Whoah! Too Much, Too Fast for Six Pack Abs?
The view when sucking wind.
I’ve been working out too hard and cutting too many calories this week. It became acutely clear on Friday when I was sucking wind on the basketball floor.
Basically, this last week I cut my calories even more, plus amped up the exercise, both on the court and my core resistance work. The net result? My body was tired; I needed more food; and my performance on the court suffered.
Not what I was looking for.
The Symptoms?
I’m having a hard time expressing what I was feeling. I’ll try through a timeline. Wednesday night, I picked up an hour of tough basketball, and I tried to minimize refueling after 9 p.m. but I still slipped in a quick arms and abs workout. I made sure I got enough water, but when I ambled off to bed at 11:00 p.m., I was still hungry. I figured a bit of sleep would do the trick.
Problem was, I slept poorly — I woke up several times in the night with some general body ache. Nothing crazy, no cramps, but some discomfort. No big deal.
Thursday rolls around, and it feels like I’ve got less energy in my muscles than usual. Oh well. Great workout last night, right? Right. Plus, I’m fueling up normally, eating a good breakfast, so I’m feeling better. I get a quick exercise bike workout in during the day, then a few rounds of pushups, lats, and shoulder lifts at night. Definitely tired, but I pushed through it.
Come Friday morning, I’m dragging my ass out of bed. A plate of scrambled eggs and two Diet Cokes later, I’m feeling better, but I can’t shake this sense of nutrient hunger. I’ve eaten, so I’m not exactly hungry like my stomach is empty, but my body is screaming at me to give it something more — I’m browsing the cupboards and the fridge with vague cravings for peanut butter, veggies, soup, turkey, milk, yogurt, leftover enchiladas. I’ve got zero interest in Halloween candy, but my body is telling me to eat. I’m able to ignore it and stick to my regular schedule — a piece of peanut butter toast at 10 a.m.
Come lunch time, I slip away from the office for a mere 45 minutes of noon ball, and that’s when I find myself staring at my shoes, sucking wind, and thinking, “This freakin’ stinks. As if I even need six pack abs.”
By then, I knew what was wrong — too much work, too fast, not enough nutrients.
I booked balls over to the local health food store and picked up some L-Glutamine, which is an amino acid that is supposed to help your body recover from tough workouts faster. It seems as if there are mixed results on the science, and while it may not directly contribute to bigger muscles, there seems to be some consensus in the fitness industry that it does help you recover, which tangentially helps you maintain muscle. If your body isn’t tapping other resources in your body to find what it needs — if it can get the basic amino building blocks via the supplement — you’re wasting fewer resources to help you recover.
I’ll see if I can dig up some additional scientific evidence, but I’ve used it in the past and I got the impression that it helped.
I mixed some in with a glass of milk and a scoop of whey protein mix, and I realized then that I just wasn’t getting enough protein, nor was I tapping creatine like I probably should have. And I haven’t bothered with a multivitamin in months.
I was eating generally pretty healthy, but not enough volume to mix well with the exercise. And my body had had enough.
Lesson learned.
Actually, I have a lot of lessons learned and strategies to share, but it’s going to take me a bit to put them together.
Here’s a quick shot:
1. Make sure you get enough protein throughout the day — the amount you need will depend on your body size and activity, but make sure you’re getting balanced protein with all meals and most snacks. Definitely: a scoop of protein powder after every hard workout, with some follow-up protein 1-3 hours later. That strategy has worked for me in the past when I was trying to gain muscle. Should help maintain muscle while trying to burn fat.
2. Take creatine. There’s tons of evidence supporting the effectiveness of creatine, and in my personal experience, you can ignore it when you’re in pretty good shape, but when you try to go the next level of intensity, you’ll really start to notice its effects. It’ll help you get a harder, more intense workout in without tiring quite as quickly. There’s schools of thought on how to cycle on and off it on the dosage, but for me, just making sure I get a teaspoon or two everyday seems to help quite a bit.
3. Take L-Glutamine after all intense workouts. It’s relatively expensive, so it’s irritating to buy, but I think it does help. Like creatine, I think noticeable effects only come into play when the workouts are intense and you’re trying to keep your caloric intake low. For instance, if I have the most intense workout ever, and then I eat 5,000 calories of whatever I can find — I’ll recover plenty fast. The side effect is that I’ll also put on fat, which is the exact opposite of my goal here.
4. Get more nutrient-dense foods into your diet — basically, I got sloppy. I was dropping my calories, but not making sure I was eating foods with enough diverse nutrients that matched the performance requirements I was expecting during exercise. So I need to eat more nuts, spinach, broccoli, bananas, berries, and olive oil. I’m pretty sure I was missing some of the good fats you get from nuts and olive oil, for example. I think it comes down to this: if you’re working out hard, you have to trick your body into believing that it can burn off the last bit of your fat stores because there’s no risk of running out of resources — you got to trick your body into believing there’s plenty of fuel lying around.
The core challenge? I know I can drop my calories low enough to shed enough fat that my abs will start to show, but I’m loathe to let go of the muscle mass to get there. To me, losing muscle just for six pack abs isn’t worth it. (In case you’re wondering, the massive-body wrestlers with huge muscle and abs . . . tend to use supplements that I’m not going to take. And the all-natural bodybuilders . . . tend to put far more hours into their body than I’m willing to spend.) So what I need to do is to tweak my strategy to maximize muscle while still shedding fat.
And do it all in a way that’s reasonable for regular guy. That’s the next step.
Learn and adjust, learn and adjust.
–Chris