Questions on "Real Fast Fat Loss" Exercise Program (T-nation)

(Edited to clarify title)

I have been following the Real Fast Fat Loss program since ... well, since I first came across it in one of melkor's posts. I am supposed to do Day 5 today so I am not that far into it, but this is the closest I've come to consistency with an exercise program on my own (not as easy as with classes! but I feel I get a better workout. Of course, the efficiency vs motivation tradeoff is a different story)

Anyway, my questions: 

1. After just about every workout I feel a tightness in my shoulder/tricep/serratus, that makes it difficult to stretch my arms up overhead. Other muscles are sore to varying degrees, but this is the most noticeable. Is this a temporary tightness as the muscles repair, or am I losing some sort of flexibility?

2. I am not in a consistent caloric deficit. I am trying to eat about maintenance. I am also not logging food or exercise, so am not sure if these workouts are putting me in a deficit, but ... will I still see results, just not as fast?

3. Along the same lines, I know some people measure themselves weekly. Does the tape measure really change over that short a time, and are the changes meaningful (ie not just fluctuations)?

Thanks in advance :)

tlhess -- the program takes about an hour, not including any time you'd take to stretch afterwards. I do a short warmup that I learned in Pilates class that consists of just moving the joints: rolling the spine forward, warming up abs, pelvis, shoulders. The first part of the workout, you'll notice, prescribes longer rests and sometimes I'll do a lighter weight for the very first set and increase when my muscles are ready (esp on a 5x5 day -- on the 3x15 days the weights stay pretty light).

So all in all I'm in there about an hour. And then I stretch, if I have time.

Workout A includes HIIT at the end of it -- Tabata bike sprints are KILLER. I hate them and have thought about replacing them with a spin class the next day. Yes, I'd rather do a full 60 mins! I have no idea how this would affect results, but so far I've been able to muster up the motivation to stick with the program (though I don't always make it through all 8 mins of sprints, due to time, exhaustion, or the "enough is enough" feeling).

As far as whether to cut out the HIIT and spinning you do now, I'd say start it and see how you feel. I welcome the days off and today, for example, I'm looking forward to a more relaxing Pilates class -- but I did spin on Friday morning between doing this workout Thurs morning and Sat evening, and I did some cardio the previous week too, IIRC.

One thing I like about this workout is that I have been perpetually sore in all the right places -- at least for the first two weeks. The last 2-3 days I've been feeling it in my traps which I don't like (using too much weight, maybe?) but before that it was back/lats, glutes, serratus, shoulders, triceps... all those muscles I always tried to target and ended up just feeling my upper traps and lower back instead.

Hope that helps some!

Well, it's possible the bike sprints could be affected by your glycogen levels, just like the weights - if it's just slightly greater endurance you're noticing I'd possibly agree with you. But being able to lift more, and with better form isn't due to increased glycogen storage - that's you getting stronger. And being able to finish the Tabata Intervals on the bike is a sign of your anaerobic and aerobic work capacity increasing - horrible though those 4 minutes are, they're also disproportionally beneficial for your overall fitness :)

 There is a cumulative effect yes, and as you get stronger and able to move more weight around you'll notice a greater effect from each individual workout as well - up until your body fully adapts to the schedule anyway. So I don't know about seeing 1/6th the effect of the full program, but you'd see about the strength gains and improvements in overall fitness you've noticed from the first workout to this one. I think you'll see the largest strength gains about mid-cycle actually, which would mean that doing 4 weeks would be a practical minimum to let the program really work for you. My plan when I start this one myself is to do the full 8 weeks and then asses the relative effect of each week using my training log. That should help some in providing a more practical hint about the program efficiency :)

 As far as combining this and any other forms of exercise or workout program - well, try it and see. Everyone's work and recovery capacity is different and the only way to really give a definite answer for what works for your body is to keep a training log and control for changes in diet, exercise selection and training density. Though just going by how you feel about your progress is probably close enough for government work - if you feel that the quality of your workout suffers when you do spinning classes in between strength days, you're probably right. If not, you can probably handle it for a while if you're carful about your nutrition and protecting your recovery/sleep time.

re: the Tabata Intervals:  8 minutes!!!! Because 4 weren't bad enough. So rest for 5 mins and do another 4. And by the way, those 5 mins of "rest" are never long enough. If it were up to me... they'd be more like 5 weeks :-P

Edited to add that I've seen results on the Kettlebell swings as well, at the end of Workout B. I've been able to do more each time. So ... I'll attribute some of the improvements to glycogen and some to little ol' ME :)

Thanks for the replies - i look forward to starting this workout - i am thinking Monday/Tuesday!

