Since I need to lose around 40lbs I'm done with NORL for the time being. Bottom line is even with a 1000 cal deficit I won't have lost the weight I need to lose before it is time to start hypertrophy.
I may come back to this but for now I'm going to go with Lyle McDonald's program, Rapid Fat Loss.
Bottom line is even with a 1000 cal deficit I won't have lost the weight I need to lose before it is time to start hypertrophy.
Just curious where your time table is coming from? (You make it sound like you have an external deadline.)
__________________
"Time and patience are the 2 elements that most people don't include in their plans."
-Alan Aragon
"The scale simply tells you how much the earth loves you on a particular day."
-Ogedei (Keith)
I think the OP is talking about the time frame given during the fatloss program before getting to the hypertrophy program.
Of course, this isn't really an issue, losing weight is about diet and one can lose weight on pretty much any lifting program, whether it's labeled "fatloss" or "hypertrophy" or "strength" but… *shrug* I suppose if OP was planning on a bulk during HYP phases and didn't just want to rearrange the programs to either do fatloss again or move to strength…
You just started FLI Sunday. You've done 2 workouts at most. 3 times a week brings you to 4 weeks. FLII is 3 workouts a week for 4 weeks. Factor in the 2 weeks of rest and thats 2 1/2 months. Then you can either go to FLIII which is 3 workouts for 4 weeks or HyperI which is 3 workouts for 8 weeks.
You are looking at 2 1/2 months for just the first 2 FL programs in addition to either an additional month for FLIII (which will bring you up 14 weeks....or 3 1/2 months) or an additional 2 months for HyperI (which will bring you up to 18 weeks or 4 1/2 months).
I don't get what your concern is. You are quitting a program because you don't even know what your body will be like in 2 1/2 months? You couldn't even do the first FLI workout without "bonking" and you're already stating that the program wont get you to your goals? Do yourself a huge favor and stick with one program instead of jumping around. Making an excuse every few weeks will get your body nowhere. You need to stay in a consistent, well designed exercise routine.
I assume you want to lose 40 pounds in less than 2 months since that's how long FLI and FLII take. NO program will help you achieve this goal while being healthy. If you are brand new to working out, you can expect a decent size weight loss the first month but then your body will level out. (for example, I lost almost 20 pounds in my first month of exercise/diet change but since then have only lost about 10 pounds a month....1.5 to 2 pounds a week). To do things correctly without burning your already existing muscle, you are looking at 1-2 pounds a week. So 10 pounds a month. So it should take you 3-4 months realistically to lose 40 pounds. Where did you get your "timeline to lose 40 pounds" from? Just remember, it took you years to put on that weight, don't expect it to come off in weeks (and if it does, I guarantee you that it will be back on plus more within a year).
Here's another tip...it doesn't matter what the program is called. Lifting heavy weights is the fastest way to weight loss. As long as you're eating at a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. You lose weight because as your body builds lean muscle, your metabolism increases because muscle takes more energy to maintain. I need to lose 90 pounds. Will I lose that before starting the Hypertrophy program? Hell no. Does it matter? Hell no. Because the act of lifting heavy weights while eating a healthy nutritional diet in a caloric deficit will continue to help me lose weight regardless of what the title of the program is called. And since the program is designed by the same trainer for the same plan, my body will already be used to the exercises and sets he uses and adapt better to the new named routine (even though it's not named "Fat Loss").
Here's another tip, stop eating at a 1,000 calorie deficit. It's not needed and it's not healthy. Your body isn't used to it. You are trying to starve yourself to lose weight. I almost guarantee if you go back to a 500 calorie deficit you will see healthier results (i.e. you're not burning muscle to try to finish your workouts) and you will feel better. Also...when you're hungry....eat. Eat some fruit, some veggies, some nuts...anything healthy. Don't ignore your body. It's one thing to be sitting on your ass all day doing nothing and try to ignore your hunger, but when you're doing strenuous exercising, your body needs the food between workouts to heal and grow and get your metabolism going.
Aoife's comment is right on the mark. You will continue to lose body fat (different from losing weight) on any of the programs as long as you take care of your diet first. Changing from FLIII to Hyp I is a real shock to the body, I just made this transition and am still losing body fat.
