Managing Your Recomposition Strategy

You have the tools, knowledge and confidence to design your own body recomposition strategy, now it is over to you to focus on the implementation.

It’s easy to delay getting started by focussing on collecting more information instead of getting out there and implementing. This is a mistake — you’re better off starting with a basic strategy that improves over time, as opposed to trying to perfect your strategy before you get started (it will never happen).

I can tell you that there will rarely be a better time to get started than now. As the old saying goes: the…

Managing Your Recomposition Strategy

The importance of developing the tools, knowledge and confidence to manage your body composition for the long-term becomes clear after you reach your goals and want to maintain your progress.

If you built these skills through the process of developing a personalised strategy to manage energy balance, it’s a straightforward process to channel them towards the new goal of maintaining your progress.

The contrast is having used a generic plan to achieve your goals. Once the goals are reached, it’s common to abandon the plan and slowly return to the previous regime that you are familiar with. …

Managing Your Recomposition Strategy

Measuring progress helps recognise the benefits of your hard work and motivate further investments of time and effort into your strategy. This section focuses on methods of assessing body composition, but it’s important to track progress in other areas of the strategy.

Improvements in strength and fitness are quite easy to monitor, but you can also measure progress in the number of training sessions you complete each we or extra activity you’ve added to your routine, such as walking.

The same goes for food. Beyond sticking to the target energy intake, look for progress in your habits such as eating…

Managing Your Recomposition Strategy

There are three things you need to manage your body composition: tools, knowledge and confidence.

You need the tools to calculate an energy deficit, increase energy expenditure and decrease energy intake.

You need the knowledge of when to use each tool — do you do everything all at once, or will that be overwhelming (you should know that answer); when do you make changes and so on.

You need the confidence that the strategy will work. The best way to develop confidence is to see results from your progress, but before you get there you need to have faith in…

Training For Body Recomposition

I still get anxious walking into a new gym and have thoughts like ‘what if people are stronger or leaner than me’ or ‘maybe they will think I do not practice what I preach?’

When I moved my personal training business to a new facility in 2017, I was worried about what other people would think about my methods, even though I had plenty of experience and a full client list.

There was this mild fear of being ‘called out’ by someone, which never happened and in fact, I have never seen it happen in a gym… so I’m not…

Training For Body Recomposition

I have always developed personalised training programs for my clients. We worked to create a program that would meet their energy expenditure targets and improve their strength and fitness in line with their goals.

In this section, I am going to share the key principles to design your own training plan to achieve your fitness, strength and body composition goals. We are going to run through each of the variables to ensure everything is covered in your own strategy.

Types of training

The type of program you select isn’t all that important at the start, what really matters is that you are exercising…

Training For Body Recomposition

When your to-do list is seemingly endless and the stress is piling up, you will question why you are training and whether it’s going to be worthwhile.

It’s quite easy to stick to the plan early on when every action you take seems to have a tangible reward. Every time you run, you are fitter. Every time you lift weights, you are stronger. After a few weeks on the program, your energy levels skyrocket, weight drops and confidence increases.

You inevitably ask yourself why you haven’t been doing this all along?

A few months down the track, you have made…

Training For Body Recomposition

Physical activity is a vital component of body recomposition and increasing it is the simplest way to increase energy expenditure.

Physical activity is associated with gains in strength, fitness and mobility along with a multitude of health benefits including decreased risks of cardiovascular conditions, improved mental health and decreased all-cause mortality.

These benefits are independent of improved body composition, but you can imagine the double-whammy of benefits that come from being more active, developing your fitness and improving your body composition.

While fat loss goals can be achieved with minimal physical activity — provided appropriate nutrition intake — this is…