In reality, the single most important thing you can do (exercise-wise) to promote fat loss is to try and become as strong as you can be, given the nutritional environment you'll be in (weight loss reality: you have to consume fewer calories than you use in order to lose weight). This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but when we dig a little deeper, you'll understand why this is true.
"In reality, the single most important thing you can do (exercise-wise) to promote fat loss is to try and become as strong as you can be, given the nutritional environment you'll be in (weight loss reality: you have to consume fewer calories than you use in order to lose weight). This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but when we dig a little deeper, you'll understand why this is true".
I agree with most things that you are saying here and the science backs most of it up. There is however a difference between being strong and being muscular. Muscular hypertrophy is more important than over all strength. Bigger muscles burn more energy 24/7 and most of that extra energy will come from bodyfat stores. One can be strong without necessarily maximizing muscle hypertrophy thereby no maximizing fat loss. As i'm sure you will know most strength athletes are not necessarily the leanest people in the world. That's the law of "specificity" at work. They want to be strength athletes not body builders, or muscle athletes or beach babes for that matter.
Strength athletes main goals are not fat loss but increased lifting poundage's. Certainly there will be some muscle hypertrophy but that is not the main goal. Repetition ranges for strength being 1-5 are not considered to be in the hypertrophy range of exercise reps. The 8-12 rep range is considered to be muscle building and therefore the ideal rep range for muscle hypertrophy and expedited fat loss (in conjunction of course with your correct assertion that there has to be somewhat of a calorie deficit going on at the same time.)
Anyone looking to lose fat should exercise in a periodized manner and utilize the full repertoire of repetition ranges... 1-5 for strength 8-12 for muscle hypertrophy and 15-20 for cardio and recovery.
nuff said.
The cool thing about continuing to learn and grow each year is that I always get to look back at something I was saying or doing 12 months earlier and say: "The hell was I thinking?!" I haven't actually looked at my OP in this thread in a long time, but I assume that if I were to go through it bit by bit I'd find little pieces all throughout it that would sound close, but not quite right, today.
Musculature and strength have a funny relationship. At the time that I wrote this thread, I think I was still in my phase of "strength = muscle but muscle =/= strength" (old Riptard mentality). Back then I was perpetuating such ideas as "there's no point doing a hypertrophy program if you can't bench/squat/dead 2/3/4 plates," because "strength = muscle, so just get really, really strong and you'll have lots of muscle." The reality, however, is not so clean cut. A lot of strength can be gained without a lot of muscle gained with it. Meanwhile, it's pretty hard to gain any muscle mass without getting stronger (in a general sense -- increasing your 10RM won't necessarily increase your 1RM, but if you do increase your 10RM then you are stronger in a certain context), so that old formula never worked as well as I'd have liked. The really sad irony is that I had all the information I needed about linear periodisation before I got into that phase, but, caught up in the inaccurate rhetoric of guys who'd had much more success getting stronger than I had, I threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Out of curiosity, is there a specific method of periodisation that you've found more effective than others?
I don't really like talking about the amount of energy burned all day by muscle mass. It's true that muscle mass does burn energy all day long, but the amplitude of this is often seriously overstated (I often hear that each pound of muscle burns 50kcal/day; IIRC it's actually only about 6kcal/day, while each pound of fat requires 3kcal/day to maintain itself). In any case, more muscle mass is still better than less muscle mass, I just don't like to highlight that particular perk so much for fat loss purely because of how much it's been oversold. Even though I'm still what most guys who lift would call skinny, I've gained (conservatively) 40lb of muscle since I first set foot in a gym. If the overstatement that each 1lb requires an extra 50kcal/day were true, I'd be maintaining on something like 3,500-4,000kcal/day...and I'd be a very happy man.