Fat loss for athletes: getting your macros right
For athletes, losing fat involves more than simply eating less. In the previous part, I covered the basic concepts and categories of athletes (see part I). In this part, we’ll work through four essential steps: setting your daily calorie, protein, fat and carbohydrate intake. Until you have these under control, no amount of fine-tuning will work.
Daily calorie intake and fat loss
Your total daily calorie intake is the most important factor in fat loss. It’s surprisingly easy to eat back the calories you burn during a workout—and then some. If you don’t keep track of your calorie intake, you won’t start losing fat, whatever else you try. Adjusting your macronutrient ratios won’t help if your overall energy balance isn’t under control.
Stop worrying about which foods to combine or whether you can eat carbohydrates after six o’clock. These details matter, but ultimately, the difference between calories in and calories out matters most.
How do you find the right calorie intake? A typical recommendation from bodybuilders is 22 – 26 kcal for every one kilogram of body weight. The lower end applies if you have a slower metabolism, and the upper end if you have a faster metabolism. This recommendation works reasonably well if you train moderately. For an athlete who trains seriously, it’s often too low.
Many endurance athletes burn at least 44 – 45 kcal per kilogram of body weight each day, often considerably more. Training that places particularly high demands on the metabolism requires even more. The needs of athletes who train for speed and strength vary widely. Even Olympic weightlifters can have quite high daily calorie expenditures—even with a low rep count. That’s hardly surprising when you do several workouts a day and train for a total of 4 – 5 hours.
A better approach is to establish your maintenance calorie intake first, then subtract 10 – 20%. This is a good starting point for your diet. Athletes with a higher body fat percentage can afford a larger deficit. In general, you need to adjust the deficit to your actual circumstances—monitor how your body weight changes and how this affects your performance.
A reasonable rate of weight loss from fat is 450 – 700 grams per week. This should be achievable without a major drop in performance. If you’re losing weight more slowly, you may need to reduce your calorie intake further or increase your activity. If you lose more than 900 grams per week or your performance declines noticeably, don’t let your calorie deficit exceed 20%. The aim is to find the point where you’re burning fat and losing weight without a substantial loss of strength or endurance. As your weight drops, you’ll need to keep making adjustments—you may need to reduce your calorie intake further to keep losing fat.
The lighter the athlete (women and lighter men in the lower weight classes), the smaller the actual weekly weight loss. For these athletes, even 250 – 350 grams per week is a good result.
Protein: losing fat without losing muscle
Once you’ve set your calorie intake, protein intake is the next most important factor. Getting enough protein while dieting helps preserve muscle mass and, in turn, performance. This is where many athletes most often go wrong, with the exception of those in strength sports.
Endurance athletes tend to overemphasize carbohydrates. When they aren’t restricting calories, the large amounts of food they eat also provide enough protein. But as soon as they enter a calorie deficit, their protein intake becomes inadequate and the problems begin. Female athletes are particularly prone to avoiding protein and fat.
Emphasizing high protein intake is an approach that has kept bodybuilders and other strength athletes a step ahead of athletes in other sports. It works, especially while dieting. Modern science has reached the same conclusion: a high protein intake during a fat-loss phase preserves muscle mass, stabilizes blood glucose levels, reduces appetite and helps prevent the metabolism from slowing down. Bodybuilders knew this from experience long before science caught up.
One fact that most dieters ignore: as calorie intake decreases, protein requirements increase. A common mistake is to cut protein along with calories. Interestingly, this was scientifically demonstrated 30 years ago.
For strength athletes, I recommend 3.1 – 3.3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day while dieting. At extremely low body fat levels, this may rise to 4.0 – 4.5 grams per kilogram. I see no reason to go higher. Since strength athletes don’t have the same daily energy expenditure as athletes in many other sports, a diet higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates suits them. This approach should also allow for more or less optimal performance.
Endurance athletes, whose protein intake at maintenance calories could be 1.5 – 2.0 grams per kilogram, could consume 1.6 – 3.1 grams of protein per kilogram while dieting. Given their high total daily calorie intake, this isn’t a particularly large amount.
Athletes in sports that combine strength and endurance need an average of 3.3 grams per kilogram of body weight. Here, too, the amount may be higher at extremely low body fat levels. The problem is that these same athletes also need more carbohydrates. An exceptionally high protein intake can make it difficult to get enough carbohydrates from food, which can, in turn, have serious consequences for performance. If you fall into this category, you need to be particularly skilled at balancing your protein, fat and carbohydrate ratios.
Fat intake while dieting
You may be surprised that I put fat before carbohydrates, but that is how I see things. Unless we are talking about ketogenic diets, fat takes priority. Very low-fat diets negatively affect important hormones, and the food is extremely bland and does not keep you full. A low-fat diet generally leaves you hungry most of the time, making it extremely difficult to keep your diet on track. So get your fat intake right before you start worrying about carbohydrates.
I generally dislike working with percentages, but I am more than happy to use them for fat. Getting 20 – 25% of your total calorie intake from fat works in most situations. Sometimes that proportion can be higher, but going below it rarely makes sense. I have also recommended 1 gram of fat per kilogram of body weight — a good starting point, although it may not always align with 20 – 25%. The only other important point is that your fat intake should include 6 – 10 grams of fish oil per day.