I think the OP is talking about the time frame given during the fatloss program before getting to the hypertrophy program.
Of course, this isn't really an issue, losing weight is about diet and one can lose weight on pretty much any lifting program, whether it's labeled "fatloss" or "hypertrophy" or "strength" but… *shrug* I suppose if OP was planning on a bulk during HYP phases and didn't just want to rearrange the programs to either do fatloss again or move to strength…
Correct.
My goal is to build muscle. (Bulk) I agree it doesn't necessarily matter what the program is called but the thing that DOES matter is what the program is designed to do so unless NROL is completely full of crap than the Hypotrophy program is designed to bulk up and strength is going to build strength which you won't be doing while eating at a deficit. From what I have read unless you are seriously obese you can't lose weight and gain mass at the same time unless you are SUPER vigilant about your diet and even then it takes a long time. Faster to loose the weight then bulk.
Here's another tip, stop eating at a 1,000 calorie deficit. It's not needed and it's not healthy. Your body isn't used to it. You are trying to starve yourself to lose weight. I almost guarantee if you go back to a 500 calorie deficit you will see healthier results (i.e. you're not burning muscle to try to finish your workouts) and you will feel better. Also...when you're hungry....eat. Eat some fruit, some veggies, some nuts...anything healthy. Don't ignore your body. It's one thing to be sitting on your ass all day doing nothing and try to ignore your hunger, but when you're doing strenuous exercising, your body needs the food between workouts to heal and grow and get your metabolism going.
Hello you sound like someone who has just read the book NROL. Unfortunately the book is wrong is certain areas. Specifically the area that you just mentioned, that is, "get your metabolism going".
EPOC is a joke, energy flux is a joke, engaging the flux capacitor is a joke. It came as a shock to me to too but here is the bottom line:
You've made it through maybe a weeks of workouts and this is the second time you've called it crap. Hypertrophy be damned you have 40 lbs. of fat to lose.
I see your goal as failure no matter what program you do.
__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
My goal is to build muscle. (Bulk) I agree it doesn't necessarily matter what the program is called but the thing that DOES matter is what the program is designed to do so unless NROL is completely full of crap than the Hypotrophy program is designed to bulk up and strength is going to build strength which you won't be doing while eating at a deficit. From what I have read unless you are seriously obese you can't lose weight and gain mass at the same time unless you are SUPER vigilant about your diet and even then it takes a long time. Faster to loose the weight then bulk.
Sure, the program is designed to help you gain muscle over fat when eating at a surplus. You're taking that to mean you shouldn't use it for anything but, and that's hardly the case. I think they would have been much better off to just call them "Phase 1, 2, 3" etc because far too many people get hung up on the terminology even when they think they aren't.
Do whatever you want, noone is stopping you, but seriously your ADD is gonna wind up costing you at some point. Between that and this crazy "FasterFASTERMoreMORE" thing you have going on (hey, if 1000 isn't working for you and you want more than 500, did you know there's numbers in between?) you're gonna be dissatisfied with anything and everything you try.
And just because a bit of old information in a book is found to be wrong doesn't make the whole thing crap. Granted, there's absolute shit out there, but NR isn't, regardless of the validity of the whole EPOC thing. To discount everything does you a huge disservice. Better to actually use a sifter and begin to understand what you're doing and why, have good purpose and goals, and find out what works to bring them closer. And it's very hard to know what works in a week. or even 2.
It's not a long term solution but I'm going on a crash diet so I can loose the weight (fat) and start bulking (gaining muscle) ASAP.
Hmm..so let's see. You're going to go on a "crash" diet, starve yourself and lose 40 pounds. Here's the deal..you will lose 40 pounds. But it wont be 40 pounds of fat, it will be 25 pounds of fat and 15 pounds of muscle (just a guess but it's most likely something along those lines).
You're going to do what you want to do regardless of what all these people (not me, but all the other people here with thousands of posts and well respected opinions) with years of knowledge and success tell you. So why even make several posts telling people that NROL sucks, you "bonk" and cant even complete one workout, and it can't get you to your goals and you know what you're doing despite that. It makes no sense, what did you expect people to tell you?
