Lifestyle and Its Influence on Gym Performance

Lift, eat, sleep and repeat.

Unless we’re professional athletes, we probably do not have the privilege to live a lifestyle mentioned above.

It’s without a doubt that if we were to do only those things, our performance will skyrocket and the gainz will be strong in us.

The fact of the matter is that we all have other priorities besides lifting weights. That being said, to center our entire life around the purpose of getting better at lifting would be pretty foolish if that isn’t what we do for our living.

However, that isn’t to say that there that we can’t tailor our pursuits in the gym to fit our current lifestyle.

Notice that I wrote that the gym should fit our lifestyle, not the other way around.

Unless we’re professional athletes, the gym should fit our lifestyle, not the other way around. <—– Click To Share this!!

I really believe that to ensure long term progress without burning out and over fatiguing ourselves, it’s important to understand the demands of our life and then tailor our training appropriately.

To further illustrate this, I’ll use myself as a case study on how lifestyle factors can influence the results from your training.

The things that I’ve taken into account here are sleep, nutrient intake and the interaction with training and how it effects my body composition.

The DEXA Scan

Doing my Masters in a university gives me access to lab equipment which allows me to obtain highly accurate results.

One of the lab equipment I’ve used is the DEXA machine.

DEXA stands for Dual Energy X-Ray Absorption, which basically functions by bouncing X- rays into your body and the information is being collected on your bone mass, fat mass and lean mass by a high tech scanner.

P/S: In the UK without proper medical clearance you can’t get a DEXA scan and there needs to be a minimum of 3 months between scans because of radiation. I did mine 5 weeks apart, and I’m still waiting for  my superpowers to manifest.

This experiment started on the 12^th of December 2015 when I got my first DEXA scan done. The image below was my results.

Bodyweight: 78.8kg

Body Fat percentage: 9.2%

Body Fat in Kg: 7.26kg

Lean Mass: 67.85kg

Bone Mass: 3.6kg

*lean mass here is everything excluding bone and fat, this includes water and muscle glycogen and isn’t purely muscle mass*

I didn’t take my measurement completely fasted and had some food in me, so one thing to note is that some lean mass here could be attributed the food and water weight.

9.2% body fat here is pretty good, which I’m completely happy with considering it’s under 10%.

My second DEXA scan was done 5 weeks later and the results here is below:

Bodyweight: 78.9kg

Body Fat percentage: 10.7%

Body Fat in Kg: 8.45kg

Lean Mass: 66.74kg

Bone Mass: 3.6kg

The first thing you should notice, which I did was there was a 1.5% increase in body fat. And I blame that on the Christmas period which I eat a ton of food, almost uncontrollably.

The next thing is that I put on 1.2kg of fat (8.4kg-7.2kg) but my bodyweight only went up by 0.1kg.

My maths is bad, but does poor math run in my blood, literally?

What kind of sorcery is this?

Take a look at my lean mass, it dropped by 1.1kg which makes up for the differences in bodyweight. And this time I took my DEXA scan fasted so there probably isn’t any additional weight from food.

This means I have lost some lean mass and put on fat mass at the same time, double combination of body composition nightmare.

So after crying and having ice cream to comfort myself, let’s take a look into what caused the results above.

Nutrient Intake

The first scan was taken 2-3 days after I completed my placement at Cardiff City. During my placement, I ate the food they provided there and I must say a lot of my calories came from protein. Here’s a snapshot of my biggest protein feed during my stint at Cardiff.

On this day I consumed a surplus of 79g of protein above my protein goals and 200+ calories over my total calorie intake.

This however isn’t an isolated event, I’ve actually overshot my protein intake 5 out of 10 days and after counting the calories from other macronutrients, some of them even put me in a surplus.

This is a pretty interesting observation especially with recent studies done by Antonio and colleagues  showing that consuming a calorie surplus from protein doesn’t really induce much changes to body composition and doesn’t result in additional fat gain.

You can read the study HERE

Protein has a high thermic effect of food which means that more energy is expended to digest protein and hence a majority of the calories I consume isn’t actually stored and is expended.

Compare this with the calories I’ve been consuming during the five weeks after my first DEXA scan

Another factor could be due to my placement at Cardiff where I spend a good 1.5 hours in the field running up and about helping the coaching staff out. This is in comparison to me being back home usually sitting down doing reading and hence movement is less. This will certainly cause a drop of energy expended since I am no longer as active as I used to be while being in Cardiff.

The energy you burn from movements like fidgeting, walking around and standing up is called Non Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) and this contributes to a huge percentage of you’re the energy your body will use. In fact, people that has a higher NEAT seems to be the same people that put on less body fat.

The last factor which could have played a role is sleep. I’ve written a few articles on the importance of sleep and how you can optimize it to ensure that it doesn’t hold you back from getting the results you want.

While spending my time in Cardiff, I was in bed by 11pm because I need to be up at 7am the following day. This gives me a good 8 hours of solid rest and I’ve also wrote about the more hours of sleep you get before the sunrises the better since melatonin is sensitive to sunlight. In contrast, during the 5 weeks especially the Christmas period, I had late nights sleeping at 2am which could have affected my performance in the gym and body composition.

It’s worth reiterating that a study showed that both groups in a calorie deficit lost weight but the group who had sufficient sleep lost most of it from fat whereas the sleep deprived group lost more weight from muscle.

Read more about the study HERE.

This could be a possible explanation why I lost some lean mass throughout the 5 weeks period.

It doesn’t discount the fact that I was still training with some pretty high volume, and I probably wasn’t hitting my protein intake on a consistent basis and recovery wasn’t optimized. All of these factors (other factors probably exist) caused a drop in lean mass and an increase in fat mass.

Just like how you can gain muscle and loss fat at the same time, gaining fat and losing muscle at the same time is highly possible too.

Which being completely honest, sucks.

The thing is we all go through phases where certain priorities will supersede our pursuits in the gym and that is completely fine. The key is to tweak certain factors to fit your training.

Here’s a summary on how you can do that:

1. To make the best progress in training, sleep is highly important yet underrated. When you can get more sleep, it’ll be wise to do your hard training around it.
2. Intake a high protein intake can potential benefit fat loss or prevention of putting on extra fat mass. If you have the urge to consume more food, eat protein (highly applicable for festive seasons).
3. If you work in front of a computer the entire day, consciously getting up and moving around can regulate energy balance in the long run compared to sitting down all day.
4. Unless you’re a professional athlete, your training should complement your life, not the other way around.

The take away here is that our lifestyle plays a bigger role in governing our training results more than we think. By giving more thought to our lifestyle, we can avoid the disappointment of getting sub optimal training results and feeling miserable at life at the same time.

Perhaps it’s time to sit down, take a minute or two and start seeing how you can tweak your training to fit your current lifestyle.

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