People love to complicate fitness.
“How many minutes after my workout do I have to consume protein or risk losing all of my gains?”
“Will I burn fat faster if I consume 57% of my calories from carbohydrates or 58%?”
“How many grams of BCAAs should I consume during my workout for optimal gains?”
“Is it healthier to have a 10-hour feeding window or a 12-hour feeding window?”
I could go on and on, but here’s my point...
Most people seem to want to figure out step 99 of their fitness journey before they’ve taken the first step. Fitness really isn’t that complicated. If you understand and implement these 5 Laws, you WILL accomplish your goals.
Law 1: Calories MATTER
Your body must adhere to the Law of the Conservation of Energy, which states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant. Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but it can neither be created nor destroyed.
All the caloric energy that you consume must be either converted into energy that your organs and muscles can use to function or stored for future use. Eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight and eat slightly more calories than you burn to build muscle.
Both fat gain and fat loss are controlled by energy balance, which equates to the difference between your caloric intake from food and your caloric expenditure. This is the fundamental principle of fat loss. No “revolutionary” diet, dietary supplement, training approach, or anything else will ever replace the need to focus on energy balance for fat-shredding purposes.
In fact, your energy balance, which is essentially calories consumed versus calories burned, is vital to the achievement of all fitness goals - whether you are working to shred fat, build muscle, or maintain your physique. Anyone who tells you that calories do not matter when it comes to fat loss or muscle growth has absolutely no idea what they are talking about and you shouldn’t listen to anything they say.
The First Law of Body Composition: A Caloric Deficit is Necessary for Shredding Fat
You must burn more energy than you consume to achieve meaningful fat loss (1). This is called a caloric deficit. Over the course of a period of time (usually measured on a daily basis), a caloric deficit is achieved when the sum of calories burned is greater than the sum of calories consumed.
However, it is crucial that you avoid starvation dieting. It is possible to be too aggressive with your caloric deficit, which will slow your metabolism and result in lost muscle mass (2). While reducing fat, our aim is to avoid reducing muscle mass as much as possible.
Use our Free Vegan Nutrition Calculator to find out how many calories you should be eating to meet your health and fitness goals! In just 2 minutes, we’ll break down exactly how much protein, carbs, and dietary fat you should include in your daily meal planning.
The Second Law of Body Composition: A Caloric Surplus is Necessary for Muscle Growth
Contrary to shredding fat, you must consume more energy than you burn to achieve meaningful muscle growth. This is called a caloric surplus. Over the course of a day, a caloric surplus is achieved when the sum of calories consumed is greater than the sum of calories burned.
If you don’t consume enough calories, you will struggle to gain muscle. In simple terms, this is because your body is physiologically wired to prioritize survival over all else. It will allocate energy resources towards maintaining basic bodily function first.
Since building larger muscles ranks very low on your body’s priority list, you must ensure that it has enough resources remaining once all other physiological requirements are met. This is achieved by maintaining a consistent caloric surplus.
In more technical terms, a caloric surplus increases your body’s ability to synthesize skeletal muscle proteins, increases anabolic hormone levels while decreasing catabolic hormone levels, and improves workout performance which in turn fuels strength progression and muscle growth (3).
The best way to maintain a lean physique is actually to increase your muscle mass. Muscle is very energy-hungry, so the more muscle mass you have, the more calories your body will burn. In other words, it gets easier and easier to stay lean and fit!
Law 2: Protein MATTERS
According to U.S. and Canadian dietary reference intakes, the recommended daily allowance for protein is 0.36 grams per pound of bodyweight (0.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight) for healthy adults (4). This amount is defined as “the average daily intake level that is sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all [~98%] of healthy adults.”
This means that as a bare minimum, a 180-pound person only needs 65 grams of plant protein per day. But recent research has shown that even that number might be high. But whatever the bare minimum target actually is, you will surpass it as long as you are eating a calorically sufficient diet.
How Much Protein Should You Eat to Shred Fat?
To ensure that your body burns fat and not your lean muscle mass as you’re following a caloric deficit, you must consume a high-protein intake. A large body of evidence suggests that a low-fat, high-protein diet increases fat loss, preserves lean body mass, and maintains your metabolism (5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). Maintaining your metabolism is especially important to long-term fat-shredding success because your metabolism tends to decrease as you shred fat.
