Sometimes things happen, and sometimes those things get in the way of our fitness program, and it forces us to take a break. No need to beat yourself up, it happens to the best of us. This has no bearing upon who you are as a person. How your respond to it does.  But have no fear, tips on how to approach your nutrition after an extended training break are here.

1. Reassess Your Starting Point

One of the most important tips I can tell you may also be one of the most difficult ones. Unfortunately you’ll need to face the music, perform all your baseline fitness measurements. Weight, body fat, circumference measurements, starting photos… are all good ways to paint an accurate picture or where you’re in relation to your body transformation goals. People tend to run from doing this, because it also lets them know how far they fell off. But, if the break has been long enough, or you took things a little too far, for too long with your nutrition break, there might also be changes that are significant enough to your body that may also call for a different nutrition program. Part of the way I put the personal in personal training is by gathering info on your starting point. Everyone that weighs 170 lbs. can vary on their body fat levels, their workout experience, just as much as they can differ in their goals. Everyone with the same weight shouldn’t have the same exact program. You’ll also need a new & accurate starting point to measure your success against. If you run away from your baseline measurements, and your weight, or body composition significantly changes, you also won’t be able to accurately assess your progress. For more info about ways to measure progress outside of just using the scale check out this video: https://youtu.be/8nm67HUlZLw 

2. Figure Out Where You Want To Go

This is part of the starting point is important. You can look at where you’re at versus where you’d like to go. This will create the road map, or the path that you should take to get there. A lot of times you can look up what the height, weight, and body fat levels of someone you that looks similar to your goal, online. Then compare where you’re at to your goal. IF your goal weighs less, carries more muscle… then you know what you’ll have to do at some point with both your nutrition (and your training). I go into more detail with this and run through a couple of case studies here https://youtu.be/2m1Zot_NVXQ and also here. https://youtu.be/Msj6UX2qc6I If you need some help with figuring out your goals, feel free to drop me an email.

3. Make Sure Your Nutrition Matches Your Goals

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to someone that needed to gain a good bit of muscle, but followed an extremely low calorie diet to get there. It’s very difficult to gain muscle in an extreme calorie deficit. Calorie deficits are designed to lose weight, just like calorie surplus’ are designed to help people gain weight. If you’re attempting to lose weight while gaining muscle, you’ll either need smaller calorie deficits, or you’ll need to devote part of your time towards executing a complete program towards each one of those goals separately. Meaning that you’ll take a few training phases where you line up both your training and nutrition to achieve fat loss, and maybe a few training phases dedicated towards gaining muscle. Most people avoid doing this, and expect to make progress without specifically training or eating to reach their desired outcome. This only works for inexperienced exercisers.