Manage your calories

You’ll need to reduce your caloric intake and increase protein in order to whittle down your waistline and keep muscles recovering. But you can’t cut out entire meals or certain foods without recourse. In fact, sometimes you add foods.

Normally, with intense strength training, the body needs more protein, about 1–1.5g per pound of lean body weight, with a blend of 40% from food and 60% from a protein powder source. Building and conditioning muscle requires higher protein use to increase nitrogen balance while supplying key amino acids to support greater recovery, strength, and growth.

When training hard, you don’t want to become catabolic and lose muscle from not having enough protein in your system, so it’s key to keep close track of your macros to facilitate even greater lean-muscle gains without excessive body fat. When people increase their protein percentages and lower their carbs to get in shape, they sometimes reduce their fat intake. It may seem counterintuitive, but this can be a mistake for someone trying to gain lean muscle mass while losing body fat.

A low-fat diet is acceptable for a general exercise, but when you’re trying to maintain rock solid muscle, that’s when healthy fats (flaxseed, olive oil, natural peanut butter, etc) become important. Your body needs good calories to gain and maintain lean hard muscle, so you want to find that fine line. You want to use the protein for rebuilding, fiber for cleansing and managing insulin spikes, and healthy fats for the energy.

“Adding 30-50 g of a blend of soluble and insoluble fiber to your diet once or twice a day helps curb hunger, reduce glucose spikes and improve health bacteria in the gut, while removing unwanted waste from the body,” says Hawk. He recommends using BarnDad’s FiberDX and adding it to a protein shake in order to get your fiber fix.

With any fat-cutting, you need to increase your training intensity for each body part. The goal is to maintain gains while cutting as much fat as possible. To do that, kick up your cardio to 45 minutes a day, five to six days a week, with some of the mesomorphs and endomorphs doing 60 minutes. It’s suggested you do your cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach so that they could burn more fat and calories faster. For weight training, the goal is to stimulate as many muscle fibers as possible to nail those separations.

The big difference in this workout is to do more volume training. Although you start off doing heavy sets to maintain as much mass as possible, you then should do giant sets, supersets and other combos. Cut rest time between sets to increase fat burning. Each muscle is trained once every six days, except for abs. Isolation movements are stressed over the compound movements. The intense pace not only helps burn fat, it leaves you soaked and gasping at the end of each workout.

Day 4

Cardio, shoulders, triceps and biceps