Your exact protein target depends on the intensity, duration, and frequency of your training program. Here are my general guidelines for target protein intake:
How Much Protein Should You Eat to Build Lean Muscle?
Many decades of research and anecdotal evidence prove active people, particularly those who lift heavy weights regularly, need more protein than the average person.
Studies from the University of Western Ontario, the Exercise Metabolism Research Group, and McMaster University all agree that the ideal range to aim for is 0.7 to 0.9 grams of high-quality protein per pound of body weight (1.5 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body weight) to maximize muscle growth (13, 14, 15).
Here are my recommendations for protein targets:
These numbers might sound high but trust me. When you are working your butt off in the gym to gain muscle, you want to be sure you are getting all of the protein you need so you aren’t leaving any gains on the table.
Law 3: Micronutrients MATTER
Macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fat) have the most direct impact on your body composition. But it doesn’t really matter if you are lean and ripped if you’re unhealthy on the inside. That’s why micronutrients matter just as much as macronutrients.
Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals. Vitamins are necessary for energy production, immune function, blood clotting, and other functions. Minerals play an important role in growth, bone health, fluid balance, and several other processes.
It’s not all about macronutrients (protein, carbs, and dietary fat). You must eat a wide variety of wholesome plant foods. Supplements do have their place, but you shouldn’t be relying on them to get your micronutrients.
I have been working with a vegan nutritionist and she prescribed a vegan multivitamin to help me boost up a few vitamins that were a bit low in recent blood work. But she said that I just need to add a bit more variety into my diet with the fruits and vegetables that I’m consuming. She said that the multivitamin would probably only boost my levels by around 4% after 6 months of consistent use.
Supplements can help, but they are NOT the answer. The simplest advice that I can give you is to eat the rainbow. Also, check out Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen:
Learn more about Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen.
However, given our modern lifestyles, some important micronutrient shortfalls need to be corrected. For example, vitamin B12 is not made by plants; it’s made by microbes in the soil.
The three supplements that most vegans would benefit from taking are:
Vitamin B12
The omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA (from algae)
Vitamin D
But the only way to know for sure what your body needs is to get blood work done.
Law 4: Focus on resistance training
When it comes to your exercise program, you need to focus on resistance training. It doesn’t matter if you’re using resistance bands, barbells, dumbbells, sandbags, bodyweight… you just need to focus on progressively overloading your muscles with resistance training over time.
Most people understand why resistance training is necessary for muscle growth, but it’s also necessary for preserving lean muscle if your goal is fat loss. And here’s a study that really proves this point...
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University designed a study to examine the physiological effects of a weight-loss dietary regimen with or without exercise (16). The researchers randomly placed 35 healthy men into one of four groups: 1) a control group, 2) a diet-only group, 3) a diet plus cardio group, and 4) a diet plus cardio and heavy resistance training group.
Their findings were remarkably close to findings published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The Pennsylvania State University researchers observed an average lean body mass loss of 31% in the diet-only group and an average lean body mass loss of 22% in the diet plus cardio group. While adding cardio on top of a diet may reduce lean body mass loss, 22% is simply unacceptable.
But have no fear, the Pennsylvania State University researchers found that the inclusion of heavy resistance training three times per week resulted in nearly complete preservation of lean body mass. Through the 12-week study, the diet plus cardio and heavy resistance training group shredded 9.57 kilograms (21.1 pounds) of body fat while only losing 0.33 kilograms (0.73 pounds) of lean body mass.
In other words, 97% of the total weight loss for the resistance training group was pure body fat, while a mere 3% can be attributed to losses in lean body mass. And despite maintaining a caloric deficit, the resistance training group also significantly increased their maximum strength in the bench press (+19.6%) and squat (+32.6%) in just 12 weeks.
Numerous other studies have proven that resistance training helps preserve - or in some cases increase - lean body mass during periods of moderate caloric restriction (17, 18, 19, 20, 21). And this holds true regardless of age or gender (22).
So what about cardio?
Numerous studies have proven that cardio alone does not have any fat shredding benefits (23, 24). This is because dieters who engage in regular cardio tend to eat back the calories they burn. Doing cardio can certainly help you burn fat when combined with a proper diet, but if you eat too much, your body will simply replace the burned fat with the excess calories you’re feeding it.
This is exactly what happened in a study conducted by researchers at the University of Kansas (25). Women who engaged in regular cardio (four sessions per week that burned an average of 440 calories per session) saw no changes in body weight or body fat percentage after 16 months!