The fact that you say you want to lose weight AND bulk up in the same post is just confusing. I should have just stayed out of this thread (and that's what I'll do from now on). Good luck and I hope you hit your goals (I know I will). My last thoughts....stop trying to find excuses and just bust your ass in your workouts and eat right. You either do it or you dont do it, that's the bottom line of your success.
It's not a long term solution but I'm going on a crash diet so I can loose the weight (fat) and start bulking (gaining muscle) ASAP.
Well, the article you posted piqued my curiosity so I had to check it out:
"Experts ‘flabbergasted’
In their own research, Melanson and his team studied moderately active people who, on separate days, performed low-intensity or high-intensity cycling, or no structured exercise at all. They repeated their experiment with endurance athletes (competitive runners and triathletes), while comparing sedentary obese people with sedentary lean people, and then again while comparing older men with younger men."
So it looks like they just studied the effects of cardio, not strength training...
"But both Melanson and Endress say it can’t be ruled out that longer, harder and possibly different types of exercise performed regularly on consecutive days could lead to a more lasting post-workout fat burn. In Melanson’s research, for instance, participants all cycled for under an hour, burning up to 400 calories."
Exactly.
"The new paper offers additional evidence that exercise does not boost metabolism as much as widely believed, Endress says. In addition to the misperception that exercise greatly hikes fat burning after exercise, there is also the false belief that weight training dramatically increases metabolism by adding muscle, he notes.
While it’s true that a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat — about seven to 10 calories a day versus two calories — most people don’t put on enough muscle to make much of a difference, Endress says."
This is a weak argument. "The false belief that weight training dramatically increases metabolism by adding muscle"? Notice that they're not saying that it doesn't? Just that "most people don't put on enough muscle to make much of a difference"? Most people don't train with heavy weights.
" 'Building muscle is very difficult for most individuals because it requires heavy weight workouts and a higher intake of calories,' he says. “Average fitness enthusiasts [who are working out to gain muscle] will only add four to five pounds of lean mass,” he says, and burn an additional 28 to 50 calories a day. (Men tend to gain more muscle, on average, than women.)"
Heavy weights. That's what we're here for.
I'm not trying to pick on you. I agree with the posters who say you should stick it out. It just bothers me greatly when people think you need to starve to lose weight. Exercise works. Give it a chance.
I just read that MSNBC article about the metabolism effects..... interestingly it appears the researchers just studied people doing steady-state cardio (cycling with low intensity and higher intensity), which both NROL and C.Waterbury both say is not going to raise EPOC or metabolism. So in that regard the research supports what they are saying. Then one of the interviewees mentions weightlifting and myths surrounding it, although they apparently didn't even test subjects who weight lifted, right? So the research doesn't investigate full-body workouts with weights, and it doesn't research the HIT interval type training as far as EPOC or metabolism is concerned. So in other words, it doesn't really say anything new that disputes NROL? Did I overlook something? NROL mentions research that does specifically discuss metabolism after intense full-body lifting and interval training.
Check out the 4th paragraph under "experts flabbergasted"...It says they would not rule out the longer term fat afterburn with different kinds of exercising or harder types. Articles like these, where people just take away sound-bytes without reading them closely, really tick me off. There are probably a lot of obese couch potatoes who will now think that exercising isn't all it is supposed to be, and they'll instead keep buying these Grapefruit potions and ab-twister machines and "Rapid loss" videos.
I will stick with Full body weight lifting programs combined with HIT interval training on my off-days, with a close eye on my total calorie intake. I don't see a more effective, safer, healthier program than that.
I don't know why this is such a big deal. Everyone has different goals, for the time being NROL doesn't fit mine.
Everything I have read everywhere says you can't REALISTICALLY lose weight and gain muscle at the same time because one requires a deficit and one requires eating above maintinence. Unless of course you are obsese and you have a huge amount of weight to lose.
No doubt it would be safer to lose my weight over a period of a year or so but I see no reason why I would do that when there are other methods that seem almost as safe in the short run and over the long run make no difference to my health.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OldGuy
You've made it through maybe a weeks of workouts and this is the second time you've called it crap. Hypertrophy be damned you have 40 lbs. of fat to lose, lardass.