 

How are you calculating the calories you are burning during this crazy workout??

... I'm not. Just trying to eat when hungry...

I don't know that it would be that many when compared with, say, a Spinning class. I burn maybe 450 cals/hr spinning but there my heart rate is constantly elevated, here there are rest periods.

According to the authors, however, this program seeks the benefits of EPOC more than the direct calorie burn during the exercise. In one of his previous posts in this thread, Melkor quoted an estimate of 700 cals of EPOC over the course of 2 days. If the 700 were right, 5-6 workouts (ie 2 weeks, as prescribed) would yield about 1lb of fat loss, not including the calories you're burning at the gym. Melkor says in practice this is probably somewhat lower for most people, and I believe that; so adjust as necessary based on your optimism/pessimism :)

Keep me posted if/when you get started on this. I'd be interested to see how you fare.

Melkor -- if you're still tuned in here:

I tried the modification of the Good Morning with the weights in front, except I used only one weight and held it with both hands. (We don't have anything between 12-lb and 20-lb dumbbells, but we have 25's and 30's, so the progression there seemed to make sense.)

Anyway, I tried holding a 25 in front, and felt like I could do more. I tried a 30 in front, and it was heavy on the arms. Then I tried to place it on my back and that seemed to work really well. I think I've got it where the bar would normally go, and it's raised off the vertebral column, but my arms are obviously in a different spot to hold it than they would be if I was using a bar.

Does this sound like a good modification, or could I be hurting myself somewhere?

Also, do you have any good tips for proper Good Morning form? I feel like one thing that's important is keeping my knees from bowing out as I come back up... but I feel like sometimes I hit the right muscles (glutes, right?) and other times less so. Also, how exactly is this different than a deadlift, aside from the placement of the weights?

P.S.: More improvements! A little bit with the weights (though not having anything between 12 and 20 lbs is a bit limiting) but I upped the planks from 30s to 45s (and even then, my shoulders die before I feel it in my core) AND I've been able to do more kettlebell (ok, dumbbell) swings every time!!

 I gave it a go with my dumbbell just now, and - well, I don't see a  problem as long as you're not killing your traps. 30lbs shouldn't be a problem in that respect anyway; with more weight you'd probably want the wider surface area of a barbell to distribute the weight over a larger area of shoulders :)

 Thing you most have to watch out for is hyperexdending your knees - bending them more than nature intended so they point the wrong way. Is that what you think of as "not bowing out"? If not, a little knee flexion will not be a problem - though you'll probably have more of a training effect with stricter form it's not a workout-killer like making your knees bend the wrong way is.

 Straight-back Stiff-leg Deadlift and Bent Knee Good-morning  aren't all that different but they do work the muscles involved from slightly different angles and put different stresses on your body - good mornings require better balance for one thing :) The difference isn't humonguous but even small changes in muscle activation can have an effect on training progression.

  And - see? I told you it was all you getting stronger! Isn't it great to see what you can do when you try?

" Straight-back Stiff-leg Deadlift and Bent Knee Good-morning  aren't all that different but they do work the muscles involved from slightly different angles and put different stresses on your body ... "

So, what about the way you do the two exercises achieves the different muscle activation and angles? The only difference I see is where the weight is.

By my knees "not bowing out" (sorry, should have been clearer) I mean that when I focus on keeping them pointing strictly forward as I come up, I feel like the work comes more from my glutes. When I don't pay much attention to the knees/legs, I feel like they open up VERY slightly so that maybe my thighs are doing some of the work in lifting me up. When I think of hyperextending I think of... going past 180deg (like how a horse's back knees bend, I guess). That's not at all what I was referring to. I'm referring to the bent-over part of the good-morning, where the knees are bent and on the way up they open up a little. Maybe not even enough where someone watching would see it, but just enough to feel it.

Well, when you consider that just changing shoes every two weeks from Nikes to Converse to wrestler's shoes and back to Nike's is enough of a difference in how you stand and how your muscles activate to keep you making gains, it doesn't need to be a visible difference to see visible results, yeh?