Before we completely shun cardio, let’s consider what the word “cardio” actually means. Cardio is short for cardiovascular training, and it functions as exercise for your heart and lungs. So obviously, improving cardiovascular fitness will lead to substantial health benefits.
I recommend that you do at least a little cardio (i.e. cardiovascular) to maintain optimal health, but the focus should be on resistance training. The only exception to this rule is if your main fitness goal is cardiovascular endurance because you are training for a marathon, triathlon, or a similar endurance event.
Law 5: Allow your body adequate rest and recovery
When you lift weights, you cause tiny tears in the muscle fibers, known as microtears, which the body then repairs. One of the things you want to achieve with your workouts is an optimal amount of micro-tearing in the muscles. Not so much that your body falls behind with repair, as this stunts muscle growth, but not so little that you miss out on potential gains.
While many people under train and thus under damage their muscles, many people also over train and over damage them. If you over damage your muscles by working out too much, then your body will fall behind in repairing your muscles and you will struggle to build muscle and strength.
So, how much should you lift?
I lift five, sometimes six, days a week. Each workout takes around 75 minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the amount of time you spend in the gym isn’t a great metric to follow because it doesn’t really correlate with results.
For example, you could spend 60 minutes in the gym on the flat bench press hitting 5 lightweight sets with 10-minute rest periods between sets spent scrolling Instagram. Obviously, your results would suck.
Instead, VOLUME is the most important metric. Volume, or the number of total reps performed, is the main determining factor in your muscle and strength gains. If your volume per week is too low, you will struggle to gain muscle and strength. If your volume per week is too high, you’ll face problems related to overtraining (more on this later). Get the volume right and you’ll make gains faster than ever.
According to the latest research, the optimal volume appears to be in the range of 60 to 180 reps per major muscle group per week. The heavier the training, the fewer reps you should do every week.
Sleep is KING
Getting enough sleep is crucial for muscle recovery/growth and fat loss, not to mention general health. Research has shown that sleep deprivation can cause muscle loss, and it has also been linked to muscular atrophy (26, 27).
One study conducted by the University of Chicago found that when 10 healthy men reduced sleep for a week from about 9 hours per night to 5, their testosterone levels dropped by up to 14% during the day (28).
It’s also known that insufficient sleep decreases growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-1) levels, which play important roles in maintaining muscle mass (29). When you sleep, your body releases high amounts of anabolic hormones such as testosterone and IGF-1. When you have short or interrupted periods of sleep, the release of these crucial hormones takes much longer, which disrupts the body’s ability to repair and build muscle during sleep.
Sleep also diminishes the level of catabolic hormones, namely, cortisol. Levels of cortisol – the stress hormone – remain elevated whenever you don’t get a good night of sleep. This is bad news for your gains. Sleep deprivation has quite a few other negative effects as well, including decreased fat loss, increased risk of chronic disease, reduced physical performance, and more (30, 31, 32).
That last point is important. When you don’t sleep enough, it negatively affects your performance in the gym. If you ever go to the gym feeling tired and sleepy, chances are you won’t be doing half as much work as you normally would.
If you are busting your butt to nail your nutrition and training, then getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night, you are fighting an uphill battle.
Use our Free Vegan Nutrition Calculator to find out how many calories you should be eating to meet your health and fitness goals! In just 2 minutes, we’ll break down exactly how much protein, carbs, and dietary fat you should include in your daily meal planning.
Summary:
Law 1: Calories MATTER
Both muscle gain and fat loss are controlled by energy balance, which equates to the difference between your caloric intake from food and your caloric expenditure.
Law 2: Protein MATTERS
A large body of evidence suggests that a low-fat, high-protein diet increases fat loss, preserves lean body mass, and maintains your metabolism.
Law 3: Micronutrients MATTER
Micronutrients matter just as much as macronutrients. You should aim to look and feel both great on the inside and the outside. Check out Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen.
Law 4: Focus on resistance training
It doesn’t matter if you’re using resistance bands, barbells, dumbbells, sandbags, bodyweight… you just need to focus on progressively overloading your muscles with resistance training over time.
Law 5: Allow your body adequate rest and recovery
If you don’t recover properly, which mainly means dialing in your weekly training volume for all of your major muscle groups and sleeping 8+ hours per night, then you’re going to get really frustrated with slow progress.