Foundations Body Comp

Hi all,

I've been moving through F1 + H1 and things are going well. I haven't stalled (yet) and form feels to be getting smoother over time. I'm 6'1 180 lbs at ~17% body fat. Always been a somewhat scrawny frame. My curiosity is that given the type of work performed in F1 & H1 does it make sense to drop the body fat or to focus on eating enough to aid recovery + muscle?

Thanks!

Since you're doing bodyweight exercises, dropping unecessary weight will help you progress.  

 

If you dial your nutrition in, you can lose the fat and have solid recovery simultaneously.  For the few recovery hours after your workout, make sure you get plenty of fuel for recovery (protein, fat, and carbs).  After a few hours, cut it back (especially the carbs) to a slight caloric deficit.

 

This is a way oversimplification of exercise nutrition.  Go check out the nutrition forum for a lot more detail.

My experience with performing a fast-paced F7 session 3X/week with 3X HS and one day of rest has been surprising in terms of body comp changes.  I've leaned out quick without making changes to diet, despite having stopped running temporarily due to overdoing it a while ago.

 

It's especially interesting that hitting an extra F7 session per week (for three total) seems to have more effect on my body comp than did running daily (hard intervals on HS days and 20 min jogging on F7 days).  The running takes it to another level, but the impact of GST is surprisingly disproportionate to me.

 

I think if you eat lean, whole foods and eat when hungry you'll be able to lose fat and also sustain your GST progress.  There is a lot of great advanced stuff in the forum, but ~80% of my progress has come from eating whole foods at intervals and in quantities suggested by how I feel.  

steady state cardio has little to no impact on your body compositions and in some cases will be detrimental.  Very well controlled studies have shown that.