Any point practising planche whilst losing weight?

I'm going on a cut to lose about 20lbs and wondered if theres any point in practising planche whilst going DOWN in weight, because surely I won't gain the muscle that I COULD with the movement when eating more?

Or can I gain strength whilst losing weight?

Im no expert but i think you should train planche regardless of your fat loss regimen

Yes you should, and you'll probably improve as well.

in what way are you cutting? if you're only cutting by laying of sweets and unnecessary amounts of food, you can still gain strength.

sse94 said:

in what way are you cutting? if you're only cutting by laying of sweets and unnecessary amounts of food, you can still gain strength.

I am going to implement a caloric defecit until i reach my goal weight.

Definitely traing planche, but it is not a complete no-brainer, since while cutting it is even more critical to find the sweet spot between constantly increasing your mobility and resistance to injury through very basic F1 work, and simultaneously training in a way which preserves muscle mass and strength (heavy stuff, planche etc).

Gaining strength is about more than just building muscle (which, coincidentally, you can still do while losing weight) it's also about improving motor neuron firing, muscle activation, tendon strength and probably quite a bit more.  All of these can be improved with constant practice, regardless of whether your muscles are getting bigger or smaller.

Yes you can, just be patient with both your weight loss & your strength gains that will be slower than if you were targeting only one goal.

Your sweet spot is going to be between the curve of pure weight loss, and the one of pure strength gains.

You'll need to closely monitor your body composition (BF%), otherwise you will really not know where you are at & will make mistakes in your nutrition, or believe you have not made progress when in fact you have.

The first 6 weeks, when I was losing 100g per day, it was easy to track and remain both motivated and confident it was working... the scale was giving me a nice feedback every morning telling me i was on the right track.

28 pounds & 6 months later, I am down to 15-20g a day (that's one pound per month more or less)... with such a slow pace & the food in/crap out daily variations, the scale doesn't tell me much that is useful on a daily basis; I am using the 20 days moving average to check things & it is very easy to lose track, lose patience, question yourself, doubt & want to change things when they are in fact really working well and producing results.

I am controlling the BF% (skin folds) every 15 days.

I've been doing F1 for the last 5 of these 6 months and have gotten stronger.

Thanks Fred, very helpful.

Can I ask, you said during the period you were losing roughly a pound a week, was your muscle increasing? Do you think you gained mass or only strength?

Very welcome.

I think I gained 3, maybe 4 Kg lean mass in total - I say "think" because the caliper measurements has a +/-3% imprecision - that alone accounts for nearly 3Kg.

Add to that the food-in/crap-out variations, and the line becomes so thick that you can read whatever you wish...

(it is impossible to say with precision when these lean mass gains occurred)

There is also the internal (organ) fat that DEXA revealed in large quantities and that has obviously diminished, but because this cannot be revealed, let alone measured with calipers, I'll have to wait until next time I am in the US to do a control DEXA scan and compare apples to apples.