I see your goal as failure no matter what program you do.
Please don't concern yourself with my success. You may however want to work on your reading comprehension. Let's review:
I never said I needed to lose 40lbs of fat. I need to lose 40lbs. (Of WEIGHT) Big difference.
I don't think NROL is crap. Please show me where I said it was.
I learned a huge amount from NROL. I think there are certain parts of the book that could be better. Specifically:
1) Suggesting one can increase their metabolism via EPOC and engaging the flux capacitor are crap IMO. Gaining lean mass will increase your metabolism but so will carrying around a 30 pound backpack everywhere you go. Everything else I've read on the topic says at best you can hope to burn an additional 25-50 calories TOTAL the few hours after a hard workout. Quite a bit different than what the book implys. The resident expert on fat loss here is one of my sources on this subject. Please read post #4. NROL: Effective?
2) The diet section which is very thin. Of course it is not a dieting book so I can excuse this.
3) The small amount of time they spend on the form of squat and deadlift. In their own words these are two of the most important lifts their programs are built around and also the easiest to injure oneself but IN MY OPINION they do not spend nearly enough time ensuring readers will follow correct form on these lifts.
From the NROL: effective thread (which you originally called NROL crap or something to the sort before a mod changed it).
Quote:
If all or most of the above is true than NROL is complete crap for getting me to my goals as fast as possible.
Couple that with the posts in this thread where you called the book full of crap.
Quote:
I never said I needed to lose 40lbs of fat. I need to lose 40lbs. (Of WEIGHT) Big difference.
But meanwhile you're going to do Lyle's Rapid Fat Loss. If you don't have fat to lose then why not his Ultimate Diet? And if you can't understand NROL how will you ever understand Lyle's work?
I feel bad for Lyle having you on his forum.
__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
Honestly, just pick a program you think you're happy with, commit to it and do it. Most good premades will give beginners (not saying you're a beginner, just stating a fact about the programs) about the same results as each other. So switch from NROL to Waterburry 10x3 for Fat Loss, or Home Grown Muscles, or Huge In A Hurry Go Lean, or Starting Strength, or Get Big (or Get Strong or Get Lean), or TNT or whatever program you will commit to. Every program will work and they should all work about the same for a beginner lifter (those are the actual people who can realistically lose fat and gain muscle at the same time for whatever short window it is).
Just a thought...you said you don't have 40 pounds of fat to lose, yet you need to lose 40 pounds so you can start bulking. This makes no sense. If its not fat, then you want to shed muscle so you can bulk?
I honestly think you are very confused and you have too much information that you don't quite understand or its contradicting each other rattling around in your head. I think you just need to work out and stop trying to overthink everything. So whatever program gets you working instead of thinking, all the better
One last sidenote, the trainer (Cosgrove) who designed the workout programs from NROL is not the same person who wrote the book (Schuler) that you think you're qualified to debunk. So simply ignore the book and the "theories" you disagre with and use the routines since you already paid for it. The are proven to work and recommended by thousands and thousands of people on every fitness forum and website. Also I recommend purchasing Starting Strength if you are concerned about form in squats and deadlifts (and any other lift). Also with form...you can have every lifter read SS and watch every single Rippetoe video and people will still have questions or do things incorrectly in the beginning. What do you want them to do, devote 20 pages to 2 exercises?
Good luck with everything. I hope you find what you're looking for.
I honestly think you are very confused and you have too much information that you don't quite understand or its contradicting each other rattling around in your head. I think you just need to work out and stop trying to overthink everything. So whatever program gets you working instead of thinking, all the better
One last sidenote, the trainer (Cosgrove) who designed the workout programs from NROL is not the same person who wrote the book (Schuler) that you think you're qualified to debunk. So simply ignore the book and the "theories" you disagre with and use the routines since you already paid for it. The are proven to work and recommended by thousands and thousands of people on every fitness forum and website. Also I recommend purchasing Starting Strength if you are concerned about form in squats and deadlifts (and any other lift). Also with form...you can have every lifter read SS and watch every single Rippetoe video and people will still have questions or do things incorrectly in the beginning. What do you want them to do, devote 20 pages to 2 exercises?
