it’s been nearly 6 months since my first post, and I’ve run hypertrophy II and powerbuilding II with great success. However, since said post I’ve gained only a couple pounds without much change to the waist circumference while still at 15% body fat (estimated via NIDDK).
One week ago, I made an unapproved post on the training forum regarding a back tweak as a result of not listening to my body on beltless deadlifts on week 3 of strength III. I suspect a possible explanation for this is insufficient calories as this happened the week I inadvertently ate nearly 300 fewer calories per day and the only lift that seemed to get progressively harder to complete was beltless deadlifts.
My current caloric intake is ~3000 calories per day split into 159g protein, 407g carbs, 85g fat/17g saturated, and 53g fiber. I’m slightly convinced that I may have to gain some weight to increase my recovery resource availability, but I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I can elaborate with more details if you’d like, but I tried to keep it concise this time
I think it’s highly unlikely that any Calorie deficit, much less a small one (~300 kCal), has any effect on your injury risk during deadlifts or training recovery. This also seems a bit reductionist in that “it’s just this one thing” when there are literally thousands of things that influence performance potential on a given day.
Mechanistically, you’re eating plenty of protein- so no risk of not being able to repair/remodel muscle tissue from session to session. You also are consuming copious amounts of energy, thereby making the risk of malnourishment extremely low. We know that more energy doesn’t necessarily cause more muscle growth and markers of muscle recovery are even more complex than this.
I’d really try to divorce this idea between calorie intake and performance in this context and really ask you if you think 300kCal could be this important?
When you put it that way, I would say 300 calories isn’t much to worry about. I suppose I was trying to make sense of my situation by attributing the pain to the easiest-to-spot shortcoming.