 With the deadlift the weight stays closer to your body most of the time, so you get a different stretch in the glutes at the bottom. That subtle difference doesn't much matter when you're a beginner, but as you accumulate training age switching between the two will give you a better overall progression than sticking to a single exercise will.

 At least, that's the way I understand it - when the coaches I read talk about changing your workout every few weeks to keep progression coming the changes they have in mind can be as small as changing your grip width on the bar. So altering where you hold the weight is a giant change by those standards :)

 And yes - that's the reward of keeping strict form; you work the intended target muscles more than when you "cheat" and let other muscles help with the job. Though controlled 'cheating' or loose form has it's place in any training regime - if you keep to strict form for the first few sets and just use loose form to get the last couple reps you'll have a noticeably greater training effect than if you terminated the set once you started cheating.

Nothing is ever without a caveat, is it :)

But I think that makes sense. What I gather is that you pretty much go through the same movement, and the different position of the weights is what makes the difference. Which I have experienced it to do, I just didn't know if I should be moving differently as well. And by the way, I did feel my glutes pretty good this morning!

Thanks for the explanations!

OK 3 weeks (today is day 3 of week 3) and I'm STILL seeing nothing in the way of positive results. Instead I'm seeing an INCREASE in measurements!! Again, by .5-1cm but consistently across the body.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG??? There's no WAY I'm consistently eating THAT MUCH. There are days when I go over (e.g. when you go out for dinner and dessert, like last night) but in between I probably hover around 1500 cals. What gives???

By the way, I measured this morning (Saturday) and my last workout was Wed evening. So muscle swelling should have subsided.

tlhess -- I wore my HRM to workout A, 3x15 today. It counted just short of 500 cals!

I don't know how accurate this is. I think in general HRMs are calibrated for cycling or running -- if anyone reading this has any insight, please let me know! If no one posts I may ask this in a new thread because I couldn't find the answer when I googled.

When I spin I burn about 350 cals in 45 mins (according to the HRM), or 470 per hour -- so about the same rate as this. I feel like this workout has more breaks, but I was seeing similar heart rates, so maybe the breaks are short enough where the heart rate doesn't fall too low?

i did this workout for the first time friday, also courtesy of melkor. i did workout A, 5x5.

questions:

i assume 5x5 means 5 sets of everything, 5 reps?

the DB Romanian deadlift to snatch to split squat...i did 10 of those each set, because i assumed the article meant 5 reps per leg. i only used 8 pound dumbbells and could probably do 15 maximum -- but was i right? (used lower weights cause my left knee has been giving me issues, but it's getting better).

same question goes for the dynamic lunge...i did 10, five each leg.

i also did tabata sprints on the elliptical instead of the bike, because of my knee...it wasn't hard but it wasn't exactly easy. but yeah, the tabata bike sprints are pure hell. 

Yes, you were right in your rep counts. T-nation had a forum thread on this program and some of the members had the same question; the program authors' answer was, yes, both legs = 1 rep. They accompanied this with saying, "Hey, we never said fat loss was easy!"

How'd you like it? Good luck with your first day of Workout B. My back was sore for 3 days afterwards :)

Enjoy!

That would be muscle gain, I'd assume - you're doing a very hard program with a rep scheme designed for maximum strength (5x5), muscle growth(4x10), and metabolic efficiency/endurance(3x15), and eating at calorie equilibrium or slightly over.

 If you're new to strength training you're going to see very rapid progress at first - when I started my recent program after long years of not lifting weight I had the same newbie metabolism and added roughly 6-8 lbs of lean mass in the first 6 weeks- guesstimate only, didn't start tracking BF% closely until later.  Newbie shock growth is a very rapid process but it also tapers off rapidly - a normal male trainee with half a year's lifting behind him will do well to add 2lbs of lean mass a month, and that's with eating above maintenance. After a year you'd do well to add 1lbs of muscle a month - which still adds up to quite a lot over time.

 Well, genetics play a role, so does nutrition - and radically changing your program can reignite stalled progress.

 Depending on your genetics, age, hormonal profile and nutrition a female can add anywhere from 40%-140% of a male trainee's results - if you've got good muscle building genes you'll beat the results of the mythical average male trainee.

