This was a PM from gymchica and we agreed to move it to my journal:
Hello. I hope I'm not bothering you, but I have a question regarding something you said in a "before and after" thread. The girl was 5'0 and 112 lbs. You said she shouldn't do very high intensity cardio because of the low amount of calories she needs to lose weight.
I am very similar to her (5'3 114 lbs) and want to lose a little bit of fat. I have been trying to do HIIT or at least pretty intense intervals twice a week (in addition to weight training and 30 mins moderate cardio following that). Would longer sessions of more moderate cardio be a better choice than the HIIT? Are the intense intervals still okay??
Sorry if the answer is obvious. It can get kind of tricky to lose weight at this stage in the game, and I had never heard advice to NOT do something like HIIT. A lot of people act like it's the answer to everything. I'm just really interested in hearing some clarification without hijacking her thread. Thank you.
At 114 lbs, your maintenance can be assumed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500-1600 calories. Do you know how many calories you are consuming currently? The problem with little women trying to lose weight is, to drop into an energetic deficit (required for weight loss) they have to eat so little. Compare your stats to mine. I'm 195 lbs currently with a maintenance intake of roughly 3100 calories. I could drop 1000 calories and still be eating more food than your maintenance.
You drop your intake by 1000 calories and you'll die, lol.
So we've got small amounts of wiggle room.
To add to this issue, when you aren't carrying around a lot of body fat, losing more body weight becomes a difficult task. Our bodies don't like us to diet below a certain point. If they did, we probably wouldn't be sitting her typing on these computers as the human race would have died off. Easy storage of fat is what kept us alive in the cold winters when all the meaty mammals ran for the equator. So we've got systems in place that fight us when we're in shoes such as yours.
To add even more, when someone is dieting, their recoverability declines. Weight training, dieting, cardio.... these are all stresses placed on our bodies systemically. We need to recover from these stresses. When in an energy deficient state though, we need to be lot more economical in how and when we apply this stress due to said decline in recoverability.
As a general rule, you want to be very conservative when in your shoes with how much CNS-intensive work you do.
CNS = central nervous system
CNS-intensive = things that have a high force output.... think max exertion such as heavy weight lifting or the sprint portion of HIIT.
So what's this mean to you?
Well, I see a lot of people who are already pretty lean trying to get leaner try to do some ridiculous volume of weight training and high intensity cardio sessoins while dieting. They do it on a daily basis.
This goes against everything I just told you.
Instead, they should be consolidating their intensive efforts so that there are more days to recover. In fact, a gentleman approached me earlier on another forum saying his play was this:
Monday: Strength training
Tuesday: HIIT
Wednesday: Strength training
Thursday: HIIT
Friday: Strength training
Saturday & Sunday: HIIT
When would he recover?
Hint: He wouldn't.
Instead, he'd be better served doing 1-2 sessions of HIIT on the same days he strength trains. This is what I meant by consolidation. This would open up more days during the week for recovery.
Less intense work can be thrown in on these recovery days too.
That said, I'd figure out your maintenance caloric intake. From there, I'd create a 20% deficit or so. This deficit will be a very individual thing. For some, they may be able to do it with nutrition solely. For others, some form of cardio is going to have to act as a ballast allowing you to eat *enough*.
If I were you, I'd be doing 2-3 sessions of strength training per week focused on a mixture of primarily heavy weights (4-6 reps) and some moderate weights (10-15 reps). Believe it or not, this is going to give you the most mileage in terms of physique enhancement at this stage in the game.
If you find that you still aren't meeting your goals, add more cardio in as necessary... but keep it sane. None of this crap where you run for 60+ minutes.
If really necessary, throw in 1.... 2 at the most sessions of HIIT on your strength training days.
Take home message: Use high intensity stuff sparingly.
or something..
