Eight Lessons In Body Recomposition – Part One

Eight Lessons In Body Recomposition – Part One

Summer’s coming, and no doubt many of you have vacations booked or will be hitting your nearby beach for some much needed sunshine therapy. But every goal needs a plan, and every plan tends to hit obstacles. When it comes to getting into shape most obstacles tend to be work and family-related – things you just have to do your best to work through. But there are other more devious forces at play trying to sabotage your efforts to get a beach body. And you CAN do something about them.

These forces may be your body working against you, or archaic advice passed down from gym-generations past that may counter all of your efforts. What I want to describe to you today is a recomposition – a complete reshaping of your body by reducing body fat. I’d like to do this by giving you eight simple lessons that you can learn and follow.

I don’t want this to be an article about how to implement a diet; I will assume you already have the principles of a diet worked out. Namely, that you need a caloric deficit, you should keep your protein intake high, and you should ensure you get sufficient essential fatty acids. There is no need to complicate it beyond this. People aiming to get into low bodybuilding-competition-levels of body fat may need to micro-manage their nutrition, but for those aiming to get visible abs for the beach, these are the fundamentals of fat loss.

Unfortunately running your body on a deficit of calories is not always smooth sailing. This is because your body has restrictions in place to slow down fat loss. Each gram of fat has nine calories - more than double how much protein or glucose supplies (both have four calories per gram). Muscle tissue is essentially a store of protein and glucose, and not only that, it is metabolically demanding! Fat cells much less so. It is quite obvious that your body would prefer to give up muscle tissue as readily as fat when it believes it is going through a famine like when you diet. Unfortunately a good store of muscle looks a hell of a lot better on the beach than a large supply of body fat. The way to ensure that your body feels the need to hang on to its muscle is to continually provoke it. Sounds strange, but this is essentially what we do every time we step into the gym.

So here is your first major lesson of this article – a routine that builds muscle when you bulk up will help preserve muscle when you diet down.

What does this mean? It means don’t suddenly switch your lifting routine when you start dieting, and certainly don’t buy into the widely-spread myth that “high reps are for cutting”. The same signals that tell the body to build large and powerful muscles when you are gaining weight will need to be sent when you diet so that you keep them. Unfortunately when you diet it is inevitable that these signals will get weaker. The main signal is, of course, testosterone. Many “old school” bodybuilders will claim that their testosterone levels are almost zero during dieting, but this has been proven not to be the case. Unfortunately though, testosterone levels WILL decline and this is simply not acceptable if you are aiming to keep all of your gains.

And thus, lesson number two – Activate Xtreme™ will help you maintain and boost testosterone levels in order to help you preserve muscle.

In does this through a multitude of pathways. Fundamentally it is built around Divanil™, an extract of stinging nettle root that has the ability to free up more of your testosterone. Unfortunately only a certain amount of your testosterone is metabolically active, but Divanil™ can fix that. Activate Xtreme™ also assists with total testosterone levels via mucuna pruriens and bryonia laciniosa seed extract, both of which have been shown to enhance testosterone levels. Mucuna pruriens can also increase levels of growth hormone, which is a highly lipolytic (releases fat from fat cells) hormone! Activate Xtreme™ also supplies you with sufficient intake of a highly undervalued micronutrient - vitamin D. Unless you live in a hot country then chances are that you don’t synthesize enough vitamin D. Hell, even if you DO live in a hot country there is no guarantee! Vitamin D is key for ensuring you have sufficient levels of testosterone! So you now have your caloric deficit and your testosterone levels are in check. You can cut your calories low and get ripped even faster, right? Wrong.

Lesson number three – don’t try and diet down too fast, you’ll lose muscle, lose strength and will inevitably hold onto MORE body fat.

Too many people want to lose weight and have the diet over and done with by next Friday. I have some bad news for you; it takes weeks to fully recompose your body. Probably months in many cases, but please do not let that put you off. I promise you will be a richer person from the experience. The real trick for recompositioning is to strip away fat while adding muscle tissue slowly and over time. Unfortunately not everyone has the patience for this and tend to want to switch their programs up frequently.

Consequently, lesson number four is – don’t change everything too often.

This really is tied to the first lesson about sticking to a routine that builds muscle when dieting. The only benefit to switching up your program is purely to maintain interest and excitement. The concept that you need to do something different every workout to “keep the body guessing” is total broscience. Your muscles only know what effort you demand from them and they respond in kind. The best way to keep the body guessing is to try and better your previous performances in the gym. Whether this means getting an extra rep in a set or by incrementing the weight ever so slightly, just try your best to improve.

Stay Tuned For Part Two!
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