I don’t know what your definitions of lean are but Mo sure as hell ain’t fat here, not even close. Yeah he is not VASCULAR like Christie or Crawford nor is he as dark (which looks leaner). Ben Johnson didn’t ever look particularly vascular either, but Mos is pretty damn lean and athletic looking here.
I honestly do not know and am not sure where you would start with that. If you want to go about it via calorie counting, I assume that you would need to figure out how many calories (approximately) you burn a day and then create a deficit there. The larger the deficit, the faster things will go purely on the scale point of via (one study had people eating 50% of maintenance calories for 6 months and their metabolic shutdown was only like 30-40%, not a whole lot when you consider the massive deficit and duration), though as an athlete, you wouldn’t want too great of a deficit as it could cause hormonal issues and leave you with crappy workouts (which is the most important thing anyway).
From reading many people’s logs, most people seem to like a greater % (and maybe even absolute amount) of protein the greater the deficit. Meaning, if you are going to try to do a strict PSMF, you would probably want ~1.5-2 grams of protein/lb to minimize LBM loss.
Keep in mind if you keep the same habits once you go back to ‘normal’ eating, you could very well end up at the same level.
Also, keep in mind that this is all just looking strictly at fat loss and body composition effects–as an athlete, if you are tired or extremely irritable or not recovering from your workouts, it won’t matter if your bf % is 0 because you will probably perform like crap.
No, I appreciate Maurice Greene is not fat. I meant relatively to athletes like you mentioned like Crawford and Linford. Maurice is not vascular like you say, and yes the darkness issue may come into it. However, if you looked at Boldon with his shirt off, I would thin you would say he looked leaner. Another example would be Dwain Chambers.
Yeah I can apprecaite that. I m currently on my end of season break until the beginning of October and could use this time to experiment, if nothing else, with trying to reduce my body fat further. As training quality is not an issue right now, I have 5 week window where I can try and reduce it, and then hope it will not rise to current levels when I start eating a diet more geared towards performing well in training. In the past when I have lost a decent amount of WEIGHT I have not tended to put it back on. The problem is a lot of my judgements on my body fat levels are very subjective, so how much I have lost I do not know. But I am convinced I can look leaner.
Couldn’t be more than 2-3 weeks, assuming the person in question weighed over 150. It would kill your training though.
Ok cool. Well I am 77kg, so what’s that? 170-5ish?? I won’t be training til the beginning of October, so I might give this a try, just gotta have the staying power to deal with the hunger and the cravings, as I’m sure that’s gonna be a problem!
Hunger gets what hungry wants. Errrrrr.
Do you mean that it’s innevitable and people always give in to their cravings?
No I was just quoting a commercial.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way around. When you are capable of training at very high intensities, you gain muscle and lean out. Fat is an insulator but muscle is a radiator, causing a rise in metabolism, leaving you leaner regardless of carb intake- as long as the carb sources are complex for the most part. ben ate a lot of carbs during the hardest training but ate very lean during the final part of the taper.
exactly, you goto eat to train - and train to get lean.
I heard Bob harper, (biggerst looser trainer) was saying, the leanest guys are pro athletes who eat upwards of 4-5000 calories per day… if they dont, they dont have energy to train.
Ah ok, guess I’m not cultered! Ha
So the calorie intake is dependent upon the training phase? i.e. when you burn more, you eat more. But macro nutrient ration isn’t such an issue, certainly in terms of carb intake?
But surely that is to do with the amount of calories they are expending through training?? All those calories must be going somewhere no??
Ha, appreciated!
You never actually gain muscle, the muscle fibers either shrink or grow based on the stimulus placed upon the body. Research has shown that the same is true with fat cells. A person never actually gains fat, the cells grow. It is true that some individuals have more fat cells than others but based on what they are doing to their body, can cause the fat cells to shrink and therefore appear leaner then another person who has less fat cells but have allowed their fat cells to grow.
I think most people are aware of that, and by saying gaining fat or muscle, they simply mean to cumulative mass of those cells.
O.k. Thanks.
Any insight you have into how to shrink the fat cells would be much appreciated though!!