Carbohydrates in an athlete’s diet
Recommendations vary most when it comes to carbohydrates. It is difficult to give a single, clear recommendation: requirements vary and depend on your sport.
Be cautious about copying bodybuilders here. Bodybuilding is not a performance-oriented sport — it is focused entirely on changing your appearance. Performance itself is entirely secondary; what matters is a lean physique with good muscle definition and separation. To achieve this, bodybuilders often reduce their carbohydrate intake to very low levels. Whether this approach will work for you without compromising performance depends on your particular sport. Copying bodybuilders could easily be the most damaging thing you could do to your performance.
Athletes focused purely on strength and power, whose main training consists of short sets of three reps in the gym, do not need many carbohydrates while dieting. As mentioned, bodybuilders also cut their carbohydrate intake quite low. For strength athletes, a carbohydrate intake of around 2.0 – 2.2 g/kg while dieting is not unusual. Carbohydrate cycling works very well and is relatively popular: carbohydrate intake is increased on training days and kept low on rest days, alongside a slight calorie deficit, to encourage fat burning on those days.
Endurance athletes inherently have higher carbohydrate needs, although their specific requirements depend on their sport and training. An hour of easy cycling does not require many carbohydrates. A six-hour training session depletes carbohydrate stores almost completely. Endurance athletes training seriously may need as much as 10 – 12 g/kg of carbohydrates per day to maintain performance. If the aim is to reduce body weight by losing fat, this amount needs to be cut somewhat. If daily training volume is very high, 10 – 12 g/kg may still work — much depends on total daily calorie intake.
Athletes in sports that combine strength and endurance fall somewhere in between in their carbohydrate needs. On harder training days, 2 – 2.2 g/kg is probably not enough, but they do not need the amounts required by endurance athletes who train for hours each day. An average intake of 3.5 – 4.5 g/kg of body weight should be enough for athletes in these sports while dieting.
Example: macros for a 91 kg strength athlete
Here is a concrete example: a 91 kg strength athlete with a body fat percentage of 15 (fat-free mass of 77 kg). Their maintenance calorie intake on training days is 35 kcal/kg, giving a total of 3200 kcal per day.
- Set your calories: Use a 20% deficit. 3200 × 0.20 = 640 kcal. 3200 − 640 = 2560 kcal per day.
- Set your protein: 3.3 g/kg of fat-free mass = 254 grams of protein × 4 kcal/g = 1016 kcal per day.
- Set your fat: 25% of total calorie intake. 2560 × 0.25 = 640 kcal / 9 kcal/g = 71 grams.
- Set your carbohydrates: 2560 kcal − 1016 kcal from protein − 640 kcal from fat = 900 kcal / 4 kcal/g = 225 grams, or roughly 2.5 g/kg.
If, for some reason, you need to reduce your calorie intake further, make that reduction through carbohydrates. Cutting your daily intake by 200 kcal means −50 grams of carbohydrates, bringing your daily carbohydrate intake to 175 grams.
Distribute your daily calories across your meals, however many meals you eat. The proportions of nutrients can vary throughout the day. Many people prefer to eat more carbohydrates earlier in the day and/or before a workout, with more fat and protein later in the day. This flexibility is, of course, perfectly fine.
As for meal timing, you should always have some of your daily carbohydrates and protein around your workout. Many athletes try to cut calories before and after training — this is unnecessary and is more likely a mistake. This is usually driven by misconceptions about growth hormone and fat burning. Female athletes are particularly inclined to cut calories around their workouts. In the long term, this actually does more harm than good.
Fat loss is determined by your overall calorie deficit. Inadequate calorie intake before or after a workout is highly likely to impair performance and affect recovery. This is undesirable even when dieting. At the very least, you should avoid it at all costs. And it is not just about getting enough carbohydrates and protein to support performance and recovery — you can also increase your calorie intake before and after a workout by eating more fat.
Of course, this does not mean you should always consume as many calories before and after a workout, including when dieting, as you would during a mass-gaining or performance-building phase. We are talking about how you distribute calories within your current intake. You could allocate somewhat more calories to the period around your workout to support it, but you must not reserve your entire daily energy intake for that time — otherwise, you will not have enough calories or nutrients left for your other meals.
Translator’s note: it also makes no sense to go hungry all day and then eat “the whole lot” before and after your workout. You need to plan, spread out your intake and be honest with yourself. Much depends on the intensity and nature of the workout ahead.
FAQ: fat loss in sport
Is the approach to fat loss always the same for all athletes?
No. Daily calorie intake and macros depend on your sport, training volume and build. Strength athletes do well with more protein and fewer carbohydrates, while endurance athletes need more carbohydrates. Sports that combine strength and endurance fall somewhere in between.
How quickly can you lose fat?
A sensible rate is 450 – 700 grams per week. Performance usually starts to suffer when you lose more than 900 grams per week. For lighter athletes (women and those in lighter weight classes), even 250 – 350 grams is a good result.
Why is protein so important when dieting?
As calorie intake decreases, protein requirements increase, rather than decrease — a fact scientifically established as far back as 30 years ago. Adequate protein preserves muscle mass, stabilizes blood sugar, reduces hunger and prevents your metabolism from slowing down.
To be continued… Fat loss and athletes… Part III
Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)
Source:Turg.Fitness.ee
Come and train! ArtGym
