How
to Keep Track of Your Biofeedback for Faster Fat Loss and Muscle Growth
Biofeedback is a technical-sounding term for all of the signals
your body is giving you.
Bio [body] feedback [signals].
These are the little things that
tell you what's going on internally.
As
coaches, we know that if we help you manage your diet and training properly,
your body will be well from the inside out, and your biofeedback will reflect
that and let us know you're feeling, moving, training, and sleeping well.
SLEEP
First up on the list of
biofeedback markers we track is sleep.
[For a deep dive into sleep, why it's so important for building
muscle and burning fat, and how to improve sleep, check out this blog.]
we cover with all our clients why
they need to focus on good quantity and quality of sleep. Getting great sleep
helps you adhere to your diet because poor sleep means...
→ Higher stress
→ More cravings
→ More hunger
→ Lower willpower
All of this together adds up to a
way harder time adhering to the diet when you're under-slept. Not to
mention training and recovery will suffer from poor sleep, and if you're tired,
you'll generally move less (lower
N.E.A.T.), meaning you'll burn fewer calories throughout the day.
Sleep is also something we watch
for changes over time. Sometimes in a prolonged calorie deficit,
especially when you start to get pretty lean, your sleep can start fine and get
worse over time.
Sometimes that will just come
with pushing to get ultra-lean, but it's something we can keep an eye on and
try to mitigate as much as possible with things like sleep routines and
lifestyle modification, or even meal timing, so you're not going to bed
hungry.
In general, we like to see anywhere from 7-9 quality hours of
sleep per night.
STRESS
Stress goes hand-in-hand with
sleep - Poor
sleep leads to higher stress, and high stress leads to poor sleep.
Stress is also another factor that can alter
your ability to stick to your nutrition protocol.
Most
people think the reason to keep stress down is that cortisol can block fat loss,
which isn't the case.
Cortisol (the
stress hormone) can mask fat loss by causing you to hold onto water
weight, but it won't completely stop you from losing fat.
The real detrimental effect of stress is its propensity to lower your adherence and
willpower.
When you're
stressed, your willpower is lowered, and hunger is typically higher either
during or after the stress. We can usually see a pretty direct correlation between
stress, sleep, hunger, and cravings. When one of the first two is off,
everything is off.
We have our clients rate their
perceived stress on a scale from 1-5. If it starts to creep up beyond a 2
or 3 and starts affecting their other biofeedback markers, it's time to start
implementing stress-relieving activities.
Some good
options are:
→ Journaling
→ Meditation
→ Deep breathing
→ Reading
→ Any other activity that
feels calming and enjoyable to them (this
can mean drinking a glass of wine, watching a favorite T.V. show, etc.)
MOTIVATION
We track
motivation to keep tabs on two main things:
1. How motivated you are a client
are feeling to do the work (this one's
obvious)
2. How well you're following the
plan
We know motivation follows
action.
When someone sets their goals,
sets up their checklist of actions they need to be doing to reach those goals,
and follows through and checking off those boxes, they are motivated and on
fire for the process.
Only when they stop doing the
things they know they need to do, does motivation start to lag.
Giving a
motivation rating from 1-5 is a sneaky way of asking...
"How
well, are you following the plan?"
When we see motivation rating
start to fall for a client,
that's an alarm bell going off for us to dig into that and see what's going on
and try to remedy that so they can get back on track and crushing their goal.
HUNGER
& CRAVINGS
Hunger
and cravings are indicators of:
→ What's
your food quality like?
→ How
well, is your meal plan set up to include things that keep you full and have
enough satisfaction?
→ Is
there is something more going on, like hormonal hunger/cravings that we know we need
to anticipate?
→ Have you been in a deficit too long?
Let's
break each of these down individually.
>
WHAT'S YOUR FOOD QUALITY LIKE? <
If you
are in a very slight deficit or even at maintenance and still have more hunger
than expected, it's usually a result of less than optimal food quality.
Why?
High-quality,
nutrient-dense whole foods come along with fiber, water content, and volume.
These are also foods that are more likely to be single-macro foods.
The example I always like to give to clients is…
→ One
protein bar = 250 calories, 20g protein, and is a mixture of carbs, fat, and
protein all in one.
→ One
cup of plain fat-free Greek yogurt, one orange, and ten almonds are also 250
calories and 25g of protein, but each food is a lot more food volume and more
filling.
Another great example of this...
→ 4
oz ribeye steak is 320 calories, 19g of protein, and 27g of fat.
→ 4 oz
chicken breast and an entire avocado is 350 calories, 25g of protein, and 23g
of fat.
The
chicken and avocado are much more filling because of the extra food volume.
For clients
struggling with hunger in a deficit, we have them add a big salad during the hungriest time of the day.
A big salad usually includes tons of greens, chopped veggies of their choice, some
lean protein on top, and a low or no-fat dressing.
This
gives lots of food volume, fiber, micronutrients, protein and takes a lot of
time to chew and finish. Combining these factors gives major fullness points
for very few calories which are a win-win in a deficit.
Food
quality is the first place we look when hunger is high without a clear reason
for all of these reasons.
> HOW
WELL, IS YOUR MEAL PLAN SET UP TO INCLUDE THINGS THAT KEEP YOU FULL & SATISFIED?
<
Your
meals need to have three characteristics:
1. Fit your target macros
2. Be enjoyable
3. Be repeatable
If you stop at number one, you'll
be eating in a way you can't stick to. Meals should also be enjoyable and
repeatable.
Being enjoyable doesn't just mean
it tastes good. It means it tastes good, makes you feel good, digests
well, and is satisfying, meaning you don't finish eating and still want
something.