You could be right I could be confused but I don't think I am. However I admit this is entirely possible.
I understand that Cosgrove designed the workouts and I have no problem with them. It is extremely likely I will come back to them once I have lost sufficient weight. I enjoyed the break in routine a lot and think I would enjoy the challenge of the other programs. This has nothing to do with why I am done with NROL for now.
I don't think it is necessary to devote 20 pages to 2 exercises but since they are so important and easy to do wrong (causing injury) I would think they could have (at minimum) had a few more pictures of the model going through the exercises.
I think the OP is talking about the time frame given during the fatloss program before getting to the hypertrophy program.
And you were right. I just wanted to check since that didn't make sense to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NACHO
I may come back to this but for now I'm going to go with Lyle McDonald's program, Rapid Fat Loss.
Good luck then.
__________________
"Time and patience are the 2 elements that most people don't include in their plans."
-Alan Aragon
"The scale simply tells you how much the earth loves you on a particular day."
-Ogedei (Keith)
Hmm..so let's see. You're going to go on a "crash" diet, starve yourself and lose 40 pounds. Here's the deal..you will lose 40 pounds. But it wont be 40 pounds of fat, it will be 25 pounds of fat and 15 pounds of muscle (just a guess but it's most likely something along those lines).
First: I speak as someone who did Fat Loss I, II, III, Strength I, and Hyp I.
A protein sparing modified fast, which is what Nacho is talking about, is called protein sparing for a reason.
I've used Rapid Fat Loss myself and it works. I didn't lose an ounce of strength.
Can anyone give me a single good reason that someone should spend months or years dieting down the traditional way losing a pound per week?
The fat loss routines are a poor choice for anyone wishing to lose fat AND preserve muscle. The intensity (percentage of one rep max) for the lifts is simply too low. Now, there is a caveat, and that is that if you have NEVER lifted before, or have not lifted in a VERY long time, then the NROL fat loss routines are fine. However, if you are someone who has been lifting for a while and you've built up some strength, what do you expect your body to do when you are suddenly sending it the message "Hey, you only need to lift these light weights for higher reps". Your body is going to say "Oh, okay then I will get rid of this metabolically expensive tissue called muscle since we don't need it." That was my experience. I lost muscle on the NROL fat loss routines. I can guarantee you that you will not find any body builder who would look at the NROL fat loss routines and agree that they are appropriate for anyone who isn't brand spanking new to lifting.
The very idea that your exercise should be the tool to lose fat is retarded from the start. Create a calorie deficit with food restriction. Eat enough protein, EFAs, drink lots of water and use your weight lifting to preserve the muscle. Lifting HEAVY weight is how you accomplish that.
The bottom line is that I was able to get much leaner using Rapid Fat Loss, followed by Ultimate Diet 2.0. See my sig for a link to pictures.
Hello I am new to this so please forgive my ignorance.
Secondly you're talking about two different things - a diet book and a lifting book. Did you use RFL before, during or after NROL? Can the two be used together?
__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
Secondly you're talking about two different things - a diet book and a lifting book. Did you use RFL before, during or after NROL? Can the two be used together?
I used NROL in the spring of 2008. I used RFL in late winter of 2008/2009.
You could possibly use the strength routines in NROL combined with RFL but you would probably want to reduce the volume and cut back to only two workouts per week because with calories as low as they can be using RFL, your recovery capacity is much less.
However, Lyle has posted an intermediate workout routine for use with RFL in the RFL forum on his website. Probably best to just use that. For people brand new to lifting there are routines in the RFL book.
How is this difficult to understand? Perhaps it is a syntactical error on my part.
As I understand the terms.
Bulking = gaining muscle and weight. Done correctly you minimize the amound of fat you gain but it is inevitable to gain some fat.
Losing weight = losing weight, some of which is going to be fat. When done correctly you minimize the amount of lean muscle mass you lose.