 I'm willing to bet quite large sums of money on you working hard, doing it right, and adding muscle while burning through bodyfat - have you checked your body composition changes on one of the online calculators lately? I've always found those encouraging - while the ones I use don't even remotely agree on the percentage they show, they're consistent in the percentage point drop over time. Tgpish said Covert Bailey's test actually tracked his BF% scale to within 1-3% percentage points - and the trend line I've graphed using that test is consistent with the trend from the graph I drew of both the Navy and the YMCA formulas from healthstatus.com's test even if none of the three agree on what exactly the percentage is :)

That's the mystery, though. My measurements have gone up slightly, and weight hasn't changed significantly. If you assume for a sec that it hadn't changed at all, that means my volume went up for the same mass, meaning lower density, meaning lower bf%!

So on average I'd say I'd been seeing maybe a pound or 2 higher on the scale. I plug those numbers in to the calculator (I used healthstatus.com's), and again get HIGHER bf numbers.

This morning though, somehow, magically, the scale was down something like 6 lbs. Yesterday it was down 2, but then I exercised so I was surprised to see it go DOWN. I don't expect it to stay this low, but maybe it'll settle out somewhere in the middle and this is the start of my results?

I am kind of new to strength training. I had been doing those weight classes for a little while, but I wouldn't say 6 months yet. And I did take a month off late in the summer so I don't know if you'd start counting after that. I definitely see bigger biceps -- and I think maybe my left bicep is starting to catch up to my right (they are pretty noticeably different! to me at least :) )

Another thing, melkor -- do you have a sense of HRM accuracy for these workouts?

Well, if anything your HRM is guilty of seriously under-estimating the calorie burn from your workout:

Calorie Burning During Weightlifting: Re-written!
 ..........here's the conclusion: Your heavy weight training bouts may be burning two to three times more calories than you have been told! Wow... just wow!


Muscle Mythbusters: The 2007 ASEP National Conference
by Dr. Lonnie Lowery

Cool, eh?

The calories you burn in the workout won't be all fat of course - strength training is more glycogen-dependent than anything, but I'm pretty confident that this explains why a diet+weight training regime has you losing fat at about 3 times the rate of a diet or diet+aerobics regime would.

 Yup, you'll still have that newbie metabolism going on - I just read an article by Waterbury where he says that he's pretty certain you can see "newbie" growth rates for close to a year if you're following a sensible program. I would assume that he'd call a program he wrote himself sensible, even if the forum denizens on T-nation think it's a killer :)

 You can also assume that if you're seeing larger biceps, you're adding muscle elsewhere as well:

In general, improvements in arm measurement are related to gains in lean body mass. A good rule of thumb is that for every inch you want to gain on your arms, you need to gain roughly 15 pounds of equally distributed body mass. In other words, to make significant improvements in your arms, you have to gain mass all over your entire body.
The Truth About Bodybuilding Arm Measurements
by Charles Poliquin

So when you're seeing visibly larger biceps, I'd be extremely surprised if you weren't adding significant muscle elsewhere :)

flowerbud -- it was great, i felt like i got a really efficient full body workout. i didn't find it particularly challenging but as i mentioned i was only using about half my maximum weight load...not sure yet i'm going to move onto workout B as prescribed, i want to see if my knee is really better or if it is just toying with me. but i do look forward to doing this with my maximum weight load, when possible. until then i do incorporate some of the exercises into my regular workout, like the pushup/jackknife combo, and i definitely want to try that jump squat to chin up -- even though i can't do a full chin up, i figure pulling myself up as much as i can should suffice, no?

Well, I'm hoping it's enough because if it's not I'm SOL! :) In all seriousness, I think you're still working the right muscles, and maybe over time we'll get closer and closer. Also, since you're jumping up part of the way, this is a bit easier than a full chinup, so I can pull myself up the rest of the way for a few reps (like, 2-3?). After that, a controlled release is the best I can do -- which is good enough for me!

I didn't find Day 1 too bad either. Actually the 5x5 days are my favorite :-P Day 2 was only killer because of the pullups I think -- I guess I hadn't worked those muscles since we did pullups in middle school or something :)

Let me know how Day 2 goes for you!

i didn't do the second workout cause my knee is stiff, but i did try the jump up to the pull up bar you are RIGHT!!!! I couldn't believe i was hanging up there with my chin above the bar like the Bionic Woman! I felt so cool.   :-)