Using the big salad example from
above, maybe a salad with greens, grilled chicken, and fat-free dressing is
fine, but it just isn't satisfying, and you still want something when you
finish.
But maybe you find that if you add
something crunchy on the top, it adds just a few calories, still fits your
macros and is way more satisfying.
And
lastly, they should be repeatable, meaning the meal isn't so complicated it's
unrealistic to repeat the day today.
> IS
THE SOMETHING MORE GOING ON LIKE HORMONAL HUNGER/CRAVINGS, THE NEED TO
ANTICIPATE/PLAN FOR? <
Some times of the month, you know
you'll be hungrier and have more cravings.
For some, that's the week leading
up to their period; for others, it's the week of.
One option is to add food that
week to accommodate and make that trade-off for slower progress. If you
don't want to do that, just knowing it's coming can be helpful.
If you don't already, start
tracking your cycle and see if you consistently have increased hunger at any
points during the month. That will usually be around ovulation or the start of
your period.
> HAVE
YOU BEEN IN A DEFICIT FOR TOO LONG? <
This would be the last on the
checklist if you still have more weight you'd like to lose, but if you've been
in a deficit for weeks on end, you could be ready for a diet break.
Having
some time to eat at maintenance can be the mental and physical break you need
to get back to it.
TRAINING
PERFORMANCE
We train hard when we're in a
surplus to build the most amount of muscle possible, and we train hard in a
deficit to preserve the most amount of muscle while dieting.
So it would make sense to track
how training performance is going. If this is starting to suffer, you may
not be optimizing your physique, but it can also give clues to any needed
changes in the diet.
If you have always had a pretty
low-fat diet and experiment with raising fats and lowering carbs, and seeing
your training performance goes down, you know that strategy isn't right for
you.
This can also be a situation
where you are going in and out of different training phases, and you can see
what does and doesn't work for you while you're in a deficit.
EXAMPLE:
If you
are deep into a dieting phase and go into a very glycolytic training phase that
you don't have the fuel for, and training performance suffers, it might be best
to hold off on that type of training until you're back at maintenance.
Tracking
training performance can also give you clues about what's going on outside of
just the training and diet.
→ Are you hydrated?
→ Is sleep going down, and Do you see it reflected in training performance?
→ Do you need to add a
pre-workout meal or change the one you're already having?
→ Are outside stressors
taking a toll on training?
Often fixing one of the other biofeedback markers can benefit
training performance as well.
RECOVERY
Recovery can be just as important
as training performance.
As the S.R.A. Curve illustrates, it's not just training hard, build muscle. You can only adapt to the training you can recover from:
As you might expect from reading the integration of all the
previous sections, recovery can be majorly affected by diet, sleep, stress, and
hydration. Those are the places to start if you want to improve your
recovery.
If you have all those dialed in and still want to improve your
recovery from training, you can...
→ Make sure your pre and post-workout meals, particularly
carbohydrates, are dialed in.
→ Add external modalities like massage, stretching, foam
rolling, and heat.
→ Would you mind taking a look at training intensity and
volume and making sure they're dialed in?
However, these things are
the 20%, and the 80% are the fundamentals I mentioned above: Diet, sleep, stress, and hydration.
Renaissance
Periodization has coined the terms minimum effective volume (M.E.V.) and maximum recoverable
volume (M.R.V.).
You might have guessed from the names, but...
MINIMUM EFFECTIVE VOLUME (M.E.V.): The the lowest volume of training an athlete can do in a particular situation and still
measurably improve.
MAXIMUM RECOVERABLE VOLUME (M.R.V.): The highest volume of training an athlete can do in a particular
situation and still recover.
In general...
→ Having adequate protein
and calories (maintenance or above)
→ Lowering stress
→ Increasing sleep quality
and quantity.
→ Being hydrated and
having the proper electrolyte balance
...will both lower your
minimum effective volume, so you can get adequate results with less volume, and
extend your maximum recoverable volume, so you can do more while still
recovering and not overtrain.
 |
| Biofeedback for Faster Fat Loss and Muscle Growth |
BONUS:
STEP COUNT
Ok, this
one is a bonus because step count isn't biofeedback per se. Still, it does indicate
the amount of movement a person is doing in a given time and might clue us into
metabolic adaptation and help prevent that.
Let me explain…
Your metabolic rate is made up of
the following components:
→ B.M.R. (calories
burned through your heart pumping, breathing, etc. - you'd burn these even if
you didn't lift a finger all day)
→ E.A.T. (exercise activity thermogenesis-calories
burned during exercise)
→ T.E.F. (thermic
effect of food-calories burned indigestion)
→ NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis-calories
burned during all movement outside of exercise)
We have no control over B.M.R.
And minimal control over T.E.F.
That leaves calories burned during
movement.
Since we can't just keep pushing
calories burned through exercise because that eats into recovery ability and time in our day, we have the most
control over NEAT.
Technically, these would be
little movements that we don't have much conscious control over, like
fidgeting, blinking, spontaneous standing vs. sitting. Still, we use step count
for our purposes.
Step count is something we can
control, and it's a way to monitor and gauge decreased activity for a
diet.
See, when you diet, your body
attempts to burn fewer calories to keep you from starving to death.
One major way of doing this is
slowing down your NEAT. You stand less, talk with your hands less, fidget
and blink less, and walk less.
If we see a client's steps start at an average of 10-11k steps per day when they start a diet and gradually move down to 9, 8, and eventually even 7k… That decreases calorie burn to a pretty large degree.
 |
| Basal metabolic rate |
Instead of continually slashing more and more
calories, we can attempt to keep those steps up and mitigate some of that
metabolic adaptation.
That way, you're not adding any unnecessary cardio time and not
slashing calories any more calories than is necessary.
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