Hey Jordan, can you help.
male, 37yr old, 193lb, 39.5" waist, 20-25% bf (at a guess).
so, i few weeks back i decided to drop some bf and brought calories down to around 2,300-2,400. I lost 8lb 198lb>193lb on LP but my lifts suffered badly. Missing reps on Squats at 100kg. I had planned to drop to 180lb but i am under muscled and think i will look rather skinny at 180lb and be very much weaker. Ive upped calories back to 2,600-2,700 to get things moving again. Macros around 220/270/75. Just wondering what you would do with someone in my situation. Could it be that i may infact need to slowly gain weight / mass at my given height & bf rather than cut? In order to drive my lifts up. Goal is to build a foundation on LP 405lb/315lb/225lb/135lb Dealift/Squat/Bench/Press. Any help/advice appreciated.
I would not recommend weight gain with a waist of what you’re reporting. It makes sense you’re “undermuscled” without a long training background, but having a high waist is not a good compromise for adding a few kg on your squat during LP.
I would have you lose weight slowly, get a form check, and move on from LP when you need to.
It is unlikely that you or anyone else will be lifting those weights on LP as the average results from LP are much lower.
So, the 8lb weightloss was over the course of around a week period. I was consuming around 2,400cals. Do you recommend continuing at this rate. My current lifts are Squat 110kg 3x5, Deadlift 130kg 1x5, Bench 90kg 5x3, Press 55kg 5x3. While my Squat and Deadlift are still progressing the Bench and Press are very much grinding through at 1kg increments.
Your current lifts as a novice are not necessarily relevant to this conversation. You’re reporting a 5lb weight loss in 1 week that is unlikely to have any direct effect on your training outcomes, but rather LP is just not that great of a program for you in that it doesn’t have any room for productive progressive overload (adding weight is not possible linearly for any significant period of time), low movement variability and hyperspecificity is not good for developing broad base of movement proficiency, no increase in volume over time compromises hypertrophy responses, decrease in deadlifting volume reduces deadlift development, and no conditioning is inappropriate for a large portion of the cohort running LP.
Finally, the instructions and resources on how to run LP are not adequate enough for even a 5% compliance rate, which is laughable.
Sorry Jordan, it was 5lb loss over the course of an 8week period. I am thinking of switching my upper lifts to the Bench & Press plug-ins that you guys put up to get extra volume in. Do you think this is a good move now given that my Bench and Press are grinding at 5x3 rep scheme?
Yea so that’s even less likely.
In any event, I do think the plug in is a step in the right direction. You may need even more programming changes in the future.
Thanks Jordan. I’ll try the upper plug-ins while slowly losing and and see how it goes.