Men with naturally larger physiques often find
it difficult to shed weight and develop leaner bodies.
Most workout plans you’ll come across in
health and fitness magazines were designed by natural athletes, who expect
everyone out there to get the same easy results from exercise that they’ve had.
Unfortunately
this is not always the way it turns out, leaving many people feeling frustrated
and wondering what went wrong.
Genetics play a large part in what we can
achieve with our bodies. Different body types react differently to exercise
stimulus and different food types. This means that the workout plan you follow
should be tailored to your body type.
So here's a
brief guide to how those with "endomorph" body types should approach
losing body fat.
THE
ENDOMORPH
Firstly,
let’s acknowledge that every individual body is, to one degree or another,
unique and we all possess traits from the each of the three main body ‘types’
(ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph). However, classifying ourselves as
predominantly fitting one of these types does help us make some basic decisions
regarding our training and nutrition.
Generally speaking, ectomorphs are naturally
slim, and don't put on a huge amount of muscle even when working out regularly,
unlike mesomorphs, who pack on muscle more easily.
Endomorphs,
on the other hand, find it more difficult to shift excess body fat. Other
traits common among endomorphs include:
Wide hips
and shoulder base;
Pear-shaped
body;
Round face;
Higher body
fat;
Insulin
dominance;
Low carb
tolerance.
NUTRITION
Endomorphs
tend to gain muscle relatively easily. They also tend to gain fat pretty
quickly too. This is because as an endomorph your body is hormonally insulin
dependent. This effectively means that your body is less able to use insulin to
lower its blood sugar levels. This poor carb tolerance means that endomorphs
should reduce the amount of carbs they consume. What's more, those sugary carbs
that the other body types may get away with should be avoided, except before
and after training.
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Designing
an endomorph's diet
To keep your
fat loss plan simple, it's best that we avoid complicated formulas and aim for
a daily intake of 2,500 calories, (take this down to 2,250 if you are over 40). If we
keep blood sugar levels stable and protein intake of a high quality, the vast
majority of this weight will be body fat.
Give your body one week to adapt before you
start to tinker with your calorie intake, because you will lose water in the
first week as you clean your diet up. After week one, if you do not lose enough
weight you can reduce your daily calories by 250 and see if that changes
things.
Keep your
carbohydrates as low G.I. as possible in order to keep your blood sugar levels
stable. Great choices include: sweet potato, quinoa, oats, pearl barley and
brown rice.
Another
great tool for the endomorph is to use carbohydrate cycling during their fat
loss plan. This involves eating fewer carbohydrates on rest days and higher
amounts on training days, allowing you to keep blood sugar levels very low on
rest days. This enables your body to utilise existing fat stores as fuel, as
glycogen stores will have been exhausted through exercise.
I have found the supplement sesamin to be
very useful for endomorphs on a cutting phase. It is concentrated sesame seed
oil and acts as both a natural fat oxidiser, burning your existing fat stores,
and also appears to inhibit the storage of new fat when consumed with a meal.
However, please consider this an auxiliary tool, not a central focus of you fat
loss plan.
TRAINING
The
advantage the endomorph has is the ability to recover from exercise rapidly, so
frequent exercise is a good idea. Intensity is also important; the endomorph is
naturally strong and finds muscle gain easy, so high-rep resistance training is
usually responded to well.
Cardio is
well suited to the endomorph, who stands to gain from both the metabolism boost
of high-intensity training and the ongoing benefit of ‘fat burning zone’
training of steady state cardio.
An Ideal
week for the bigger man looking to shed some fat would look much like this:
Impressive
lean physiques can still be carved out of the endomorph body type, it just
requires that the training plan and nutritional guidelines are tweaked to
favour the natural traits of the individual.
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