89kg and fat-skinny-fat

Hi Robert, I’ve been listening to the great podcasts you’ve recently done on skinny fat lifters, as well as the stuff with Andy on a more body building approach to things.

For various reasons I’ve been out of lifting for about 5 months and am looking to restart with an LP. My issue is that I’m 5ft 7, 47 years old and approximately 30% body fat at 89 kilos. My question is do I need to gain more weight or can I run an LP and perhaps drop a few kilos? I also run 5k a week and do interval sprints twice a week and am actively trying to lose weight through this and diet (plus I enjoy these activities).

Should I drop the kilo’s first and try and reduce bf% prior to hopping back to serious lifting? Probably a lot of silly questions here that you’ve answered before, so apologies in advance!

Glad you are enjoying the podcast. Appreciate the feedback.

How strong are you?

When i last did LP I got to 132.5kg squat for 3 sets of 5, 175kg deadlift for 1 set of 5, bench 80kg for 3 sets of 5 and press 49.5 kg for 3 sets of 5. My power clean got to 60kg. Problem is I bulked rapidly by eating crap and got a fat gut and ass along with skinny legs. Hence my question about whether it’s optimal to get rid of the excess body fat before going back to lifting. Plus I tweaked my adductor when trying for 135kg on the squat and basically pussied out.

Since then I’ve been training for Masters Australian Football (basically for anyone over 40), so a lot of running (distance and intervals) and practice for about 1.5 hours a week, although it’s quite leisurely really and always ends with beer and barbecue.

I’ve cut the beers and calories and the fat parts are slowly reducing (shirts are getting looser). The games start up again in April but they’re only for an hour and are every two weeks. Essentially I’m a weekend warrior who does sports for fun. HOWEVER, the lifting bug has come back and I want to have another go at LP, but I’m concerned that my other areas of fitness may be unsustainable and I’ll have a shit season. So perhaps coming back when the season ends in September might be better? That said I’m already adapted to the running, so maybe all I have to do is reduce rather than eliminate my runs. So I guess I’d like your view on reducing my 30% body fat first before starting up lifting again, or can I work in LP with maintenance calories, at least initially and possibly see a reduction in fat?

Thanks in advance, that went on way longer than I thought it would!

You could probably afford to drop some weight but not a ton. At your height I wouldn't get below 80 kg for these purposes and I would treat 80 kg as the bottom of end of your productive range. Now if you are gaining weight on alcohol and fat calories unfortunately those will not transfer to improving strength and gaining muscle mass. Diet does need to be composed of quality carbohydrates and protein.

Great stuff, thanks Robert. I’m in the process of cleaning up my diet and am using MyFitnessPal as a tracker for macros and calories. It’s actually astonishing how many calories can be crammed into seemingly innocuous sized portions of food. Also I’ve noticed that portion sizes on food packages tend to be ridiculously small. As an example 1 portion of cornflakes is 30g but to have a decent sized helping you really need to double that amount. Add even low fat milk, banana etc. and you end up with about 400 calories sometimes.

I’ll aim to be about 80-82 kilos as a target weight. Given I’m already running for my sport (so consider myself to be quite well adapted), but would like to do an LP again and also lose fat to get to that weight range, plus I’m an older guy; would I be able to get away with about 2500 quality calories a day? I would pretty much keep the practice and some of the running in but wouldn’t bother with increasing these, just keep them going at a reduced level, while I work on strength.

Anyway thanks for your advice and I’ll keep tuning into the podcasts.

You are learning. Reading labels and measuring food are analogous to training wheels on a bicycle. As you go through and measure all sorts of things out you learn what gives you the most bang for your buck and what is extraneous dietary fluff.

2500 calories is a good baseline if it's not heavy yet. When it gets heavy you'll need more especially if you are running. If running is the priority just know that you will only go so far under the bar.

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Originally Posted by Robert Santana

If running is the priority just know that you will only go so far under the bar.

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Yes I’m aware that any LP where I’m doing running will likely not be as efficacious as doing no running, so I’ll do the best I can within the constraints I have set myself. We’re in pre-season at the moment and once the season ends in September, I’ll probably cut out all running for a few months and focus on strength, although I’ll likely be intermediate by then. I’m listening to Rips podcast on functional training and it’s failings while typing this! Fantastic stuff.

One of the guys on the team told me to lift light weights or I’d get too bulky lol, although to be fair he gave me good advice about sprinting for conditioning rather than long runs. I’ll keep you posted on my progress and will likely start a training log on the novice training logs section to hold myself accountable! Thanks!

You should be able to make the best progress you can make in pre season. You'll want to back off the volume and intensity of squatting and deadlifting during season. Upper body may still move, it's a crapshoot depending on the lifter. Keep 'getting bulky.'

Hey Robert, I’m now down to 87.1kg, making steady progress on NLP although had to miss a session today as had some wisdom teeth out yesterday. Just doing football training on a Thursday and sprinting after one of my weights sessions, so far no interference effects but it’s early days.

Great. Whee are your numbers now?