My determination is back. My hip is improving and no injury will stand in my way.

Day: 37 of 77
Date: 17/06/2013
Workout Day: Rest
Weight (lb): 163.0 (8.8 lb loss)
Body Fat %: 14.3 (2.3% loss)
Health: Hip is a bit sore 8/10

I woke today with a much improved hip. Is it a trapped nerve? Is a poor rack-deadlift form re-inflaming an injury each week? Whatever it is, I’m thoroughly thankful for a significant improvement today. And despite feeling perfectly able to perform the scheduled chest+arms workout, I gave it a miss and did absolutely nothing. I’ve got six weeks left to go and that’s still plenty of time to train hard and diet well, so another day of full rest will certainly have been the best option.

All this raises the big question of how the 12 Week Body Plan works. Is it the training? Is it the intensity, the muscle gain, the increased testosterone or the increased metabolism? Is it the better sleep? Or is it just a low carb and low calorie diet? Obviously it’s a combination of all of these, but if I was to weight them proportionally, I would suggest that the diet is 75% of the results. This might sound like heresy but it is clear that without the diet, very few results would be achieved, whereas without the training you could still achieve a fair amount of fat loss. If you embrace this concept then the value of rest days becomes more apparent as you consider how one can “diet” effectively to gain results without training nutrition considerations. e.g. Today I needed fairly little protein with having not trained today and not much yesterday, and additionally I could also keep my calories fairly low and help with a bit of extra fat loss. Don’t ever think that nutritional requirements are static. There are tens of factors driving what and when you should eat. A heavy leg day requires very different intake to a quiet rest day like today.

So my plan is to be particularly careful with my exercise selection and resting intensity, and ensure my eating helps my recovery but also keeps helping towards my fat loss.

P.s. Don’t think that I believe low calorie/low carb is necessary for fat loss. For instance I do know that a high fat diet can be very useful for fat loss, but for simplicity a calorie deficit for a fairly lean and healthy person should result in fat loss. I’ll stand by my view that for the vast majority of people, the most effective short term dietary regimen is a low carb and low calorie diet.