The key takeaway: "There's no point in you losing weight right now."
The key takeaway: "There's no point in you losing weight right now."
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I revisited Rip’s conversations with the great Marty Gallagher yesterday. Go and listen to them if you haven’t. If one could take anything away from them is, “EAT, for the love of God.” No one has made any real progress at getting strong while trying to stay small.
To a degree. I’m not suggesting that you eat yourself to the size of a whale, only that you will need to maintain a SMALL calorie surplus IMO. The more accurately that you track your macros and stick consistently to it, then the closer you will come to optimising the balance between strength/aesthetics. The problem is that you will be compromising ultimate strength gains because the fatigue created by the later stages of NLP progression will effectively curtail it far earlier than otherwise.
Lifting goals are an entirely personal choice and they can change. You aren’t at the extremes of body weight. You are much like most of us are when we began to lift weights, just kind of in the middle. If you cut your weight now, then your strength gains will be proportionally slower, but you get to look like a ‘modern’ man for longer. Until you actually begin lifting, it’s really a waste of time trying to help, because you are just going to go and do whatever you are going to do and then perhaps realise that it was not the best decision in the middle of NLP, then go nuts in the opposite direction and think that you must do GOMAD with chocolate milk or something. Then get fluffy and decide that it’s now just too much and start wanting to cut. This kind of yo-yoing often seems to happen-one day you want to just get strong, the next you just want a nice physique, half the time you get to bulking like a maniac and then your cutting like an anorexic.
My advice FWIW, is to wait until you begin lifting before deciding anything. Then learn to become a consistent, focused lifter, doing the program diligently, filling in the log book, doing it day after day no matter what gets in the way. Don’t get faddy, or an over enthusiastic evangelist. Turn up, load the bar, do the programmed sets like it was just another day at the office. As time goes by, it will become ingrained, habitual, hard and often boring. The rewards for lifting are only partially in the pure physical realm and mostly in the mind, in how you begin to think about life in general. If you lift for a few years then the changes go well beyond dietary considerations and body image. It’s like changing from the inside out, rather than how you think of it at the moment. Lifting is something that you consciously accept that you do to yourself, rather than something that has to be done to you. Lifting is not the activity of victims, but of winners and that takes years to realise.