How Bodybuilders Lose Body Fat (Energy Deficit Explained)

If you are not creating an energy deficit, you will not lose body fat. There is no diet, supplement, or workout that will get you to lose body fat if you are not using more energy than you bring in.

There are two primary methods that natural bodybuilders can use to lose body fat. One revolves around your diet, and one revolves around your training. Spoiler alert: it’s easier to do option one versus option two.

1) Bodybuilders Can Lose Body Fat By Reducing Calories

Creating a caloric deficit by reducing the total amount of food you consume on a daily basis is the most basic and practical way to create an energy deficit.

Let’s hypothetically say you are a figure competitor, who is 5’5 130lbs in the offseason. Let’s also say you are maintaining this weight by eating 1750 calories a day in conjunction with your regular training. A reduction in calories, with the same exact activity levels, will result in reductions in body fat.

Calorie reduction is not a difficult process. If you are already in the habit of weighing your food, you would simply weigh less food on the food scale. 200 grams of rice could become 100 grams. These reductions add up over the course of the day/week/month.  And before you know it, you look in the mirror and you are noticeably leaner.

To gauge your progress, you should take progress photos while in your mandatory/symmetry poses to see the visual changes in your physique. Weigh yourself daily if possible, with once per week as the minimum. In most cases, if you are consistently training hard and eating correctly, losing 0.5 to 1.5 pounds of weight per week is a great indicator that the vast majority of the weight that you are losing is body fat.

Now, I’m a big fan of using caloric reduction in conjunction with conditioning or cardio to help with reducing body fat. But the easier way to create the energy deficit is to reduce your food intake, because it’s much harder to burn 200 calories through training than it is to reduce it with lower calories.

No one can out-train too much food.

2) Bodybuilders Can Lose Body Fat By Increasing Activity

Another way for natural bodybuilders to lose body fat is to increase the amount of energy they use. This can be done by increasing daily activity levels.

Bronze, silver, and golden age bodybuilders relied more on diet and training density rather than structured cardio. Modern bodybuilders rely more on cardio to help create an energy deficit.

As bodybuilding continued to change, bodybuilders started to perform cardio (low intensity steady state or LISS) in addition to their lifting in order to get even leaner. This was typically done in a low to moderate intensity manner such as walking or even riding a bike post-lifting. Some examples of low to moderate intensity cardio would be:

* Walking (low)
* Jumping Rope (moderate)
* Bike Riding (moderate)

In modern times a small minority of bodybuilders (mainly naturals) also started to do high intensity interval training (HIIT) which can also be simply referred to as conditioning. Conditioning workouts are significantly shorter in duration than LISS workouts. Conditioning is also decidedly tougher than low-intensity cardio workouts as your heartrate gets up pretty high and your mental toughness gets challenged.

Another benefit of conditioning workouts is that they have the capability to build muscle mass along with stimulating fat loss.  Some examples of conditioning would be:

* Sprinting
* Prowler sprints or walks
* Bodyweight exercise circuits
* Barbell or dumbbell complexes

The overwhelming majority of modern bodybuilders prefer to use LISS to lose body fat. And LISS has its place as it does not tax your body. I like to walk. But HIIT offers some things that LISS does not which are the ability to build muscle and mental toughening.

As with all conditioning/cardio if you overdo it, you will then begin to run the high risk of losing muscle mass. Daily 3 hour long cardio workouts or trying to do 45-minute HIIT sessions every day, will absolutely have a detrimental effect on your physique. The most important thing is the dosage.

Despite this fact, most natural bodybuilders will still do too much cardio, and then still do it to the point of diminishing returns. It’s not uncommon to hear about competitors using 2-3 hours of low intensity cardio a day to get ready for a show.

Not only is this unnecessary but it will eventually cause bigger than normal losses in muscle mass. Losing some muscle mass is inevitable during the final weeks of contest prep. I’ve experienced it but the goal is to mitigate the losses.

You won’t mitigate them by becoming a cardio bunny.

The Last Rep

There is no special diet, workout, or supplement that will get you to the top of Lean Mountain. Discipline is what gets you lean. Everything else is noise.

If you are looking to get into contest shape, fill out my contest prep application to get started.

I’ll holla at you next time.
The People’s Trainer,
Fitman