This is the first of eleven posts to go with the classroom content. (The addition of which has made no difference to the ranking?) So this is a different tack. Most people treat fat loss as a subtraction problem. Eat less, lose more. Push harder, lose faster. It's half right, and the other half can hurt people. Getting fat out of storage is the easy part. Your body is extremely good at that. Everything after it- ferrying it, gating it into the mitochondria, oxidising it- is regulated, and it runs at whatever rate the deficit demands. There is no daily ceiling on doing it. ( I was always taught that there was ) Three lean men in a chamber on about 3,350 kJ (800 kcal) a day oxidised 177 g of fat a day, two-thirds of everything they spent. (R§8) A man in Dundee fasted under supervision for 382 days and ran his whole day, about 10.5 MJ (2,500 kcal), from his store the entire time. (R§9) @Mika Bray started all this off many moons ago without knowing it 😀 So what goes wrong when you push too hard? Two things, and neither is a ceiling. The first is where the loss comes from. At 2,090 kJ (500 kcal) a day, 8.8% of what one trial's subjects lost was lean tissue. At 5,230 kJ (1,250 kcal) a day, 1.3%. (R§11) Same total loss. Different tissue leaving the body. The second is what happens to fat you mobilise and don't oxidise. It doesn't disappear. At rest, about 70% of it goes straight back into storage. (R§23) The rest can end up in the liver, which is the subject of Post 4. This is why the person on 3,350 kJ (800 kcal) and two hours of cardio often isn't leaner than the person doing something sane. Not because the fat couldn't come off. Because the wrong tissue came off with it. Over the next ten posts, I'll walk through the machinery, what regulates it, and what only pretends to. So - What's the most aggressive deficit you've ever run, and what actually happened?

In Post 1, I gained 24 lb (10.9 kg) on purpose, on the same food, by reducing my energy output. One other thing for transparency. Four weeks before the operation, I stopped TRT, testosterone replacement therapy. I had been on it for many years, 125 mg a week of testosterone enanthate, split into two doses. My decision, not a medical one. It was the right time to stop, because a result from a man who is not on TRT means more to most of you than a result from a man who is. I am still off it. This post is what that felt like, so you can weigh its share of the gain. Coming off testosterone pushes body composition towards fat on its own, with no change in food or training. I cannot separate its share of the 24 lb from the training's share. I am telling you so you can weigh it. What coming off it felt like for me. The strength drop at the start and the emotional side were both noticeable. Strength was down for 9 to 10 weeks, then climbed, and it is close to where it was before I stopped, which has surprised me. Some of that is the extra bodyweight, not just my own hormones coming back. Sleep was worse at first and got better from 6 to 8 weeks on. The one thing that has not come back is recovery between sessions. I hit each muscle every 6 days. I used to feel fine after 2 or 3. That is now 4 or 5, especially for legs: a dull ache of knowing I have trained, not the two-days-after kind. The full blood panel comes at the end of this month, and that is the number I want most. What comes next. Post 3: the DEXA and the full blood panel, both this month, and then the next phase: the drop back to 250 and beyond. Ask. If you are on TRT, or have come off it, reply with the one thing that changed that you did not expect.

Does muscle soreness =growth? I tried training my calves twice in one workout. Once at the beginning and once at the end of the workout. Both lots to volitional failure. I have, as usual, zero soreness in my calves. When I train any other muscle, I am sore as hell .

My husband is looking for protein powder recommendations. He doesn’t like all the sweet chocolate/vanilla/strawberry types; he’s looking for something which is more like a squash flavour rather than a milkshake! And not too sweet ideally. He uses the lemon ESN whey one at the moment but they keep hiking the price up. His bro gym sells them but from what I’ve seen on the shelf, it looks like a lot of garbage ingredients. Any recommendations?

Anyone got an extra spare £2500-£3000 for a master class? I think Reta is a bit cheaper at this point.