your chest up, and push your butt back like you’re playing post defense against someone particularly attractive. If you’re holding a barbell or kettlebell, it should be against your shins. To come back up, thrust your hips forward by squeezing your butt. I could have said “extend your hips by engaging your glutes”, but I didn’t and I’m not sorry. At no point should you round any part of your back, and your shoulders should move up at the same rate as your hips. 

Cause #3: Tight Middle and Upper Back

A good 90% of my instruction on any given exercise boils down to two simple cues, “Back flat, head and chest up”. As a trainer, I say it probably twenty times a day. But out in the real world, the back twists and bends and rounds and arches and no one wants to show off perfect deadlifting mechanics when picking up a fork they dropped on the floor. 

When we talk about back pain, we’re almost always talking about the lower back...but why? There is a foot and a half of back up top that rarely seems to give anyone any trouble. Why is the lower back such a problem child when it seems to be made of the same stuff that behaves on top? Don’t fall for it. The mid and upper back are the two stronger but less flexible older brothers that break everything and blame it on the poor red-headed step-child that is the lower back. When you round your back to pick something up -and you will, so will I, it happens- your back will bend at the point of its greatest laxity. Almost always, this is the lower back. The same goes for when you twist. If we could increase mobility in the middle and upper back, the range of motion required for daily living and lifting could be distributed more evenly between each section of your spine. 

The Fix: Soft Tissue Work 

What we in the industry call “soft tissue work” refers to any attempt at physically altering either the length or density of a muscle. We can change the length of a muscle by stretching it, as mentioned earlier. But try as I might, I can’t stretch the middle of my back. I just don’t think I bend that way. So the other option is to change the density, and we do this by applying pressure to points where the muscle is so dense that it affects mobility. Your best option would be a massage, either by a professional or competent significant other. But if you’re poor and/or alone, the next best option is a foam roller, which looks like a big pool noodle. We have plenty of foam rollers here at LIFT that you can use before and after class if your back is giving you trouble, but if you want your own they’re only about ten bucks on Amazon.com. The cool thing about foam rolling is that there isn’t a whole lot of technique involved, just put the roller on the ground and roll the muscle group you want to target back and forth. For your mid and upper back, make sure to pull your shoulder blades apart to get to the muscle underneath. 8-12 rolls, nice and slow with special attention paid to any “trigger points”, should do the trick. 

An even cheaper, possibly even more effective option is to tape two tennis balls together and make a specialized back roller that would make MacGyver proud. Place the peanut a few inches above your waistband lined up with the two parallel muscles running up along your spine, and lay down on top of it. Try to completely relax for a second and let the peanut seep in, trying not to conjure too much imagery from that statement. Do three small sit-ups, just enough to put pressure on the tennis balls and feel it pressing against a segment of your spine, then roll the peanut towards your head a quarter roll and repeat. Keep going until you get between your shoulder blades. 

Just remember, go easy on rolling and stretching your lower back. I know that’s where you feel the pain, but remember, we stretch and roll areas where we want more mobility, and too much stretching and rolling of your lower back is just adding more laxity to an area that was too lax to begin with. A few rolls to loosen up is fine, but any more than that and you end up scorching the shirt you meant to iron. 

Summary

Back pain is a disease of disuse. I will be the first to admit that I love a good twelve hour session in front of my xbox, moving only when I need to eat or go to the bathroom and sometimes not even then, but too much of a good thing comes at a price. To get the most out of the body you’ve been given here in the 21st century, you have to make a real targeted effort into undoing some of the damage done by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. That means stand, stretch, swing, and roll in the face of a hostile, uncaring world that seeks to do you harm. Either that, or develop a tolerance for ibuprofen and a familiarity with bell towers.

General Tips for Back Health

-A strong core will go a long way in keeping the spine in line. Don’t sleepwalk through your ab routines, they’re good for more than just keeping you looking good at the pool.

-Stay loose. If you come to our classes, put genuine effort into our hip mobility drills during the warm up, and go through a full range of motion on all of our exercises. For legal reasons I’m no longer allowed to use a taser to “encourage” people to reach the bottom of a squat, so for now it’s all up to you (until my lawyer pulls through).

-Stand up often. Are you reading this hunched over in your chair? Do you dive into a bag of chips when you read dieting tips? Don’t let yourself sit for more than twenty minutes at a time. You’ll be surprised at just how much better you feel all over. Seriously, stand up after you get done reading this.

-Get to class early and foam roll. It only takes a few minutes, and we’ll be there to help you if you’re not quite sure what to do. A few foam rolls combined with our dynamic warm-up will keep your back and hips mobile and healthy.

-If it hurts, fix your form and try again. Like I said earlier, hinge movements like the kettlebell swing are Doctor Jekyll when done properly and Mister Hyde when done incorrectly. But as much as it pains me to say, if you can’t do the motion without pain, don’t do it at all. 


Justin Gibson is a certified personal trainer at LIFT Fitness and Wellness in Lexington, Kentucky and a recent graduate of the University of Kentucky’s Kinesiology program. He has dealt with his own back pain more than anyone his age has a right to, and wants to give you the help he wishes he’d gotten years earlier.