So you're going to gain muscle and inevitable fat, but you also have 40 lbs of weight to lose and you want to accomplish all of it at the same time. I think you're the only person that thinks this makes sense.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
So you're going to gain muscle and inevitable fat, but you also have 40 lbs of weight to lose and you want to accomplish all of it at the same time. I think you're the only person that thinks this makes sense.
Apparently I am doing a very poor job of explaining myself here.
I want to lose a lot of my weight first, with a goal of getting to around 15% BF.
After that I want to start bulking.
I don't need this to make sense to you but if it doesn't make sense to you please tell me WHY and not just that it doesn't.
You could possibly use the strength routines in NROL combined with RFL but you would probably want to reduce the volume and cut back to only two workouts per week because with calories as low as they can be using RFL, your recovery capacity is much less.
Then wouldn't the lower volume fat loss routines work on a PSMF diet than strength routines? The point of the PSMF is to maintain LBM on such a low caloric intake. You can reduce those to twice a week for recovery purposes.
Your "study" is n=1 and I would expect you to achieve better results than this new guy. You had the lifting experience going into the program so you can adapt how your training went with as you progressed in the diet.
NROL is not a diet book. Yes, they may have been wrong about EPOC but how many trends from five years ago have changed as more research is done? I fully expect the current flavor of the month, whatever it is now, to be different in the near future.
__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
First: I speak as someone who did Fat Loss I, II, III, Strength I, and Hyp I.
A protein sparing modified fast, which is what Nacho is talking about, is called protein sparing for a reason.
I've used Rapid Fat Loss myself and it works. I didn't lose an ounce of strength.
Can anyone give me a single good reason that someone should spend months or years dieting down the traditional way losing a pound per week?
The fat loss routines are a poor choice for anyone wishing to lose fat AND preserve muscle. The intensity (percentage of one rep max) for the lifts is simply too low. Now, there is a caveat, and that is that if you have NEVER lifted before, or have not lifted in a VERY long time, then the NROL fat loss routines are fine. However, if you are someone who has been lifting for a while and you've built up some strength, what do you expect your body to do when you are suddenly sending it the message "Hey, you only need to lift these light weights for higher reps". Your body is going to say "Oh, okay then I will get rid of this metabolically expensive tissue called muscle since we don't need it." That was my experience. I lost muscle on the NROL fat loss routines. I can guarantee you that you will not find any body builder who would look at the NROL fat loss routines and agree that they are appropriate for anyone who isn't brand spanking new to lifting.
The very idea that your exercise should be the tool to lose fat is retarded from the start. Create a calorie deficit with food restriction. Eat enough protein, EFAs, drink lots of water and use your weight lifting to preserve the muscle. Lifting HEAVY weight is how you accomplish that.
The bottom line is that I was able to get much leaner using Rapid Fat Loss, followed by Ultimate Diet 2.0. See my sig for a link to pictures.
Thing is, you can create a deficit with your diet AND create a deficit with your exercise. There's no reason that you can't do both.
Bringing bodybuilders into the equation is foolish as juice monkeys aren't going to open NROL to begin with. The book obviously isn't aimed at them.
IIRC, the NROL fat loss routines go from 15 to 12 to 10 over the course of the routine, do they not? 3x15 in a caloric deficit isn't going to magically cause you to lose muscle. Your pure strength may go down, but that's nothing big. However, I'm assuming your diet was different than it was when you were doing Lyle's program? If it was, that's not a very valid comparison either, as there is no control to draw from.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
Apparently I am doing a very poor job of explaining myself here.
I want to lose a lot of my weight first, with a goal of getting to around 15% BF.
After that I want to start bulking.
I don't need this to make sense to you but if it doesn't make sense to you please tell me WHY and not just that it doesn't.
Then do the NROL fat loss routines as prescribed. They're 12 weeks, right? If you're that much overweight, you could lose 20 lbs, and then you're halfway there. There's nothing magical enough to get you to lose 40 lbs over the course of the program unless it's a really long program designed specifically for long term massive weight loss.
Pick a fucking goal and stick with it. You eat enough protein and eat at a deficit you are not going to lose muscle on the NROL Fat Loss workouts. Book it.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
Done with NROL for now
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