All right.
Number five is a big one.
It might be one of the most important things not to overlook
that I rarely hear anyone talk about.
And you should be specifically asking about this
when you're looking for someone to, who is going
to coach you through a transformation of any length.
That question is what do we do afterwards?
Are you just kind of left on your own?
Hey, after those three or four months, you know,
great, have a nice life.
Or are they gonna give you some type
of like at least outline of how to get back?
'cause you've been in a deficit. How do you get back
to your maintenance?
How do you find what your maintenance is now?
'cause it's likely shifted a little bit since you began the
transformation, if you assess that during your prep period.
So if you're not left on your own, there's kind
of three main mistakes that will happen when trying
to come out of a transformation or get back to a maintenance
or even a growth period.
So reverse dieting was very popular and it can work,
but if it's not paired appropriately with a training plan,
it's kind of the low IQ version
of reestablishing your maintenance calories at your
new body composition.
Doing it too slowly is just wasting time.
But on the flip side,
going too quickly is just gonna put fat back on faster.
Your maintenance window has probably shifted as,
as has your thyroid activity
because as we bring down calories
and bring down carbohydrates, your thyroid activity is going
to down regulate a little bit, which can shift
that maintenance window a bit.
It's gonna take some time to kind of get that back up.
Bringing your calories and your carbohydrates up tore, uh,
to raise your metabolic rate a little bit.
So when we bring those calories back up
to do those in an appropriate fashion, not take too long,
we want to pair that with programming that's going
to complement that higher carb intake
and support the nutrient partitioning
to make sure those carbs are being used through, you know,
energy flux, burned or stored as muscle glycogen
and make it less likely that they are stored as fat.
So the last one,
or the last, uh, mini error if you will, is dropping off
that extra energy expenditure too quickly.
If you were doing cardio every day
and go to zero, well
that's actually decreasing your deficit.
And if you're also adding calories, you might have shifted
your energy balance a lot further than you may have thought
if we're not factoring that stuff in.
Um, so we want to kind
of do this gradually over a couple of weeks.
Um, not going from, you know, cardio every day to zero days
of cardio, but maybe cut it down to, all right,
now we're just doing three days of cardio
and we're gonna keep calories the same for a week or two.
Then bring calories up, then adjust the training,
then bring down the cardio a little bit more,
then bring calories up.
So we have to kind of stagger these things a bit so
that we don't, uh, kind
of shock our body in the wrong kind of way,
Uh, with excess calories that we're not prepared
to utilize right away.
So when we factor this, uh, reclamation period in
a 90 day transformation, assuming everything goes perfectly
and then trying to establish that body composition
might take twice that amount of time.
If you significantly lowered your body fat, you'll need
to take the time and effort to establish that
as your set point.
Your body does adapt to what its happy, uh,
body fat level is.
And based on the experience of myself
and other coaches, this takes around four to six months
at maintaining your body fat level to make it easier
to then maintain it normally.
And this has to do with fat tissue actually does have
hormone signaling properties
or the ability to, you know, create hormones that signal
what your body does.
Um, and so it does have the ability to sense
how much stored energy there is.
And then you may have heard
of things like adiponectin and leptin.
Those are two of the hormones, uh, that are kind of signals
that will help influence where your body's happy medium
of body fat is, uh, going to,
that isn't something we're going to cover here,
but just know that once you do that transformation,
it's going to take additional work
and time to be able to set that as your new maintenance so
that you're not constantly fighting
to keep yourself lean every time you try and build.
If you try building too quickly, you're gonna put
that body fat on a little bit quicker than if you took the
time to just buckle down and get that set point established.
Then it will be easier to continue on from there.